The Mises Review
The Mises Review
Summer 1999
A Quarterly Review of Books, by David Gordon
The Socialist
Asylum
MARKET SOCIALISM: THE DEBATE AMONG SOCIALISTS
Bertell Ollman, Ed.
Rise of the Thought
Police
POLITICAL TOLERANCE: BALANCING COMMUNITY AND
DIVERSITY
Robert Weissberg
War as Secular Salvation
AMERICA'S IMPERIAL BURDEN: IS THE PAST PROLOGUE?
Ernest W. Lefever
Myth of the Voluntary State
POST-SOCIALIST POLITICAL ECONOMY: SELECTED ESSAYS
James M. Buchanan
Society Without a State
AGAINST POLITICS: ON GOVERNMENT, ANARCHY, AND ORDER
Anthony de Jasay
Love Thy Neighbor, or
Else
A LIFE OF ONE'S OWN: INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND THE WELFARE STATE
David Kelley
The Language of Law
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE PRIDE OF REASON
Steven D. Smith
The Socialist Asylum
MARKE
T SOCIALISM: THE DEBATE AMONG SOCIALISTS
Bertell Ollman, Ed.
Routledge, 1998, vii + 200 pgs.
One question about socialists has for many years puzzled me: how can they exist? The
Soviet Experiment, the Chinese
Great Leap Forward, etc. are now "one with Nineveh and Tyre"; but how can they have deceived
a rational person for more
than a moment?
The question can be made more pointed. Whatever the blindness of Western intellectuals
before 1989, surely, one might
think, no one can now be a socialist. Given socialism's manifest failures, the position seems
about as plausible as the
presidential candidacy of Harold Stassen.
Nevertheless, socialism is alive and well in the American academy, and this book helps us
understand why. It consists of
debates on market socialism conducted by four socialists in good standing. Two of them, David
Schweickart and James
Lawler, support market socialism; Hillel Ticktin and the editor, Bertell Ollman, oppose it.
I shall not hold readers in suspense any longer. The answer to the question posed above is a
simple one: the socialists are
stark, raving lunatics. They embrace socialism because they cling to the empty shibboleths of
Marxism.
Only Mr. Schweickart earns partial clemency from this verdict: he is at least acquainted with
the rudiments of economic
thought. In his principal essay, he ably summarizes the standard Misesian and Hayekian case
against socialism. A centrally
planned economy "faces four distinct sets of problems: information problems, incentive
problems, authoritarian tendencies,
and entrepreneurial problems" (p. 12).
Mr. Schweickart's statement of the first of these problems, as set forth in the Mises-Hayek
calculation argument, is
excellent: "Production involves inputs as well as outputs, and since the inputs into one enterprise
are the outputs of many
others, quantities and qualities of these inputs must also be planned. But since inputs cannot be
determined until
technologies are given, technologies too must be specified. To have a maximally coherent plan,
all of these determinations
must be made by the center, but such calculations, interdependent as they are, are far too
complicated for even our most
sophisticated computational technologies. Star Wars, by comparison, is child's play" (p. 12).
Of course, no socialist in good standing can say an unqualified good word about the great
Austrians. And so Mr.
Schweickart feels impelled to add: "It is absurd to say...that Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich
Hayek have been proven right
by events, that a centrally-planned socialism is 'impossible.' To cite only the Soviet Union: an
economic order that endured
for three-quarters of a century...should not be called 'impossible'" (p. 12).
I cannot help but suspect that Mr. Schweickart really knows better. Mises and Hayek did not
doubt the existence of Soviet
Russia. Rather, they contended that a world socialist economy could not engage in rational
economic calculation, for
reasons well stated by Mr. Schweickart himself. The Soviet Union (as the contributors to this
volume never tire of
reminding us) was not fully centrally planned; further, it had available capitalist prices as set on
the world market. The
existence of Soviet Russia posed no threat to Mises's and Hayek's case.
Although a confirmed socialist like Mr. Schweickart cannot help but on occasion wax
nostalgic over the Workers' Paradise,
nevertheless, in his sober moments he acknowledges the force of the argument.
What then is he to do? Will he overcome his inclination in favor of central planning and
embrace capitalism? Perish the
thought! Our ingenious author redefines socialism so that it no longer entails central planning.
Instead, he favors a system
he grandiloquently terms Economic Democracy. In it, production takes place in firms owned by
workers. The state
coordinates these firms through its control of investment, but there is no central planning of the
sort that Mises and Hayek
have refuted.
The problems of this scheme are well brought out by Hillel Ticktin. But before turning to his
comments, I shall add a
difficulty of my own. This problem, one may be sure, would not appeal to Messrs. Ticktin and
Ollman, despite their
opposition to cooperatives, since it strikes at the heart of socialism. Suppose that Mr.
Schweickart were right that
cooperatives greatly exceed in efficiency standard-model capitalist firms. Nothing prevents
cooperatives from developing
on the free market and (if Mr. Schweickart's view about their superior efficiency is right)
supplanting firms owned by
capitalists. The fact that this has not happened suggests that cooperatives are not the paragons of
efficiency that Mr.
Schweickart imagines.
Mr. Schweickart's response (besides calling me a mean-spirited reactionary) is obvious. He
will counter that the
capitalist-controlled state and banking system would strangle an incipient cooperative
commonwealth in its cradle. In point
of fact, precisely the opposite is the case. In spite of large tax advantages cooperatives have never
succeeded in making
much headway in capitalist economies. It is not necessary to confront fantasies of capitalist
resistance: cooperatives
characteristically fail to rise to the level at which such resistance would have a point.
Suppose, though, that one ignores this argument, as I am sure Mr. Schweickart will be happy
to do. The question remains:
why does he think that cooperatives are desirable? Mr. Schweickart has a reason, but it is one
that most readers will I
suspect find unappealing.
The reason in question is the great economic success of China under a system controlled by
worker-owned firms. "This
'incoherent' market socialist economy has been strikingly successful, averaging an astonishing
ten percent per year annual
growth rate over the past fifteen years." (p. 8). Mr. Schweickart does find one fly in the ointment:
"China is not inspirational
now the way Russia was in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, or as China was for many
on the Left in the 1960s or
as Vietnam or Nicaragua or Cuba have been" (p. 8). Well, you can't have everything.
Our author has not managed to think of a ready-to-hand explanation for China's
"astonishing" growth rate. China under
Mao made such a mess of things that any move toward normality will generate substantial
growth rates. (If you blow up
your house and then rebuild it, your growth rate will be very high.) I hardly think this is much of
a point in favor of the
Chinese economy.
Even if Mr. Schweickart's case for cooperatives is weak, his arguments have not been
theoretically refuted. What can be
said against them? Here Mr. Hillel Ticktin, a Trotskyite and an expert on the history of
Bolshevik economics, contributes
something of value. Like Mises, though from an opposite perspective, Mr. Ticktin argues that
socialism and capitalism do
not mix.
"The Marxist answers that market socialism cannot exist because it involves limiting the
incentive system of the market
through providing minimum wages, high levels of unemployment insurance, reducing the size of
the reserve army of labor,
taxing profits, and taxing the wealthy. As a result, the capitalists will have little incentive to
invest and the workers will
have little incentive to work. Capitalism works because, as Marx remarked, it is a system of
economic force. In market
socialism, that force is insufficient to provide an incentive to make the system work" (pp.
60-61).
Mr. Ticktin goes further in his apparent Misesianism. He remarks that in a socialist
economy, "any privacy would be purely
artificial. In this respect...Mises was correct against Lange, in their well-known debate on
calculation in a socialist society"
(p. 160).
Given Mr. Ticktin's insights, a question will no doubt have occurred to you. Why did I
include him among the crazies? Is
he not entitled to exemption, along with his market socialist opponent Mr. Schweickart? Do we
not have here another
example of my usual meanness of spirit?
I venture to hope that further exposure to Mr. Ticktin's profundities will reinforce my
original verdict. True enough, he
thinks, a socialist system cannot calculate; but so what? Calculation through prices is needed
only under capitalism, where
the law of value obtains. (By this he means that in capitalism, the value of a good is the socially
necessary labor-time
needed to produce it.) Socialism abolishes the law of value, and abundance now comes into
being.
Scarcity, contrary to bourgeois purveyors of pessimism, is not a permanent feature of the
world. Socialism means
abundance; and where scarcity does not exist, the lack of a rational method of pricing works no
harm. Everyone can have as
much of everything as he wishes.
With the other two contributors we may be more brief. Mr. Lawler wishes to show that,
although sympathetic to market
socialism, he remains a simon-pure Marxist. Not for him the blandishments of revisionism! To
prove his orthodoxy, he
endeavors to prove that the Master Himself thought that a system of market socialism would
prevail during the first stage of
socialism. With considerable success, Mr. Bertell Ollman argues that Mr. Lawler has misread his
Marx. Both authors are
fond of invoking dialectics, and I leave their debate to those interested in such matters, or amused
by them.
Rise of the Thought Police
POLITIC
AL TOLERANCE: BALANCING COMMUNITY AND DIVERSITY
Robert Weissberg
Sage Publications, 1998, x + 275 pgs.
Professor Weissberg has taken on, in exemplary fashion, one of the major myths of our age.
As everyone knows, America is
an intolerant society. Political radicals, members of racial minorities, and homosexuals daily
confront prejudice and
oppression. This situation is of course altogether undesirable, since a democratic society must be
open to ideas and groups
that offend majority opinion. What is to be done? (The Leninist accents of this question are
deliberate.) An elaborate
program of education and propaganda must be instituted, aimed at altering the hearts and minds
of the benighted populace.
Professor Weissberg assails the picture just presented at every point, in my view with
complete success. The surveys that
show Americans to be intolerant are deeply flawed in method. In fact, Americans are remarkably
tolerant of all the
politically correct dissidents. One only has to look at the proliferating diversity of groups that
advance unpopular causes in
order to bring into question the conventional wisdom on the subject.
Further, a democratic society should not be tolerant to an unlimited degree; tolerance is one
of several competing values, as
the great political philosophers who have written about tolerance recognize. If it is thought
necessary to promote tolerance,
a "hearts and minds" approach is just what we do not want. This leads to totalitarian control: only
an approach that confines
itself to behavior is consistent with a free society. Fortunately, if we accept the external behavior
approach to tolerance,
there are effective steps that can be taken. These include separation of groups liable to come into
conflict.
As you can see, our author is in close competition with Professor Michael Levin as the most
politically incorrect academic
of the past fifty years. He begins with a discussion of a number of studies that purport to show
deep-seated intolerance in
American society. These studies, the most famous of which is Samuel Stouffer's Communism,
Conformity, and Civil
Liberties (1955) proceed in the following way. People are polled on such questions as "Would
you allow a Communist to
teach in your local school?" and myriad other hypotheticals. The results, it is alleged, show
widespread intolerance. Most
people, it appears, would not allow Communists or open homosexuals access to their
schools.
Professor Weissberg finds the procedures of these surveys radically deficient. People's
behavior in concrete situations may
differ sharply from casual answers to situations confronted only as abstract possibilities.
"Unfortunately, the inherent nature
of the random sample-based opinion poll is ill-suited to study the objects of hatred.... Of 1,500
respondents, a goodly
number for a poll, those with controversial views will probably number less than a dozen.
Moreover, these data would still
be opinion data, not the hard experiences defining the meaning of intolerance" (p. 49).
If Professor Weissberg is right, tolerance surveys fail to prove that America is an intolerant
country. But of course it does
not follow that we are a tolerant country. Nevertheless, our author embraces the wider
conclusion. He largely relies on a
simple fact. The views and groups allegedly not tolerated seem to be thriving.
"If one hypothesizes that loathsome Marxists and sexual politics groups are on the
endangered species list...[Laird]
Wilcox's compilation advertises otherwise. A simple count reveals 1,122 separate Marxist
socialist groups and 495
Feminist-Gay organizations of one type or another in 1988.... A cursory overview of this listing
suggests that joining a
widely untolerated controversial Marxist or sexual politics group would be relatively
convenient... Nor are these groups
safely concentrated in large urban groups associated with renowned radicalism" (pp.
116-117).
One might raise an objection to our author along these lines: It does not follow that if a
minority group has many
organizations that its members are widely tolerated. There were in the 1930s several Jewish
cultural organizations in Nazi
Germany, but it would be rash to conclude on this basis that Nazis tolerated Jews. Nevertheless,
given the vast abundance
of radical and minority organizations our author has documented, the burden clearly rests on
those who would indict us as
narrowminded.
But suppose that Professor Weissberg is wrong and that the surveys of Samuel Stouffer and
his successors correctly depict
American society. Is this bad? A democracy, our author holds, must balance order and liberty.
No society can allow
unlimited freedom of opinions and behavior. Tolerance is a value, to be sure; but it must be
balanced against competing
goals.
Here, I venture to suggest, classical liberals will be most likely to part company with our
author. Do we not hold that
individuals have absolute rights that are not to be balanced against competing considerations?
How a libertarian society
would deal with tolerance issues is an important question, but I do not propose to summon
Professor Weissberg before a
libertarian Inquisition. Rather, on the ground he has chosen, that of democratic political thought,
his position cannot be
challenged. Why is tolerance more than simply one value to be assessed against others? Our avid
contemporary advocates
of tolerance owe us some account of why their favored values should be privileged above all
else.
At one point, and it is a central one, I venture to suggest that Professor Weissberg is much
more a defender of genuine
freedom than the extreme tolerance advocates he condemns. Their "hearts and minds" approach
mandates massive and
extensive interference with individual liberty. Children are to be continually propagandized, in
the name of tolerance, to
adopt the "correct" attitudes toward racial minorities and sexual deviants. (My use of the last
expression no doubt shows
that I am a candidate for "tolerance" brainwashing.) Nor are adults to be spared. On-the-job
tolerance training is the order of
the day. Surely Professor Weissberg stands closer to classical liberalism than the Thought Police
he valiantly assails.
On rare occasions, the author seems to me to go astray. I think, e.g., that he overestimates the
extent to which John Stuart
Mill accepted violations of his liberty principles. But such details are of minor importance.
Professor Weissberg has written
an indispensable book on a major issue.
War as Secular Salvation
AMERIC
A'S IMPERIAL BURDEN: IS THE PAST PROLOGUE?
Ernest W. Lefever
Westview Press, 1999, xi + 196 pgs.
This book rests on a false antithesis. The author, with beguiling charm, declares himself a
hardheaded realist and excoriates
assorted Wilsonians and do-gooders. Yet the foreign policy he advocates betrays our traditional
doctrine of nonintervention
and is antipodal to true realism.
Few could quarrel with Mr. Lefever's professed philosophy: "[H]istorical realists emphasize
the finite limits of human
nature and history. Their approach stems from biblical ethics and from St. Augustine, John
Calvin, Edmund Burke, James
Madison, and most other classical thinkers. Rejecting all religious and secular utopias, they
contend that all political
achievements are constrained by resistance to drastic reconstruction" (p. 140).
In contrast with historians like Henry Steele Commager who view America as an endeavor to
enact the Enlightenment, our
author offers an appropriate corrective: "James Madison, influenced by Calvinist theologian John
Witherspoon, emphasized
the tenacity of original sin and the potential for corruption in all institutions" (p. 9).
Given this salutary emphasis on realism and sin, one might be tempted to guess that Mr.
Lefever's approach to foreign
policy would be along these lines: Because human beings are tainted by original sin, they readily
grasp at power, cloaking
personal ambition in righteous rhetoric. To avoid this snare, government must be strictly limited.
Foreign adventures must
be avoided: only rigorous adherence to nonintervention properly respects man's nature. In short,
America's traditional
foreign policy--avoid entangling foreign commitments and wars--would be on the agenda. If
power is a sinful temptation,
stay away from it: what could be simpler?
Unfortunately, Mr. Lefever does not move from his realistic premise to the foreign policy
conclusions just suggested. Quite
the contrary, he uses his "realism" to defend a policy of massive intervention, both when he
evaluates the past and
prescribes for the future. One can readily see that something is amiss if one examines the
concluding sentence of Mr.
Lefever's encomium to historical realism: "Lincoln was the personification of a humane realist"
(p. 140).
There you have it. Mr. Lefever begins from original sin and human limits, and he ends with
praise for the instigator of the
bloodiest war in American history. Is not Lincoln's messianic moralism the antithesis of the
respect for human limits our
author claims to favor? What has gone wrong?
Much of the answer lies in a single name--Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian by whom Mr.
Lefever has been much
influenced. According to Niebuhr, utopian schemes for social reform manifest their authors'
corruption by power. In foreign
affairs, Niebuhr held, Woodrow Wilson's scheme for replacing power politics with a League of
Nations epitomized the
illusions of Enlightenment reason.
Niebuhr's stress on original sin raised important issues, but, unfortunately, he, and Lefever
following him, drew the wrong
conclusions. Original sin taints supposedly rational plans to escape power politics; therefore,
politics should "realistically"
engage in the struggle for power.
Would it not have been wiser to conclude that, since power politics also is an expression of
man's fallen nature, one should
steer clear of it, as well as of the Wilsonian schemes Niebuhr rightly condemned? This is all too
much for Mr. Lefever.
Instead, he credits Niebuhr's thought, along with his experience of the devastation of Europe after
World War II, for
awakening him from his religious pacifist illusions. Having acquired the wisdom of "humane
realism," Mr. Lefever believes
himself in a position to pass out grades to past and present American statesmen for their
adherence, or lack of it, to
Niebuhr's realism.
As we shall see, Mr. Lefever's evaluation of history partakes more than a little of the bizarre.
But before joining our author
on his tour through history, I pause to remark two anomalies. First, he states that at Yale Divinity
School, "[h]alf of my
professors...held essentially the same position [of religious pacifism]. Richard Nie-buhr,
Reinhold's older brother who
taught Christian ethics, was the principal exception" (pp. 52-53). One suspects that Mr. Lefever
was not always wide awake
during class. In a famous debate in The Christian Century, H. Richard Niebuhr criticized his
brother for taking leave of
pacifism.
More importantly, how can Mr. Lefever possibly claim that seeing the destruction wrought
by World War II turned him
away from religious pacifism? Is not the natural reaction to the horrors of war revulsion from it,
rather than avidity to
crusade anew? Here is what our author says: "A month after Hiroshima, I sailed for three years of
voluntary relief work in
war-ravaged Europe. The overwhelming physical and spiritual devastation there forced me to
surrender my pacifist stance
and replace it with the traditional Judeo-Christian just war position" (p. ix).
Here we must meet an obvious objection. Is Mr. Lefever quite the fool I have been making
him out to be? What is wrong
with the just war position? Was not his reaction to Europe's devastation an appropriate one?
Happily for me, the objection cannot stand. By the "just war" position, Mr. Lefever does not
mean what Aquinas and Suarez
intended. Instead, he means exactly the Niebuhrian immersion in power politics already
described. If we are true followers
of the great Reinhold, we must see that America's mission is to carry out our imperial mission in
proper fashion. If we do
the job right, we can attain the glories of the Roman and British Empires. (This is what he gets
from contemplating original
sin?)
Before reaching his sage advice to present policymakers, Mr. Lefever, as I have mentioned,
undertakes a historical survey.
He gets off to a bad start. As you might expect, he can find next to nothing in the early history of
the Republic to lay the
groundwork for his imperialist counsel. The Farewell Address is hardly a manifesto for
empire.
Our author, however, does not exit the eighteenth century emptyhanded. He comes up with
this nugget: "Alexander
Hamilton in The Federalist (no. 1) with extraordinary prescience referred to the United States as
'an empire, in many
respects the most interesting one in the world'" (p. 10). Our latter-day empire builder is not quite
so outrageous, is he? Mr.
Lefever stands in good Hamiltonian company.
Our author has neglected to notice that "empire," in the eighteenth century and earlier, often
meant a nation not governed by
an external power. The term was not restricted to countries that held colonies. Perhaps Mr.
Lefever, not hitherto known as a
student of early modern Europe, was unaware of this. But simple common sense should have
sufficed to tell him that
Hamilton cannot be read as a proto-imperialist in the modern sense. Need our author be reminded
that when Hamilton
wrote, the United States had no colonies and so was not an empire as we use the term today?
Mr. Lefever's history does not really get going until he reaches the twentieth century. Here
one must give him credit: he
transcends the level of fatuity he attained in his use of the Hamilton quotation. As everyone
knows, America's entry into
World War I was a watershed in our abandonment of noninterventionist foreign policy.
How does Mr. Lefever deal with this crucial turning point? We. of course. would not expect
him to defend nonintervention:
his purpose is to attack it. Do we at least get a carefully considered Niebuhrian defense of
intervention? Not at all. Mr.
Lefever treats Wilson's intervention as if it were a matter of course.
In his coverage of Wilson's war aims, Mr. Lefever mocks a supposedly naive Wilson, blind
to the realities of European
politics. Yet our supposed realist Lefever offers not one word to justify U.S. entry into the war.
Grant him, if you will, his
Niebuhrian premises. How does it follow from them that America ought to have joined in the
European conflagration? He
does not tell us.
Our author's performance does not improve when he arrives at World War II. The very
existence of opponents of American
entry into the war induces in him a mild state of shock. "Providentially, the iron grip of
American isolationism was finally
broken up by Japan's sudden attack on Pearl Harbor. The arguments for a Fortress America
collapsed like a ruptured
balloon, and our past aloofness surrendered to a demanding common purpose" (p. 53, emphasis
added).
Mr. Lefever displays no inkling of Roosevelt's provocative diplomacy that induced the
Japanese assault. This aside, what in
his view is supposed to be so unrealistic about the isolationist view? Mr. Lefever's response does
not inspire confidence.
"On a deeper level, the pragmatic interventionists were rediscovering the political realism of
classical thinkers from
Aristotle onward--especially the need for military power to defend the state.... Journalist Walter
Lippmann declared that
Britain and the Royal Navy were America's first line of defense." (p. 52).
As Mr. Lefever acknowledges on the previous page, the dominant isolationist position
favored a strong national defense.
What then is the proof of their lack of realism? An ex parte statement by the inveterate
Anglophile Walter Lippmann
suffices for our author as proof of his case.
I do not think it necessary to recount in detail our author's story of the cold war. Mr. Lefever
relentlessly refights the war,
with Nixon and Kissinger starring as his Niebuhrian heroes. I find it difficult to imagine either of
these worthies
contemplating the perils of original sin, guided by the wisdom of St. Augustine. But this may be
a failure of imagination on
my part. No doubt our author's acquaintance with these eminent statesmen far surpasses my
own.
Readers of this bizarre blend of Niebuhrian wisdom and potted diplomatic history will, if our
author has succeeded, be
equipped to confront America's imperial burden. Those with at least a dash of skepticism will I
trust see that Mr. Lefever's
case for imperialism rests on nothing at all.
Myth of the Voluntary State
POST-S
OCIALIST POLITICAL ECONOMY: SELECTED ESSAYS
James M. Buchanan
Edward Elgar, 1997, ix + 285 pgs.
Professor James Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Economics, has achieved fame
through public choice economics,
which he, together with Gordon Tullock, invented. According to this discipline, economic
analysis does not stop with
market participants. The state consists not of impartial arbiters, but of agents anxious to advance
their own interests.
Professor Buchanan applies his insight into politics to great effect in one area of American
politics. Unfortunately, he fails
to develop this insight, and several others almost as important, to the fullest extent possible.
If politicians avidly pursue their own interests, what are the rest of us to do about this? One
response, that of libertarian
anarchists such as Murray Rothbard, suggests getting rid of the state altogether; but this is
entirely too radical for the public
choice school. Rather, it suggests that the malign effects of self-seeking politicians can be
considerably alleviated through a
federal system.
If political power is decentralized into small units, and a country's citizens enjoy the right to
move freely among these units,
then competition limits governmental abuses. If, for example, a state imposes high taxes on
corporations in its jurisdiction,
they will flee to more congenial climates.
All this is hardly news, but Professor Buchanan applies the federalist point in a way that
illuminates a crucial period in
American history. He writes: "We know now that the Madisonian enterprise [of federalism and
limited government] failed.
The great American Civil War removed forever the threat of secession by the states. This basic
constitutional change more
or less insured that, eventually, the United States would be transformed into a centralized
majoritarian democracy with few,
if any, checks on ultimate political authority. In this modern setting, democracy dominates
society" (p. 220).
Well said! But if one adopts this perspective, will not the Rothbardian position soon follow
as a reasonable extension? If
states may secede from the Union, why may not individuals secede from the state? I do not
suggest that there is a logical
contradiction in defending state secession but rejecting an individual's right to secede. But does
not the same reasoning that
sees secession as a deterrent to oppression by the central government also suggest that the right
of individual secession
limits the power of the states to do bad? If not, why not?
And if individuals may secede, have we not in effect arrived at a Rothbardian position, in
which individuals do not
surrender their natural rights to a state at all? But this view Buchanan rejects as extreme. Or does
he?
In one brilliant essay, he seems to transcend his customary perspective of "constitutional
political economy." He speaks
favorably of self-ownership, the key theme of Rothbard and his followers. "We can refer to
private ownership in person, in
the individual's own capacities to produce economic value. Such property-in-person exists when
the individual is at liberty
to choose when to submit to the direction of others concerning the use of his or her own labor
services and when there
exists also freedom to choose among locations, occupations, and professions, both as offered by
the market and as
potentially created by the individual's own entrepreneurial initiative" (p. 193).
Our author, I fear, is no master of English prose, but it is the thought that counts. He takes
the second crucial Rothbardian
step also, as the passage just quoted suggests. He recognizes that individual self-owners may
acquire rights to property.
These rights are valued by the individuals as a means of enhancing liberty. Unlike Chicago
school economists, Professor
Buchanan does not view property titles solely as a means to maximize efficiency. "[P]ersons
desire ownership of property in
order to secure and maintain liberty over the disposal of resources, without which liberty there
could be no hope of bettering
the conditions of life" (p. 192).
Before I go on with the line of argument Mr. Buchanan's defense of liberty and property
suggests, allow me a digression.
(After all, this is my publication.) The Canadian political philosopher C.B. Macpherson once
raised an interesting objection
to the free market. Proponents of the market, Macpherson noted, claim that individuals in a
laissez-faire economy are free to
make any exchanges they wish. All voluntary transactions, then, take place only if all
participants expect to benefit. Perhaps
so, said Macpherson, but are individuals free to leave the market altogether? How many people
can become fully
self-subsistent farmers? And if you are not free to exit the market, is your freedom to exchange
as significant as advocates
of capitalism think?
Professor Buchanan does not mention Macpherson, but several of his remarks enable us to
construct a reply to the
objection. He points out that ownership of long-term assets reduces direct dependence on the
market. "Consider ownership
of a house. As the owner of this asset that yields services over time, the individual is producing
these particular services for
himself or herself. To the extent that self-production is made possible, the owner is insulated
from direct dependence on the
market" (p.194). Macpherson failed to see that exit from the market need not be total. The force
of his objection to the
market is thus blunted.
But this is by the way. Although Professor Buchanan travels a good deal down the road with
Rothbard, he stops short. He
rejects complete laissez-faire because of that dread specter--public goods. As our author sees
matters, individuals must be
coerced, in some cases, to do what they themselves recognize as in their own collective
interest.
An example will clarify what Professor Buchanan means. If I hire a policeman to protect my
house, his presence also helps
you, if you are my neighbor. Prospective burglars who see him will probably avoid your house as
well as mine. An
externality results: any neoclassical theorist worth his salt can readily show that the market
outcome is "inefficient."
Is there not available an easy escape? Why not an agreement by the concerned individuals to
produce the public good--in
our example, protection--at the optimal amount? Unfortunately, matters are not so simple.
Individuals who make such an
agreement might find it rational to break their word. If I can get a public good without paying for
it, will I not be better off
than I would be if I had paid the share agreed upon? Unfortunately for me, everyone else is in the
same position. Since each
of us foresees that it will be rational for each of us to renege on an agreement to produce a public
good, no such agreement
will be made in the first place. The result will be, horribile dictu, a nonoptimal supply of public
goods.
Here, in Mr. Buchanan's view, the state comes to the rescue. By forcing people to adhere to
their agreements, public goods
are produced in amounts most beneficial to all. Optimality is at hand: all is for the best in this
best of all possible worlds.
What is one to make of this? Arguably, self-owners in Rothbard's sense can voluntarily agree
to establish an agency to
compel them to observe an agreement. But unless someone actually joins in such an
arrangement, force against him cannot
be justified. To claim that he would have entered into an agreement, had he been rational, does
not suffice. Nor does it
suffice if the majority of people in someone's society accept an arrangement: so long as a person
has not explicitly
consented, an attempt to compel him to contribute to a public good violates his rights.
So, at any rate, a consistent supporter of self-ownership will argue. The upshot, of course, is
that no actually existing state
respects people's rights, since there has never been the explicit agreement oncoercion that
self-ownership mandates.
Professor Buchanan, I regret to say, wants to have it both ways. Even though he recognizes
that in existing states, there has
been no actual agreement by everyone to use the state as a coercive agent, he nevertheless retains
the agreement or exchange
model. "At this point, those who defend contractual or exchange models find it useful to
introduce conceptual as opposed to
actual agreement as a device for retaining some explanatory value.... Could the existing rules that
define the overall
operations of the polity have been agreed upon by all citizens if, indeed, there could have been
some imagined initial
dialogue? At this point, the potential conflict among the separate interests of persons and groups
is mitigated by resort to
constructions that introduce a veil of ignorance or uncertainty" (p. 176).
To his credit, Professor Buchanan recognizes that hypothetical consent poses problems, and
he also finds attractive a
Hobbesian view of the state as a predatory agency. Yet at the end he refuses to abandon the
"exchange" model; and he is left
with the nonsense-concept of a state that is coercive but nevertheless voluntary.
Society Without a State
AGAINS
T POLITICS: ON GOVERNMENT, ANARCHY, AND ORDER
Anthony de Jasay
London: Routledge, 1998, 256 pgs.
Anthony de Jasay is one of the few genuinely original thinkers in contemporary political
philosophy. Like James Buchanan,
he begins from the public-choice approach. Unlike his eminent colleague, he endorses full
laissez-faire.
To do so, he must confront a formidable obstacle. Most members of the public choice school
contend that a state is
necessary: they view libertarian anarchists such as Murray Rothbard as idle dreamers. The
starting point of the school is
self-interested rational actors. All social institutions, the school holds, must be explained in terms
of individuals' choices.
Absent a state, why would I ever keep an agreement I had made with you to do something
for you in the future, in return for
your present payment? A familiar argument from game theory shows that in many
circumstances, defection pays. Only an
external agency of coercion, the state, can enable a system of social cooperation to get off the
ground.
Against this popular view, Mr. de Jasay deploys an ingenious argument. If we cannot trust
rational individuals to keep their
agreements, why should we trust the state to exercise its job of enforcement as rational actors
intend? The agents of the state
are themselves self-interested actors, no more altruistic than anyone else.
"It is crucial to the understanding of the putative resolution of the dilemma of contract [by an
external agent]." Mr. de Jasay
writes, "that while an enforcing agent can, under certain conditions, enable the parties to pass
from n-person
non-cooperative to (conflictually) cooperative games by entering into binding commitments, the
interaction between the
agent and either party remains a two-person non-cooperative game. Nothing proves the
possibility of a binding contract
between the parties and enforcing agent; there is no meta-agent that could, and would, enforce
this contract" (pp. 18-19).
I have included this long quotation to give readers a taste of Mr. de Jasay's style. He is a
rigorous thinker, whose work
demands close attention. And it appears that our author will have to exercise all his rigor and
ingenuity to extricate himself
from a predicament. Most public-choice theorists, to reiterate, argue that a state is needed to
enforce contracts. Mr. de Jasay
argues that a state will not solve the difficulty: an agreement to form a state will give rise to the
same problems its
establishment was supposed to resolve.
Has not our author printed himself into a corner? If individuals cannot enter into enforceable
contracts, and the state cannot
do so either, what is left? Are rational actors doomed to a Hobbesian war of all against all?
Our author discovers an escape. It is the initial argument of the public-choicers that is at
fault. Contrary to James Buchanan
and many lesser eminences, it is sometimes rational for self-interested agents to enter into
binding contracts, and to keep
them, without the aid of an external agent. No state is needed to generate law enforcement and
other public goods.
How can this be? The argument to the contrary appears ironclad. Suppose I offer to trade you
one of my apples for one of
your oranges. Should you be dense enough to fork over your orange, why should I now give up
my apple? If I do not, I shall
have both an apple and an orange.
You, of course, are in fact no such dolt as our conjecture supposes. You realize what will
happen and do not surrender your
orange. Thus, no exchange at all takes place, even though, by hypothesis, each of us would have
been better off had we been
able to carry through this simple act of barter. For supposedly rational agents, we have not done
very well. But how is the
dilemma to be escaped?
Mr. de Jasay maintains that the argument just given errs by taking bargains one at a time.
True enough, if only one exchange
between two persons takes place, it will be rational for each to violate the terms of an agreement
to exchange goods.
Take the money and run! You won't be seeing your trading partner again. If, however, we do
not confine our attention to
single exchanges, "one-shot prisoner's dilemmas" as the trade jargon has it, the situation looks
entirely different. If you
think it likely that you will be involved in a series of exchanges with someone, then it is indeed
rational for you to keep your
promises. If you do not, others will not make contracts with you in the future. The "rational"
contractors we have imagined,
who always find promise-breaking in their interest, are in fact short-sighted.
Further, if it is rational to keep bargains, why do we need a state? Our author's earlier
argument has shown that if
agreements cannot be enforced, the state cannot help: his new argument shows that one does not
need a state to enforce
contracts. Why then establish one? It is either unneeded or futile. (Of course, if one is established
through agreement, de
Jasay's second argument seems to show that this agreement can also be kept.)
I am inclined to believe, but am not at all sure, that Mr. de Jasay's argument that the state is
superfluous is correct, on the
assumptions he sets forward. It all depends, it seems to me, on what view one takes about the
force of the backward
induction paradox under uncertainty. Fortunately for readers, I am not going to explain this, in
large measure because I
doubt my own grasp of the issues. Suffice it to say that, given his starting point, Mr. de Jasay
makes a good case.
But is his starting point the best one to adopt? Mr. de Jasay attempts to derive all human
institutions, to reiterate, from the
behavior of rational self-interested actors. In particular, ethical principles, on this view, are not
true in themselves: they
must be derived from self-interested behavior that does not presuppose them.
If, then, I do not steal your wallet, I refrain not because I see that theft is intrinsically wrong.
Rather, I see that it is in my
self-interest to bind myself to a rule against theft, provided that enough others do the same.
This view rests squarely on ethical skepticism. If ethical principles are true, then the question
of belief does not depend on
self-interest. Just as I believe that "2+2=4" because I see that it is true, so, I should contend, I
accept "theft is wrong"
because I see that it is true.
Mr. de Jasay rejects this sort of ethical rationalism. In his view, no interpersonal agreement
can be reached on "value
judgments." We can ask whether value judgments are consistent; but the individual value
judgment, as such, is incapable of
being assessed by reason. "It is perfectly possible for me to share your value judgments, but it is
never intersubjectively
compelling for you to share mine, never a matter of straight practical inference, and never a bow
to the rules of rationality"
(pp. 70-71).
Mr. de Jasay's skepticism appears to land him in another predicament. He strongly supports
the free market; but on his own
view of ethics, why should anyone with value judgments of a different kind from his care about
this? If I have authoritarian
value judgments, why should I not try to impose them on Mr. de Jasay? From an objective point
of view, these value
judgments are no better, and no worse, than his own.
As you might expect, Mr. de Jasay has an ingenious response. In a situation where value
judgments clash, we should adopt
a position of "moral minimalism." Is it not reasonable to assume that we should be free to act as
we like, provided that I
harm no one else? If I do not care for Mr. de Jasay's writing style, the burden of proof is on me to
show that he must change
it. If I cannot do so, he is free to write as he wishes.
I cannot think that this proposal solves the difficulty posed by conflicting value judgments.
Let us grant him his premise that
you are at liberty to do something unless it can be shown that you are required not to do it. It
does follow that you have a
liberty-right to perform the act in question. That supposes that everyone else has an obligation
not to interfere with you.
And to show this requires showing that their liberties may be restricted. At most, our author
shows that while absent
argument to the contrary, I am free to act as I like, others are also free to try to stop me. That may
be acting as they like.
Agree with him or not, one can always learn a great deal from the work of Anthony de Jasay.
As Mr. N. Stephan Kinsella
has noted, Mr. de Jasay is a master of criticism; perusers of his essays on Karl Popper and F.A.
Hayek in this collection will
encounter a polemicist of formidable gifts. Let us hope he does not see this review: if he does, I
am in for it.
Love Thy Neighbor, or
Else
A LIFE
OF ONE'S OWN: INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND THE WELFARE STATE
David Kelley
Cato Institute/National Book Network, 1998, vii + 176 pgs.
Mr. Kelley undertakes a vital task in his excellent new book. As everyone knows, the welfare
state costs a great deal of
money. "In 1930 governments at all levels [in the United States] spent $8 billion (measured in
1995 dollars), or about 1
percent of the gross national product, on all welfare programs. By 1990 the sum had grown to
nearly $900 billion, or 13.4
percent of GNP" (p. 4).
Proposals to cut or eliminate welfare must confront a formidable intellectual obstacle.
According to many philosophers and
political theorists, people have a moral right to receive welfare. Moral rights, contrary to classical
liberals, are not confined
to "negative" liberties, the rights to be free from coercion. On the contrary, rights are "positive"
as well. People have rights
to the provisions of certain goods and services.
Once you learn that Mr. Kelley is a follower of Ayn Rand, you have all you need to know
how he will view the controversy.
He mounts a formidable assault on welfare rights, and most of his arguments seem to me right.
Unfortunately, he has left a
gap through which welfare rightists may escape.
Supporters of welfare rights do not usually overtly oppose liberty rights (except, of course,
the right to acquire property).
They will, rather, argue in this way: without food and a place to live, what good is your right to
free speech? People need
civil liberties, but they also need a certain minimum provision of goods. As everyone knows, but
leftists never tire of
reminding us anyway, Anatole France once said that a rich man and a beggar are equally free to
sleep on a park bench at
night. This example is somehow supposed to show that liberty rights without welfare avail
little.
Mr. Kelley argues that to call both claims to freedom of action and to welfare "rights" blurs
an important distinction. No
one chooses from an unlimited set of options; the constraints of nature and our surroundings
restrict our "feasible choice
set." To protest that we must choose only from given alternatives shows ignorance of the human
condition. But, given our
alternatives, others may attempt to remove one of our options by the use or threat of force.
In Mr. Kelley's view, the distinction between the natural limits to choice and the imposition
of force is decisively important:
"Freedom always involves the capacity to choose among a range of alternative actions. In that
sense, freedom is a positive
concept. But it is also a negative concept: the freedom to choose exists as long as no one
interferes with the choice
coercively, using force to prevent the person from selecting one of the alternatives....The concept
of positive freedom arises
from an invalid attempt...[to say] that the presence of certain options among one's alternatives is
equivalent to freedom of
choice among one's alternatives and that the absence of an option is equivalent to coercive
interference with one's freedom"
(pp. 67-69).
Let us return to Anatole France's beggar. If he lacks money for more suitable lodging than a
park bench, his freedom has
not been taken away. His options are limited and bad; but no one uses force against him.
A defender of welfare rights might respond to Mr. Kelley in this way: "You are right. The
distinction between choice
among a set of alternatives and forcible removal of a number of that set is a good one, and you
have convinced me that we
should not use the same word 'freedom,' to designate both of these. But why does it follow that
there are no welfare rights?
Why must rights rest on the negative sense of freedom that you have taken pains to
distinguish?"
Here our author has a ready response; and this to my mind is the best part of the book. If
someone has a welfare right, then
others must produce the goods to which he is entitled. No doubt you are by now thoroughly sick
of the beggar sleeping on
the park bench, but let us return to him one last time. If he is moved to a room in the
Waldorf-Astoria, someone must
provide the new accommodation. That person is being compelled to labor for the unfortunate
denizen of the park. Being
unfortunate or disabled, in the author's view, confers no right to conscript the labor or someone
better off.
Here we reach bedrock. To conscript labor, our author contends, is to treat the person
conscripted to service exclusively as a
means, not as an end in himself. In brief, this violates the basic principle of interpersonal
morality: "The moral code of
altruism, and the notion of a right to welfare that is based on it, is incompatible with the principle
that the individual is an
end in himself who may not be used against his will" (p. 99).
Mr. Kelley shows that some philosophers who defend welfare rights readily acknowledge
that their favored measures entail
forced labor. "Philosopher Richard Arneson claims that 'in some circumstances, forced labor can
be a morally acceptable
state policy' because the needy have a genuine ownership right in the productive members of
society--an ownership right
that, he acknowledges, is comparable to the right that feudal lords claimed in their serfs" (p. 98).
Professor Arneson, I might
add, is very well thought of indeed among the dominant elite in political philosophy today: he is
one of several acolytes
buzzing round the throne of John Rawls.
Liberty rights of the sort our author supports have no such onerous consequences. The
beggar on the park bench (I know I
promised not to mention him again, but I was being Clintonian) has the same liberty rights as
anyone else. I have no right to
assault him, but this fact does not make me his slave. I need not work for him: I am mandated
only to leave him alone.
So far, so good: the case against welfare rights seems complete. Why then did I claim earlier
that Mr. Kelley has left
advocates of welfarism with an escape? (You may answer because I like to make trouble.
Perhaps you are right, but I
certainly do not intend to acknowledge this.)
The gap in our author's argument, as it seems to me, is this. He ably shows that the needy
have no right to conscript the
labor of others. But why may they not take part of the property of others? "Idiot," you will
answer, "because to do so
violates property rights." But here precisely is the problem. Mr. Kelley has neglected to offer a
justification of property
rights immune from the touch of the needy and their self-appointed spokesmen. For all Mr.
Kelley has shown, we can own
property only subject to the claims of the poor.
If so, our beggar--yes, he's back--can say to Mr. Kelley: "I have no right to force you to labor
for me. But I am entitled to
some of your property. You acquired it subject to the proviso that I, and others like me, can
periodically demand a handout."
Of course, I do not for a moment believe that the beggar is right: I would hardly be editor of The
Mises Review if I did. But
the point is that some justification of property rights must be added to what Professor Kelley has
so ably given us.
Here I confess to an ulterior motive. Randian philosophers do not to my mind do an adequate
job of justifying property
rights, and I am using Mr. Kelley as an excuse to introduce a hobby horse of my own. Randians
tend to argue that owners of
property create, as economic assets, the resources to which they lay claim. Whether Mr. Kelley
adopts this line I do not
know.
To return to our author's case, he next considers another justification for welfarism. Perhaps
we have been looking at
matters from the wrong angle. Rather than begin with the rights of the needy, should we not
instead start with the duties of
benevolence and generosity? Are we not obligated to help those less well-off than
ourselves?
Professor Kelley has no quarrel with the notion that benevolence and generosity are virtues;
but their invocation does not
suffice to make the welfarist case. Benevolent actions reflect a generous character: they are not
duties that may be enforced
against us.
Our author tends to think that the contrasting view, which holds that we have a duty to be
altruistic, rests on a
misapprehension: "Those attitudes [of altruism] often spring from the assumption that the
interests of people generally
conflict... That the stronger and more able flourish at the expense of the weaker and less able....
Society must not make
benevolence, generosity, service, and self-sacrifice the central virtues...lest the grounds for
cooperation and peaceful
coexistence be destroyed by conflict, lest man become a wolf to man" (p. 93).
Against this, our author argues that human interests are harmonious. But it is not this aspect
of his argument I wish to
challenge. Rather, his explanation for the view that altruism is a duty begs the question in that it
presupposes the truth of a
version of egoism. If interests conflict, shared values must be inculcated in order to insure the
survival of the group.
Benevolence, etc. are valuable for the functions these dispositions perform. But why must
benevolence be justified in terms
of some more self-serving value, whether individual or group? What if one does not start from
Professor Kelley's egoistic
premise?
David Kelley's work always merits close attention from those interested in liberty. I
commend to readers his neat
demolition of "communitarian" arguments for welfarism.
The Language of Law
THE
CONSTITUTION AND THE PRIDE OF REASON
Steven D. Smith
Oxford University Press, 1998, xiii + 203 pgs.
Professor Smith has written a book that is an excellent example of a type of scholarship it is
at pains to criticize. As our
author sees matters, many modern constitutional law professors produce "elaborate, exotic"
works (p. vii). Academic
lawyers, seduced by the "pride of reason," have erected complex edifices that lack proper
foundation. Mr. Smith's own
book, though not without its insights, is itself a convoluted structure. It does not really come
alive until Part II, an assault on
a certain style of modern constitutional interpretation.
Our author begins with the Enlightenment. The framers of the Constitution were, he
maintained, imbued with faith in
reason. They inhabited what Carl Becker called "the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century
philosophers." The framers
viewed the world as the creation of a rational God. "The critical point is that if Nature is the
product of 'mind', then it may
be commensurate with or accessible to 'mind'" (p. 8). Further, our grasp of nature is not limited to
descriptive matters of
fact. Quite the contrary, nature also provides a guide to what ought-to-be.
"If the world was the product of a supremely wise and benevolent Providence," he writes,
"then there could be no radical
divergence between the is and ought" (p. 22). Human beings, then, have the power to analyze the
way nature works. From
this grasp of nature, laws of ethics may be deduced.
What has all this to do with the Constitution? Everything, according to our author. The
framers of the Constitution viewed
themselves as occupants of a unique position. They were designing a government from scratch:
unlike previous
governments, their product, if rightly designed, would not be the passive result of force and
chance. Matters in Mr. Smith's
tale now get more complicated. Although man is a being endowed with reason, most men, at
least most of the time, are not
governed by reason. Just the reverse: "in the framers' view, the power of reason was not the
whole, or even the dominant
characteristic, of human nature. There is also a darker side. More specifically, it is human nature
to crave, and to exercise,
power" (p. 37).
The framers believed that they themselves were, perhaps uniquely, at their moment of
conviction acting rationally. But how
could they ensure that their successors, dominated by power and passion, would carry out their
wishes? Further, if human
beings were governed by passion and power, on what basis did the framers exempt themselves?
The authors of the Constitution said little about the latter problem, but they had a strategy to
cope with the former. They
wrote the Constitution, not as a statement of general principles, but as a detailed specification of
enumerated powers.
Regardless of whether Mr. Smith's account of reason at the convention is correct, the
Constitution is indeed a legalistic
document that largely sets forward enumerated powers. Further, as Mr. Smith is at pains to
emphasize, the framers' plan to
restrict power did not work. Disputes between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians soon arose
over interpretation of the
enumerated powers. For whatever reason, the Constitution we have today is not the document the
framers intended us to
have. What are we to do?
Mr. Smith proffers no solution of his own. (In two notes, he suggests that natural-law and
common-law styles of
interpretation merit exploration.) Rather, he is concerned with how contemporary constitutional
lawyers deal with the crisis
of meaning.
He sees current constitutional law as dominated by a fundamental fact: belief in nature as a
source of norms has ceased for
most intellectuals to be an option. Natural law, in McTaggart's phrase, is "one with the gorgons
and the harpies." But this
has had a surprising consequence.
One might have thought that the collapse of natural law would bring to an end attempts to
subordinate the Constitution to
alleged dictates of reason. On the contrary, Mr. Smith holds, it has intensified them. No longer
bound by nature,
constitutional "experts" are free to excogitate rules of reason as they please. And this they have
done with a vengeance.
"It is revealing," Mr. Smith contends, "that in the writings of prominent constitutional
scholars like Ronald Dworkin and
Robin West, the original Constitution virtually disappears" (p. 53). Without a mooring in nature,
the search for
constitutional reason is arbitrary.
Our author has located a weak point in much current moral and legal philosophy. If a writer
proceeds, like Ronald Dworkin,
from certain beliefs that he considers reasonable, in what sense is he a believer in moral truth? Is
he not building sand
castles out of his own intuitions? Mr. Smith's criticism of many self-styled greats in
constitutional law strikes home, and it
is here the main value of the book lies. If only Mr. Smith had managed to raze some of his own
sand castles, his book would
have been substantially better.