Benefactors and bad philosophy

The Left
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There’s a reason I don’t often turn to Slate: Jacob Weisberg. Too often he approaches a great idea only to turn from it in revulsion.

Take his current profile of Peter Thiel. “Having given up hope for American democracy, [Thiel] writes that he has decided to focus ‘my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.’ Both his entrepreneurship and his philanthropy have been animated by techno-utopianism. In founding PayPal, which made his first fortune when he sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Thiel sought to create a global currency beyond the reach of taxation or central bank policy. He likewise sees Facebook as a way to form voluntary supra-national communities.” Thiel’s current project, which Weisberg calls his “worst yet,” is a plan to pay “would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for American universities which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they’re worth and hinder what really matters in life, namely starting tech companies. His scholarships are meant as an escape hatch from these insufficiently capitalist institutions of higher learning.”

Weisberg’s view of the world is par for the course from a Yale grad, so narrow …

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Against Political Panglossianism

Anti-Statism, Vulgar Politics
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I offer to readers a term of my coinage: polidicy.

I construct it as “theodicy” was constructed, and I do so in the spirit of the copycat. A theodicy is a vindication of divine goodness in the context of the existence of evil. It is an important theological concept, and you will find theodicies embedded in most understandings of Providence, and nearly everyone who believes in a deity has some sort of theodicy in tow.

Polidicy, then, is a vindication of a state or government body in the context of its own obvious crimes. Most people who are loyal to some state and pretend to possess a moral sense, or conscience, have some polidicy in their head, some set of excuses for why the state’s many crimes do not amount to a moral case against the state as such, and how, even, the state can be said to be “basically good.”

…

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Price Discrimination: An Example

(Austrian) Economics
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The rental rates on iTunes are fairly well established. You pay most for a new HD release, a little less for an older movie, and less yet for non-HD.

But one movie on iTunes rents for more than double the usual, highest established rate. What’s going on here? Should we send in a “rogue economist,” perhaps, like the dudes of Freakonomics fame?

Well, they would know, since it’s their movie. Freakonomics: The Movie, that is being rented on iTunes for more than double the regular rental price. And, though this may be just the kind of puzzle Levitt and Dubner like to fix upon …

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9/11/01: Shocking, Unsurprising

Imperialism, War
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Nine years ago today, early in the morning, I woke up to my radio alarm. Usually, classical music woke me. This time, the radio announcer urgently related the horror that an airliner had hit one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. There was no consensus on what it meant, at that early hour, and the announcer offered none. But I immediately knew it was an act of what we call “terrorism.” I hit the snooze button and rolled over. “Finally,” I muttered.

I was not surprised. I was not shocked. Appalled at the massive taking of life? Yes. Later, I was impressed at the planning and daring of the attacks. But, unlike most Americans I talked to that day, I was definitely not startled by the event. Though the largest act of terrorism ever, it was not unprecedented. I had been expecting blowback from U.S. foreign policy for over a decade. I was not unaware that, in matters of aggression, the Laws of Thermodynamics echoed in sociology, if crudely: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. American forces bomb, obliterate, and gun down folks elsewhere? At some point those folks elsewhere are going to strike back.

To not expect this, I figured, was to be incredibly naive.

But I live in America, the land of Never-Ending Naivety. When the president called the terrorists “faceless cowards,” the essential silliness of the epithet did not strike most people as the very opposite of the truth — which it was. And when the president then began talking about a “war on terrorism,” I knew things were going to get bad. Self-righteous talk of “wars” against this and that always get out of hand, and rarely reach their ostensible objectives. Instead, we’d just have wars. And reductions in civil liberties. And such.

The wonder, now, is that things didn’t get  worse than they did. But grant the declension its own rate. In 2008, as the financial markets began to collapse, and as the American government threw trillions of dollars at rich people, in fear of chaos, in utter beffuddlement at what to do, I imagined Osama bin Laden, chortling in a cave, rubbing his hands and saying “Excellent, excellent.” The American federal government did pretty much everything that Osama wanted. In its wars on terrorism, it spent itself to the brink of oblivion; it addicted itself to spending. Now, its leaders cannot see the way out of any problem other than spending increasing heaps of borrowed money.

If and when this all collapses — America’s ability to support military bases around the world, America’s ability to pay interest on its own debt — I’ll think, again, on that morning of 9/11/01. On what horrors came so close to home. And on what ended. Lives, yes. But also America’s game of pretending to be for peace while spreading death; the politicians’ game of playing US vs. THEM and never expecting negative feedback “in the homeland”; the citizens’ belligerent insistence on their own innocence even while showing not one jot of interest in what actually happens in the rest of the world — it all began to unravel on 9/11/01.

And that’s good. Vicious fantasies deserve to die. But the everyday folk in the towers, on that day, didn’t deserve their horrible deaths. But then, neither did the innocents in Iraq, or at the aspirin factory in Africa, or in Panama, or too near a thousand other targets of America’s careless “peacekeeping.”

I would rather have had it that we lost our innocence through inquiry, reason, and reflection. But a shocking-to-the-fools comeuppance works, too.

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Wolf in Sheep’s Garb

Libertarian Theory
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Martin Wolf, a British writer, has offered us a grand example of a certain rhetorical style. He has written a seemingly reasonable pitch for the modern state, a defense that had a chance of ascending to the insightful had he not also possessed another, more subtle purpose in mind.

He asks “What is the role of the state” in order to declare, with the utmost confidence, that the role is to provide “protection.” Protection of what or whom, it is not really very clear, though civic-minded readers will just assume it is “everybody.”

Also not clear, at least at the outset, is whether he is describing what states do or telling us what states should do. There is a difference.

But what becomes clear, as one reads, is that Wolf’s main purpose is to cast aspersions on libertarian ideas.

The careless reader might not notice his anti-libertarian stance until he brings up anarchism only to dismiss it by saying that “most people accept that protection . . . is a natural monopoly: the presence of more than one such organisation within a given territory is a recipe for unbridled lawlessness, civil war, or both.” There’s nothing like the authority of popular opinion to decide an important issue.

Libertarianism/classical liberalism comes under attack, directly, in the eighth paragraph. But by this time the careful reader will have understood that the whole piece has been written in just such a way as to undermine respect for libertarian ideas. Not argue against libertarianism, mind you, just undermine respect. For what Wolf offers by way of argument is not very compelling.

What is compelling is the careful rhetoric of the way he frames his piece. He raises up “protection” as the standard, and dismisses the Molinarian idea of competition in protective services without once mentioning any scholarly work done on the subject, or (and this is where he is breathtakingly clever) using the word “contract.” As I wrote on my blog yesterday, he carries over his understanding of warfare and conflict from his experience with monopoly state governments, and imputes them to competitive protective services.

The cleverness comes in with his immediate admission of a more skeptical point of view than the one he obviously prefers. He cites Mancur Olson’s contention that the state is a “stationary bandit.” And then he offers up the three mechanisms by which the stationary bandit has been controlled in modern time: exit, voice, and restraint. This is all very fascinating, and could have been the beginning of a great article on the nature of politics and law. Instead, he turns on libertarians, and misinterprets their ideas as relying almost exclusively on “restraint,” that is, the constitutional constraints of competing powers and the like.

The truth is that “exit” is the main check that libertarians prefer. And “voice” (speaking out, protest, lobbying, voting) is not exactly foreign to the libertarian mindset, either.

His contention that libertarians have little practical hope has more than a little plausibility. But I pilloried his assertion that libertarianism is “hopeless intellectually,” elsewhere. It is a silly argument. Utterly silly. Risible.

And by “silly” I don’t mean “blessed” or “pious.”

Those may have been the original meaning of the word, but I’m going with current meaning.

Why bring this up?

Because Wolf concludes his short essay with a discussion of an Athenian epithet, against those who don’t participate in politics. The word? “Idiotes.” And Wolf cannot help himself: “This is, of course, the origin of our word “idiot”. Individual liberty does indeed matter. But it is not the only thing that matters.”

You see what he’s done here. He’s called libertarians “idiots.” It’s his final, subtle insult. (This is the clear implication, even though libertarians, in insisting on rolling back the state, are also, just as clearly, being the good citizens he himself says we all have a duty to be.)

The whole piece ends up amounting to nothing other than an exercise in passive-aggressive rhetoric. Actual arguments are sparse. But by juxtaposing ideas in a certain way, it is designed to lead people not inclined to libertarianism to take libertarian ideas less seriously.

It is perhaps a pity that Ilya Somin (on The Volokh Conspiracy) and I (on Wirkman Netizen) took his piece seriously. Really, it is not a serious piece of argument. It is a clever piece of derision . . . all the more so because it doesn’t look like one.

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