Playing catchup

I can't remember how I got there, but I've been enjoying a new site today called "Popehat," especially a piece about Alvin Toffler's successive waves of change in human society.  In the original state of human culture, hunter-gatherers bumped up against a limiting condition of enough food.  Utopia was a place where there was plenty to eat.  Next came agriculture, which increased productivity and the food supply.  "Agriculture allowed us to harvest more calories per hour of labor."  The limiting condition was arable land.  This was followed by industrialization, which increased productivity again. "Industry allowed us to harvest more material wealth per hour of labor."  The limiting condition was capital; in Utopia there would enough machinery for everyone.  Finally, in the post-industrial society, "information technology allows us to harvest more informed decisions per hour of labor."   The limiting condition on prosperity has become scarce mental skills.

The author identifies the problem with many political schemes as "retrograde Utopian solutions."  Land redistribution, or socialist redistribution of the means of factory production, he sees as beside the point.  The current approach to a shortage of genius is to tax the highly creative and successful at extremely high rates.  The commenters try to explore a solution that increases cognitive skills via education, to which the author wryly responds, "What mechanism do you think turns cash into geniuses?"   There follows a spirited discussion of education and intelligence (with a long detour into the usual arguments for and against the minimum wage).

48 comments:

Grim said...

This maybe returns us to discussing theories of value. We had a go at that in the long discussion recently, in which I was at times trying to lay out a theory of value in our current world, and you were trying to correct my understanding so that it more closely followed Adam Smith's. :)

I was arguing that capital plus skilled labor is the source of wealth (not value). Now capital is nothing other than a kind of stored skilled labor: either it is wealth that was earned by somebody working (someone who knew how), or it is machinery that was built and designed by someone who knew how, etc. In the agricultural era, the skill was knowing where and when to plant, how to turn the soil, eventually it was knowing about crop rotation and similar things.

Unskilled labor can increase the value of a good, but the wealth of society increases because of skilled labor, either directly or stored as capital. To simplify this, I'll use the ancient Greek word for knowledge related to making things: techne.

So you may have a factory in which 10,000 unskilled workers are running machines that were designed by 2 workers, which were built by machines designed by 2 more (or the same 2). Those 10,000 workers may be increasing the value of a lump of iron ore by processing it through the machines into components for machines, or computer parts, or whatever. On the other hand, there's nothing certain about this. If it turns out that nobody wants the thing they're making, because a better version has come out, they may actually have reduced the value of the raw components -- either the stuff is now just trash, or we have to pay to recycle it (which is usually more expensive than making new stuff from raw materials, although not always -- aluminum is a notable exception).

On the other hand, the wealth of society has really increased by the design of the machines. Even if nobody wants the products tomorrow because a better version has been invented, the reason the better version was invented was likely in response to the original idea. Even if this is not the case, it may be that some new problem will come up in which a process from the first idea is useful -- so our wealth has increased, because we have more techne.

The wealth of a society is thus a kind of living knowledge. But it isn't just any sort of knowledge. It's not scientific knowledge (episteme in the Greek), except insofar as that can be applied to the making of useful things (i.e., insofar as episteme gives rise to new techne). It's not knowledge of the arts, which is either episteme or possibly gnosis, a kind of wisdom.

Now it seems to be the claim here that the limiting condition is currently techne in living workers -- that is, skilled labor of a certain type, not capital. And of course, the solution -- already proposed in the comments -- is to use that skilled labor to develop capital capable of performing the high-executive functions, so that the process can be further automated: but both skilled labor and capital are components of techne, though one may be in shorter supply than the other at a given moment.

Grim said...



So much for increasing wealth, and even for increasing the value of stuff lying around. The real problem for me is, and has been, what do you do with the people you don't need anymore? What's being said here is that the only labor that is still valuable is this kind of highly skilled techne labor; but even that might be automated.

So at some point we're relying on almost no people as the drivers of wealth, which means that the rest of them have no necessary role in any market economy. People who are not themselves necessary have their wages driven down to the lowest common denominator. I always hear that they will make a good living by providing services of some kind to the few remaining genuine wealth-producers; but as there will be fewer of those, at some point you're providing services to the servants, and then to the servant's servants, each of whom become less wealthy as the concentric spheres expand. Your personal standard of living thus has nothing to do with your value, or the wealth you are capable of producing: it becomes a question purely of proximity and access.

Or else you need a non-market mechanism for determining how people obtain access to resources. Elise is talking about one idea over at her place just now.

Texan99 said...

You have written a economic treatise with which I have shockingly few points of disagreement. But for you it leads to a dilemma, and for me it does not.

"[Y]you need a non-market mechanism for determining how people obtain access to resources." We already have one of those. For one thing, there is nothing about a free market that impinges in any way on the right or the proclivity of people to help each other voluntarily, without regard for an economic return -- whether intimately in families or more distantly via charities. I never object to such arrangements as long as people use their own resources to fund them.

For another, even if it is true that the limiting factor in the expanding growth of wealth in our current system is some kind of wild genius, as this author suggests (and I strongly suspect he is one of the wild geniuses), that doesn't mean that only wild genius remains valuable. It only means that other resources and skills are in more comfortable supply, and the one whose scarcity we most often run up against is the wild genius. (Similarly, when arable land was the limiting factor, artisans remained valuable. When capital-intensive factors were the limiting factor, arable land remained valuable.)

(By wild genius, I take the author to be describing an unusual ability to dream up the next better mousetrap, something for which he'll be richly rewarded and all of society will benefit.)

So in the meantime, while we enjoy the wild geniuses and wish we could find a way to generate more of them and/or fight over whether they should get to keep most of their wages, the rest of the free market bumps along as it always has: with individuals making free choices about what to trade and what to give, and specializing and gaining expertise as appropriate.

There is nothing about a free market that requires anyone to starve. It's only a question of how we will allocate our resources to feed the helpless: will each of us decide what to give and to whom, or will that decision be made by a central authority with powers of confiscation? Which approach will result in the alleviation of the most hunger? You know what my answer is to that question.

Grim said...

For one thing, there is nothing about a free market that impinges in any way on the right or the proclivity of people to help each other voluntarily...

That's true. What holds us back here is human nature.

even if it is true that the limiting factor in the expanding growth of wealth in our current system is some kind of wild genius, as this author suggests (and I strongly suspect he is one of the wild geniuses), that doesn't mean that only wild genius remains valuable. It only means that other resources and skills are in more comfortable supply, and the one whose scarcity we most often run up against is the wild genius.

Theoretically that could be true (and indeed, that's how he frames the argument). However, techne is not just skilled labor, but the capital that such labor creates as a kind of stored form of itself. Now, one of the truths about economics is that capital can be substituted for labor (and vice versa). Further, a basic truth of economics is that increasing the supply of something, given a flat demand, decreases its cost.

Therefore, increasing capital should decrease the cost of capital, which means that it will be increasingly substituted for labor. (After all, people are expensive! Especially if there are pension costs, medical care to be provided, and so forth.) Thus, even away from the limiting factor, labor ought to be increasingly out of use by the economy. (There's an exception to this scenario, increasing demand, which I'll get to in a moment.)

Furthermore, because techne continues to increase over generations, this is an ongoing process. There's going to come a point at which we really don't need anyone to do anything at all that could be described as unskilled labor, and in fact even many things now considered skilled labor can be automated (such as "high intelligence, executive function, and self-discipline" -- which is why the author and commenters think that this limiting factor, 'wild genius,' will be solved via automation. The next one will be power, but power generation might even ideally be automated -- think of the advantages of an automatic nuclear plant, needing only one human to shut it down if it goes wrong, and a few humans across the whole set of such plants to maintain them in any ways that robots can't).

So there should be a general decline in the need for people to operate the economy. The exception, as I said, is if there is increasing demand for things to which capital might be put. That could keep the price of even an increasing supply of capital high enough that there continue to be jobs (the 'labor' that capital is substituting for here is just any sort of work that isn't automated, so we're really talking about most jobs -- everything from cutting your hair to preparing your meals).

In theory this could all lead to a nice future in terms of material wealth for everyone. It's just that to get there, we need a system for making sure people have access to the increasing wealth being generated.

You could end up with a sci-fi solution whereby everyone has machines that make whatever they need (which pretty much does away with most of the commerce you're talking about as the ordinary market!). That's acceptable, because ordinary people have all their ordinary needs met. It's a happy solution, on the far horizon.

But there's a transition period that is dangerous, and it's not sure you'd get there. Currently we allocate resources either because you can command a wage or, increasingly, by redistribution. Neither solution is good in the long term, given that fewer people can command wages; and both of them have serious political consequences we'll have to navigate.

Grim said...

Now, what about increasing demand? Well, that's been the innovation of the last 60 years, since the end of WWII: Madison Avenue has been all about increasing demand, by increasing the number of things you think you need.

But there are also unmet real demands (like adequate food in Africa), and demands nearly as real and unmet (like air conditioning in India). Why are these demands not being met by the market?

It isn't 'wild genius.' It's the power thing already in the case of India: we have to solve that problem, and until we do we can't tap into that huge demand. It's political stability in Africa, the solving of which is noneconomic absent something like colonialism (which is actually noneconomic itself, since you can extract the resources more cheaply without having the costs of imposing order).

Solving noneconomic problems requires political will, and sustained political will -- the community of nations, or a particular nation, has to be willing to pay the price in blood and treasure for someone else's short term benefit. In the long term, it creates new demand (although there's no reason to believe this demand won't dry up eventually too, leaving you back with the we-don't-need-workers scenario).

The technological problems are non-solvable for now. We'll solve them with more techne, perhaps. But if we do, it doesn't push us off the incline I'm describing. It just creates a window of breathing space before the created jobs dry up.

Texan99 said...

"What holds us back here is human nature." Have you got a proposal for improving that?

Grim said...

Before we ask about improving human nature, can we agree on what constitutes "improvement"?

I'm skeptical of the project -- even Jesus warned that the poor would always be with us. I believe in maximizing your virtues and minimizing your vices, and winning people's hearts to the good through philosophy and religion and beauty. But skeptic that I am, it might be possible to plot a course, if we were certain we knew the right star.

Texan99 said...

Let's say "improvement" is defined as removing whatever is holding us back, per your formulation.

Grim said...

I'm not sure that we can agree that is an improvement, though. What is holding us back may be important. Why don't you trim back what you own to the true minimum of what you need, and give the rest to the poor? My guess is that it is a combination of self-love, and love of family, a kind of special valuation of the intimate.

Now that kind of love powers the market -- people work for their own good and the good of those they love. So even in purely economic terms, abandoning that might not be wise. But at the same time, it may be what is standing between us and really being willing to voluntarily give enough. It would be something like some sort of native unwillingness to endure the shame of having more than anyone else.

You get that sometimes in intimate communities -- sometimes country music singers sing of the shame of drinking up the paycheck they've earned, but which their family also relies upon. Even though they earned the wage, they're ashamed of having taken a larger share of it.

So for it to really be an improvement, we would have to be able to extend that kind of sense to the rest of humanity -- which means we would have to lose both the problem of the commons (i.e., those we hoped to help would have to lose it), and whatever it is that makes us only want to work our hardest when it is for the gain of those we love most. We'd have to work just as hard, but for the good of everyone.

That sounds like the general project of Christianity, but honestly, I've never seen any good plan to achieve it short of awaiting the Second Coming. I certainly have no good program that will make us love our neighbors, all of them everywhere, exactly as we love ourselves.

Texan99 said...

Then I'll have to stick with the free market, and leave everyone to his own devices in deciding how to use his own resources for charity. I never did think people needed improvement in order for freedom-plus-charity to be the most workable system we have available.

That people need improving is something I'm prepared to leave to God. The economic system, on the other hand, is up to us.

Grim said...

...the most workable...

Well, that's in debate. I don't think it has worked -- I think it's already been replaced, in practical terms, by a collective and redistributive system. One reason people are so ready to support redistribution is that the market-based system didn't support them at the level they desired -- so they used political methods to pull themselves out of it, wholly or partially.

In that sense, freedom-plus-charity has already failed to work. It had a chance, around 1900, but instead has been steadily replaced by another system: compulsion-plus-redistribution, if you like. (Nor did the poor do this on their own, for the poor are politically powerful only because there are wealthy, educated people helping to organize and lead them through the political processes: the warnings of Schumpeter, again.)

I don't think that system can work either, so I expect it to fail as well. But we've had that conversation.

Texan99 said...

I don't mean that the free market system has worked to prevent anyone from ever being in need or to prevent anyone from voting foolishly. I mean that it's raised the average standard of living, and thus the excess wealth available for supporting the helpless.

It would be possible to argue that the redistributionist schemes we all began to implement in the 20th century, especially in the 30s, raised the average standard of living, but I wouldn't know how to start. The countries that have the most free markets and the least forcible redistribution also have the highest GDP, by and large. China was a basket case economically but began roaring when it tried some partial experimentation in freedom. Scandinavia was starting to falter, then freed up its market and improved its prosperity. The redistributionist countries of mainland Europe are all going into the ditch. The countries that went left in the 20th century and stayed there are completely hopeless (Cuba, North Korea). The ones that came out from behind the Iron Curtain and went for free markets are booming. The ones that still flirt with command-control economies (Russia) are faltering. The ones that have tried to lurch left recently (Argentina, Venezuela) are faltering.

I make a distinction between "the most workable economic system we have available" and "a system that works so well economically that democracies won't vote for policies that will kill the golden goose." Our system creates more collective prosperity than any other system ever tried (regardless of what we think about how it should be shared). If it's to be replaced, I'd like it to be by a system that can demonstrate its ability to produce more collective prosperity. Otherwise, we'll still have the problem of people wanting to vote for policies that destroy wealth, but we'll have even less wealth to start from when they do it, and less time to correct the error.

No system ever works to our highest expectations, but there's no reason to throw them out if we don't have something available that will work better. It's certainly not a reason to encourage the growth of the malfunctioning parts of the system and jettison the parts that work best.

Grim said...

Nobody talked about throwing out the system, though -- or if they did, they were dismissed for having raised a straw man fallacy. The talk was always about modifying or adjusting the system so that it treated the poor better.

This, actually, is how European democratic socialism (and American reform liberalism, the liberalism that really gained steam in the 1930s) diverges from Marxism. The Marxists wanted to toss the system and replace it with something new. The whole point of democratic socialism was to protect the existing, more-or-less functional institutions from the revolution threatened by an angry poor. So one little change after another, and a few larger changes like Social Security and Medicare, and you eventually find yourself with an entirely different system. The fundamentals of the system slipped out from under our feet: at some point we weren't still adjusting the old system, but had embarked upon a new economic system with different fundamental assumptions.

This may be a point where technocrats (or a wise king) is less susceptible than a democracy. An educated elite could, in principle, resist the temptations of the mob and adhere to some economic principles (like Adam Smith's). The democracy will be driven chiefly by the concerns of its members, and if the bottom half (or 60%, or 70%) feel they'd prefer to be more equal than the market can make them, well...

Texan99 said...

The whole point of democratic socialism was to try to keep the wealth-creating advantage of the free market alive so the democratic socialists could drain it as much as they dared. That was an improvement over Marxism's outright destruction of the wealth potential of the free market, but the problem is that democratic socialists always threaten to kill the host, because they don't really understand where the wealth comes from. They want one patient to give blood transfusions to save the life of another, but they don't really understand where blood comes from, how it's replaced, or how much the donor can give before you kill him. Somehow they start thinking that the very process of drawing blood is part of the same mechanism that generates it. They lose track of which schemes generate and which schemes consume. No wonder they go broke!

I think it's a mistake to conclude that we don't have a free market any more, because it's supposedly been replaced irrevocably with "something new." The free market is still a tool that's very much available to us. It has the potential to increase wealth now just as it always did. We just need to quit choosing to harm it so severely in service of "helping the poor" that we make ourselves less able than ever to help the poor. The great thing about the free market is that we never kill the usefulness of the system. We just keep abandoning it, going broke, and then re-discovering its potential. It's always waiting right there to be picked up and used again.

Grim said...

So now combine that reading with the economic analysis.

Say that somehow we were to restore a vibrant free-market system. However, a group of those at the bottom of the system -- the people who have the least to gain personally from the market, and who want to be supported in other ways -- begin, as before, to advocate for greater equality in society via redistribution.

They begin to make similar arguments that political equality is not really compatible with vast inequalities of wealth. It isn't right that a small minority occupies the heights of wealth and power, and the rest of the people -- though they may work very hard, as did the proto-labor unions in the 1900s -- suffer relative privation.

Under the economic analysis, this argument ought to be more persuasive than ever. This is because, more than ever, the advance of techne has rendered ever more people non-necessary. They are labor who can be swapped for capital, which means that they have to keep their costs of living -- including pensions, retirement, health care -- below the cost of the cheapest workable replacement technology. Otherwise it is noneconomic to employ them.

Thus, they will be suffering from either unemployment or a constant downward pressure on their incomes and standards of living.

So, you'll either need adequate charity to remedy that -- meaning not just their poverty, but to keep their standard of living from falling as the economy prices them out of the market. Otherwise, you'll have an even larger democratic movement next time advocating for adjustments, modifications, and redistributions.

The free market may always be there waiting for us, but it seems to have its own internal instability. Even private charity on that massive scale might not do it, if people resent being made into charity cases -- Elise points out that the Left generally finds "charity" to be an insulting response, which emotional reaction means that it simply may not be acceptable to this increasingly strong majority.

Thus, you might wish to dispose of democracy after all.

Texan99 said...

"[M]ore than ever, the advance of techne has rendered ever more people non-necessary."

I've never agreed that techne or anything else renders people unnecessary in large numbers. Some people will be too sick to work, but anyone else who's more interested in supplying the needs of others than in doing what he likes can be of some use to somebody. It's just that we can't guarantee a minimum wealth the worker can expect to gain from his work, though we can be sure it will be more than all but the luckiest people on earth got 300 years ago.

Will a bunch of people be dissatisfied when they get less than they see some of their neighbors getting? Sure. Will they agitate for forcible redistribution if they consider charity an insult? Sure, but how is this different from the tendency of some segment of society to conclude that they're entitled to live by robbery? Part of what civilization is for is to prevent that -- unless we make the mistake of thinking civilization is there to facilitate it. We ought to be teaching our kids that there's no such thing as a level of pay that someone is "entitled" to, any more than they're entitled to hold up liquor stores. It's all about trading, and trading is about two people finding a middle position that leaves them both better off than if they simply parted ways and each grubbed in the forest with his own stick.

There's nothing inherent in the free market that leads either to unemployment or to ever-decreasing income, any more than there's an inherent tendency toward leaving some goods on the shelf unsold, or a relentless downward trajectory in the prices of goods. Instead, we reach a balance, as long as no one tries to set the prices of either goods or labor at arbitrary levels. The goods get sold at some price, the workers get hired at some wage. No one in the system gets unilateral power, as long as you keep Congress out of it. Where's the instability? Price-fixing schemes are inherently unstable. Free markets are not; their internal mechanisms push them to equilibrium.

I don't know what you mean by saying "the economy prices them out of the market." I don't think there's any such thing. No one who's not suicidal leaves the market unless he has some other source for the necessities of life, such as the ability to live off the land all by himself, or the ability to persuade other people (family, friends, or government) to cover his living expenses. In that case, it's not the "economy" that persuaded him to leave the market. It's the availability of other alternatives to starvation.

Grim said...

Yes, I see your problem understanding me. I consider them out of the market before they die. If you want a job and can't get one -- because there's no skill you have that a machine can't perform more cheaply, for example -- you're out of the market. If you're going to survive, it has to be via extra-market means.

That can be charity, or it could be organizing via politics to force a better deal for yourself and others. Or it could be crime -- it very often is crime, in fact. Or it could be revolt, as very often happens among poor men in Africa even today: join a militia, and start commanding some resources.

If the market can't answer those challenges, it's unstable. It's not unstable because it isn't productive, but because the productivity is concentrated in a way that is unacceptable to the people in society. Not all of them, to be sure! But at this point, even in America, we're talking about majorities.

So either the market has to give way to those political realities, or we have to try to find some form of force to compel these people to accept the market's decisions (plus whatever charity we are inclined to give them). I think there's a real collision between this kind of unfettered capitalism and democracy: at some point, democracy will kill the free market, or the free market will kill democracy. They aren't compatible with each other in the long term.

Grim said...

Now, I take that as a serious problem, because considered as a political order 'constitutional rule by the many' is the least-bad form of political system; and the free market is the best form of economic system. If they aren't compatible, though -- and I really think they are not -- then we have to negotiate a compromise, or else choose between them.

Texan99 said...

I may not have expressed myself well. I didn't mean to suggest that no one leaves the market before dying. I meant to say that the "economy" does not drive anyone out of the market, and that the only sane reason to leave the market would be a perception that there was some other way to put food on the table. I just couldn't make out quite what you were trying to say about the economy driving workers out of the market. A minimum wage could do that, certainly, as could other government-imposed restrictions on employment, but the economy itself could not do so.

An economic system such as a free market is not unstable because people are willing to use violence to get the wealth they want. That's a hallmark of an unstable political or cultural system, one that can't protect order or property rights. A democracy may or may not devolve into such a state. Some people think democracies are inherently prone to devolve into such a state. Such a devolution certainly seems an increased risk if you lack some kind of foundational document, like a Constitution, that puts a limit on what kinds of confiscation people can vote to impose on each other through the power of government. I think the 16th Amendment was a spectacularly bad idea.

But in that case, it's the inability of a constitutionally limited democracy to prohibit confiscation that's unstable, not the free market.

Grim said...

The 16th kind of points up the idea I'm after, though. It was not like Obamacare, where some shady parliamentary maneuver rammed through a blatantly unconstitutional law through Congress on a party-line vote, only to have a submissive Supreme Court bow to it. It is a legitimate Constitutional Amendment, passed by supermajorities of the Congress, and then ratified by a supermajority of the states.

At some point you're saying that you want these questions removed from democratic authority -- even in cases of supermajorities, even in cases where constitutional measures have been clearly obeyed.

I said that at some point you might have to choose between democracy and the free market, because in the long term they weren't compatible. It sounds like you're opting to reject democracy insofar as it conflicts with the free market. Perhaps a kind of constitution that put property rights in a special category, unquestionable by any future polity no matter how large the majority?

Texan99 said...

I don't think the 16th Amendment was illegitimate, just a spectacularly bad idea. That's the problem with even a foundational document like the Constitution: it can still be undermined by bad amendments if you can talk enough people into it. One of the reasons I think arguments about the economy are important is to try to persuade people not to support ideas like that. In a democracy, that's just about the only defense you have against spectacularly bad ideas.

Nevertheless, I don't feel the free market is at all inconsistent with democracy. Theoretically, in a democracy, people will vote for their self-interest, on average. As things are, a great mass of voters believe they can vote themselves prosperity in the form of redistribution schemes. If they could be persuaded that the idea is self-defeating -- that they'd be better off even with a smaller slice of a bigger pie -- they might quit voting themselves bigger pieces of a smaller pie. Ideally I would be appealing to their self-interest, though I haven't figured out a way to communicate the argument well yet. (I'm practicing on you.)

All I get to do is try to persuade people to go along with me voluntarily. I don't have (or even want) any power to force them.

Grim said...

You are practicing on me? Well, good. I like that. Let me help you practice, then.

You're arguing out of a tradition that takes property rights to be fundamental. Libertarian philosophy starts with the idea that you own yourself -- and thus that no one else has any right to tell you what you can do with your body, so long as it causes no injury. Your status as an owner -- an owner of yourself -- is fundamental to what it means to be a person, to have rights, and to have your rights respected.

For example, if people try to tell you can't X with your body, they are violating your property rights. As long as you voluntarily agree to an exchange of property -- say, prostitution -- it is a valid exchange with which no one else has any right to interfere. Your strong support for the free market begins with the fact that it is the clearest case for a voluntary exchange among property owners.

Now, the problem for the market in winning wide public support is that it leads to inequality in ownership of property. Your hope is that you will convince people to believe that, however poorly they may do in the market, they'll do better than under any other system because the market is more productive.

But they may have a point here. If their rights as individuals are in some sense fundamentally a kind of property right, if they have less property than X they have fewer rights than X. Yet democracy is based on an ideal of equality of rights.

Perhaps this is the place to start?

Texan99 said...

I am arguing from a tradition of property rights -- not just because that appeals to me personally, but because I'm persuaded that attempts to run economies on any other basis leads to widespread and avoidable penury. I would love to think that we could all own property in common, so I was disappointed to conclude that people are not so constituted as to make that work. They starve when they try it. It doesn't seem possible to harness their best efforts without giving them property rights.

You probably recall from my discussions with Cassandra that I do tend to take the position that people have the right to control their own bodies, even to the extent of prostituting themselves, as horrible a choice as I think that is.

But I don't follow the connection between either of those two precepts and the idea that there is a property right to equality of property. To me, property rights and enforce equality of property are in direct opposition. Nobody protects property rights by redistributing everything equally. They protect property rights by ensuring that whoever has possession, especially whoever improved what was in his possession, and whoever got property via voluntary trades, should get to keep the property he's accumulated.

We've found that it works better that way overall. Some people will have more than an average share and some less, but there will be more to go around in the aggregate, and over time there is an inexorable trend toward even the ones with the smallest share having more than the poorest members of the generation before them had. If you divvy everything up equally, some people get more for a while, but it can't last. Everybody starts starving.

Grim said...

But I don't follow the connection between either of those two precepts and the idea that there is a property right to equality of property.

There's no such connection. In a system purely based on property rights, that would never come up. The problem comes when you try to mix it with democracy, because democracy is based on equality of rights. But if rights are fundamentally about property -- "I own myself, so nobody else can tell me what to do with myself" -- then an inequality of property means an inequality of rights. That's why it keeps running up against democratic institutions -- even if you demand multiple supermajorities, as with the Amendment process.

Insofar as you are ready to endorse property rights over democracy, you don't have a problem. And if you were prepared to endorse equality of rights over property, you wouldn't have a problem. The problem -- the contradiction -- comes in dealing with the two as equal constitutents of a state. It doesn't matter if property is increasing in the aggregate. If one of our fundamental values is equal rights, and rights are fundamentally a species of property right, inequality of property is a problem.

E Hines said...

...if they have less property than X they have fewer rights than X.

There's another aspect of this--what is the source of a man's rights? If those rights come from God, if via those rights, we're equal before God, then.... Moreover, if the social compact a collection of men (voluntarily) form is structured so as to assert, and to guarantee, equality before the compact's laws, then....

Those "thens" lead to this about those who have less property than X: they do not have fewer rights than X, they merely have less property. Their own right to their own (Adams-ian) Happiness--to keep trying and to accumulate more of their own--remains intact.

Moreover, if men are equal before God and under law, then those who have less property than X, of necessity, have no claim on X's property in recompense of their lesser condition.

However, even with a completely unfettered free market, wherein everyone without exception plays by the rules and no one cheats (the ideal case), there will likely, ultimately, obtain a condition where the unequal distribution of outcomes becomes so extreme that the system breaks down (ignoring the mechanics of any specific failure). Our Judeo-Christian heritage supplies this deficiency, though: we are each enjoined as individuals to help those less fortunate than us. Those who are so far behind that their survival is at stake do have a claim on a measure of our resources.

Both the Bible and the Talmud have examples of this injunction, but it's important to note that those examples indicate that X's obligation to those less fortunate is only to a subsistence level of aid--enough that they can survive to keep trying on their own.

I claim that it's a measure of the success of individual liberty, individual obligation, and the free market that falls out of them that the market has generated sufficient prosperity for the polity as a whole that the Xs in it can do better than subsistence level help--and so we do do better. The problem here then becomes a perception that the obligation exists to do better--to the point of an obligation to provide equal outcomes.

This is where the argument in today's US begins, I think.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

"an inequality of property means an inequality of rights" -- how do you figure? The only right that's outraged is an non-existent right to have the same amount of property.

It runs up against democratic institutions because a majority of Americans can be persuaded they'll be better off if they're allowed to take other people's stuff instead of having to trade for it.

I'm still not seeing the inherent conflict between democracy and property right. I live in a democracy that traditionally voted to support property rights. That support has been eroding, which I think will lead to avoidable poverty in the aggregate. That result is not inconsistent with democracy, but it is unfortunate. The way to avoid it, as far as I can see, is to persuade people it's in their best interests to stop voting to erode property rights, by showing them the economic collapse that results.

I endorse a kind of equality of rights, but not apparently the same kind you mean. My idea of equality of rights is completely consistent with property rights, and can function quite well together as constituents of a state without privileging one over the other.

I'm not sure what you mean by calling rights fundamentally a species of property right. Some rights have to do with property, while others do not. You can "have" a right, but that's not what I mean by property when I speak of property rights.

Grim said...

Mr. Hines:

You aren't in the same position as the libertarian. An appeal to God as the originator of rights means an acceptance of God as the originator of duties -- which means that you accept, as the libertarian does not, that you cannot dispose of your body however you wish. It isn't really your property, as it turns out. You can't commit suicide, because that is to destroy God's work; you can't prostitute yourself, because that is to blaspheme the dignity of God's creation.

You don't have the same problem, but it's because there is a different set of things you're ready to put beyond the reach of democracy. Instead of property rights, it's God as the ultimate root of a just society. Now that I agree with, but it is not at all clear it is supportable under the 1st Amendment.

Tex:

A democracy can support property rights for a time. The conflict takes a while to manifest.

The real issue is -- as I said to Mr. Hines -- that the libertarian philosophy takes property rights as its model for all rights. Why do you have a right to engage in prostitution? Because you own your body, and no one else owns it, and therefore no one else has a right to tell you what to do with it -- at least, as long as you aren't using it to hurt someone else. Why do you have a right to free speech? Because you own your mind and your body, and you therefore have the right to think what you think and to use your tongue to say what you have to say. No one else has a right to interfere.

This is a particular fact about your tradition. I don't reduce all rights to property rights: but libertarianism does. The reason it defends the particular rights it does, and the arguments that it uses to support its defenses, ultimately come down to property rights over the body. These extend to other kinds of property, but the body as yours is the model. You have a right to self defense why? Because you have a right to defend your body, that is your property, against harm by others. You have a right not to have soldiers quartered in your home why? Because it is your home, and nobody ought to be telling you that you have to take on guests you don't want.

It's a particular problem with the way the model you have taken up was formulated by your predecessors. If you want to persuade people to adopt that model, you'll have to think through the conflicts it generates. If all rights are ultimately a species of property right, then unequal property means unequal rights.

Texan99 said...

I don't reduce all rights to property rights, either. If it's true that libertarianism does, then I must not be an orthodox libertarian. They may have to drum me out. I don't see the point as essential to anything about libertarianism that's important to me.

My support for property rights doesn't have that much to do with my abstract beliefs about the nature or justification or source of other kinds of rights. It's a practical thing. Assuming it's a good idea for people to be prosperous, I think property rights are the way for a society to get there. (If prosperity isn't that important, then there's no need to worry about the plight of poor people, or indeed anything else about whether the economy works well.)

I don't worry much about the source or even the exact nature of rights. As a practical matter, I think it's a bad habit for governments to get into, to think they "extend" the rights to their citizens. Governments behave better if they think of the rights as inherent in the citizens, and if they think the purpose of the government is to secure the rights. Otherwise, where my rights come from is my business. All other people have to worry about is whether I'll fight for them.

E Hines said...

Governments behave better if they think of the rights as inherent in the citizens, and if they think the purpose of the government is to secure the rights.

But without acknowledging that rights originate somewhere other than government, government has no reason not to assert that rights originate in it.

As to what I can do with my property after an appeal to God as the source of my rights, that's pretty much up to me. There are a couple of contaminants here, one of which we've been over a few years ago, and that's what we know vs what we think we know--including what we think we know about God, and by extension what we think we know about our rights from God. I won't pursue that here.

The other is the matter of the free will that God has imbued in us (eliding what we think we know, again). That free will gives me, not just the ability, but the right, to do as I will with my property--including my body. God might disapprove, and he might attach sanctions to behaviors we engage in that he disapproves, but that's a clash of rights.

But I never represented myself as a libertarian. I've just been arguing that unequal amounts of property do not equate to unequal amounts of rights. Neither an appeal to God nor an appeal to a more nebulous libertarian bent (not the monolith you seem to be ascribing) suggests otherwise.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

Both:

If the libertarians seem nebulous, it is because they have not been careful. They have not as you have not been, Tex. They have not always considered carefully just what rights are, or how they are founded, or what justifies them.

But if you look at the kind of justifications they give, you will see that I am right. Each of them can be described in terms of ownership: of what is mine, and what is not yours, and what I therefore have exclusive right to judge.

It would be well to reconsider these questions. Exactly what rights are, and how they are grounded, is a matter of the first importance. There's a strong set of traditions to consider, which inform the debate mostly below the surface, but in powerful ways. The left is taking its view from Rousseau, who argues that rights arise from natural capacities -- that justice in society comes from making sure that people have the right kind of upbringing and circumstances, so that these capacities are maximized.

There is the libertarian tradition, which stands on ownership of self foremost. And there is the conservative tradition, which believes that God is the author, and grants rights and commands duties.

And then there is another tradition, still, which I have argued and which I am told includes Nietzsche as well. This tradition argues that rights are a product of war: that they are what we have won, and what we will defend. Tex is on my ground here when she says, "All other people have to worry about is whether I'll fight for them."

I am convinced of the one, though I don't discount God: but if God intended us to have rights, he put the sword that secures them in our hands. But this is not a matter that can be shrugged to one side. You will find that everything follows from it -- the Left and the Right aren't disagreeing about some little matter, some compromise, but about these fundamental questions. There is no hope of compromise in part because we are separated at the first principles.

douglas said...

"If all rights are ultimately a species of property right, then unequal property means unequal rights."

I have to agree with Eric and Tex on this one Grim. I don't see how rights have a volumetric metric- that is, if you have property rights, and I have property rights under the same law applied equally, how does volume of property extend the right? It's like saying someone who's had to defend their life has more rights via the right to self defense than someone who's not had to. Or someone who has lived longer has more right to life than someone who hasn't. In fact, if you put that one to most people, they'd think if there was a difference, it would be in the reverse.

Rights may have defined ranges, but only in two axes. The third is infinte in capacity and may be variable in application and use, but how does that make it different?

E Hines said...

This tradition argues that rights are a product of war: that they are what we have won, and what we will defend.

And I have to agree with Douglas. To add to his argument, this tradition justifies wars of naked aggression--what some have termed unjust wars--and more generally, the idea that might makes right. Against which is one of the fundamental reasons men form social compacts.

If might makes right--if my rights flow from my greater success at warring on you than yours on me--how are there any rights at all?

What Tex is arguing--not to put words in her mouth--is that her rights are worth fighting for. But losing that fight does not deprive her of those rights, it only deprives her of her ability to act under those rights.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

I agree with a patchwork of the alternatives that Grim laid out. In commanding my own conduct, I loosely apply the concept of rights to other people in a God-given sense: God tells me there are things I must and must not do in my relations with them. Nothing they say, nothing I can dream up, and nothing a government (or any other armed person) can say will change that. Luckily, God's commands give me lots of leeway for ordinary friendly interaction, so I have no trouble applying my judgment and obeying most pragmatic laws for how people should get along in daily life.

As between myself and God, I don't apply any concept of rights at all. I have none, only a duty of obedience and devotion -- like my relationship with my husband but a million times more so. At least with my husband, because we are fallen people, we have to be careful to draw little lines and say "This is your right, and this is mine." The sooner we can give those up and deal in terms of love instead of defense, the better. I don't expect to find them in Heaven. Christ never talked about rights.

But as between myself and my government, which is a social construct made up of fallen men who mostly don't behave well if given too much power, I find the concept of rights very useful. There I'm not primarily concerned with whether the government is acting morally. I want it to function adequately, and I'm convinced governments function best when they limit themselves. That limitation is what I call the rights of the citizens. As a practical matter, they won't last long unless people fight for them. Most "rights," in that context, are my shorthand for "stuff that it's best if government butts out of." They're almost never absolute, because they generally can run up against someone else's rights, and it's not always easy even for someone as dogmatic and arrogant as myself to say where that boundary is.

I think I've often said I'm conservative personally but libertarian politically, and this is why.

Grim said...

Douglas:

[I]f you have property rights, and I have property rights under the same law applied equally, how does volume of property extend the right?

I have a number of rights as a property owner that a non-owner doesn't have: for example, because I own a certain amount of land, I have the right to shoot on it. You have no right to shoot if you don't; you must go to a range, or somewhere else where someone else has a right, and buy from them the use of their right. But if you haven't enough wealth (which is also property) to buy that right, you can't shoot at all.

Do you feel the need to protect yourself from criminals? If you own a building, so that it is your home, Heller recognizes your right to do so there -- but nowhere else. But if you own a large building, as a corporation might, you can obtain permits for private, armed security. That gives you a greater right to protection, in practical terms, than people who own no property.

I told MikeD that rights and duties go together, but property rights sometimes allow you to avoid duties. The classic example is the fee you could pay to avoid military service, either directly or by hiring someone to take your place. Currently you can buy yourself better conditions in some California jails for a fee: even as a criminal, then, you have the right to better treatment because you paid for it.

And what about the Republican or Democratic National Conventions, which set up 'free speech zones' that are the only place protests are allowed? They're able to do this because they have bought a temporary property claim from a given city, in return for an agreement from the city to use their police to enforce that claim. Even if the convention hall is in some sense a "public accommodation," it still has the right to remove trespassers -- and so does the city, which owns the otherwise-public land where your ordinary 'public' rights would be exercised.

Property ends up being very important to controlling these rights, then. Do you have a right to free expression of your religion? Not at work! There, your employers have a right to constrain it because they own the building (and have to worry about civil lawsuits -- that is, challenges to their property -- from others who feel impinged upon). So that's free speech, free expression of religion, and gun rights, all of which turn out to have a strong property component. These considerations apply even to criminals.

Now, I think that all of the above that I have just described is in at least some degree wrong. But this is because I have a different view of rights. The courts have been persuaded by all of this, at one time or another.

Grim said...

Mr. Hines:

Against which is one of the fundamental reasons men form social compacts.

Indeed, that's the root I'm talking about. You want to have a social compact to ensure that wicked men won't do X to you? Good. You form it, and you enforce it against the men who might do X with arms.

What happens when someone within the compact gains power over it, and starts doing X against the rules? One of two things: either you remove him from power by some means, in which case you have again defended the right; or you don't, in which case you lose the right in a practical way.

You'd like to say that you continue to have the right even though it is being violated. Perhaps you do -- perhaps God is on your side. But if you are ever to restore the right, it will have to be by forcing others to abide by it after all.

I wrote a short piece on the subject here; and I've written about it at much greater length, if you like to read a longer document I'd have to email.

Grim said...

Tex:

As between myself and God, I don't apply any concept of rights at all. I have none, only a duty of obedience and devotion -- like my relationship with my husband...

You must be an excellent wife.

I'm not trying to convince you of anything, at this point. I just want to help you think this through, because you said you wanted to practice persuasion. (Rhetoric is an authentic part of philosophy -- Aristotle wrote a book on that, too).

One of the things you'll need to do is what you are now beginning to do, which is to work out just what you mean by "rights" -- where they come from, and what kind of thing they are. It could be OK to have a patchwork view, but you might want to find a way of specifying which sort of right you're talking about, because otherwise the people you want to persuade will be confused. You may even confuse yourself at times by using the same word to mean two or three different kinds of things.

The other thing you'll want to do is to understand clearly how your opponents view the same issues. Insofar as you are talking to someone with a view of Rousseau's kind, a violation of rights is very serious because it deprives that person of something they need to become a moral person. This is why the Left often talks about criminals as if they were victims: because they were deprived of their right to decent housing and education as a child, of course their character was distorted. "Rights" here are things that a human being needs to achieve moral perfection, and if they are denied then their immorality is really on the heads of whoever denied them these rights.

Thus a right to at least basic health care, housing, food, clothing, education, and several other things are assumed to be real rights. To be persuasive, you'll either need to convince them to abandon their view, or to give an account of your ideas that uses their view. The first is quite hard, since most of them don't really understand why they hold it -- they inherited it as an assumption from teachers or parents or their social institutions, and thus cannot explain where it comes from or how they know it is right. For the same reason, they can't evaluate an attack on the principle: they just know that important people in their lives held it dear.

The second is easier as a practical matter, but ends up conceding the point of what rights are to your opponents. That may be too high a price to pay, especially here where it really does inform what kind of a society we ought to have, and what kinds of things a government ought to do.

Texan99 said...

The wealth-creating advantages of the free market certainly depend in large degree on making property ownership pleasant for the owners. There's no absolute standard, however, for how pleasant it has to be. We can fiddle around with how many extra rights property gives a citizen and not mess up our economy or our prosperity too much. So, for instance, there's nothing about the free market that requires us to say that people are entitled to buy themselves better treatment in prison, or that you can have sex with anyone you find on your own property, or that your vote is proportionate to your holdings.

But arbitrary confiscation leaves the property owner with nothing to motivate him. So there is something about the wealth-creating mechanics of the free market that requires us not to do too much arbitrary confiscation, unless we find another way to motivate humans to contribute to the collective wealth. Or at least, if we insist on too much confiscation, then we have to learn to live with increasing poverty. If the point of the confiscation was to alleviate poverty, it was self-defeating.

Grim said...

...or that you can have sex with anyone you find on your own property...

Well, an important component of the libertarian view is that this would be a violation of property rights -- because everyone owns their body. Thus, even if you are trespassing, you still have an absolute right not to be raped that resides in the fact that your own body is a piece of property of yours.

Now, that view gives rise to some interesting questions. First, is that the correct way to root the claim (which I assume we all take to be true) that a person has an absolute right not to be raped? What consequences follow from taking that view?

Second, do we view the body as an inalienable piece of property or not? For example, can you morally sell yourself into slavery in exchange for other property considerations?

Texan99 said...

Grim, the kind of arguments I try out on you aren't the ones I'd use on someone who believes he has a right to "basic health care, housing, food, clothing, education, and several other things." In experience, such a person probably can't be reached by any argument I can make, unless I can make him see what duties those rights create in other people, and to think about whether he really feels he has those duties, or ever acts on them. If he thinks he has a right to receive them, but no duty to provide them, we probably can't communicate civilly for long.

My views of rights haven't changed that much over the last thirty years or so. I know very well that there is little agreement in our culture over what "rights" mean. I normally try to avoid talking about them at all, except in a very practical legal sense, because it only leads to highly abstract arguments of the sort I find almost completely useless. Someone else will have to be the spokesman for that kind of approach.

I'm pragmatic. In a discussion that presumes a duty to ensure some level of material prosperity for everyone, I tend to talk about how prosperity is created and how it is undermined.

If I achieved nothing in my life but to persuade a few people that there's no important difference between theft and the forcible use of other people's money for "charity," and that it's not charity if you don't sacrifice your own resources, I'd feel I'd done some good. There are way too many people supporting a welfare state because they think that to do otherwise is inconsistent with a clear conscience. I'd like them to conclude the opposite. I think they are like doctors mistakenly dispensing poison.

I'm not sure, but it seems to me that I encounter more people these days who see it my way. Maybe that's just a function of the Internet's bringing me into contact with them, but I see it even in comment threads on mainstream articles that draw a philosophically and educationally mixed crowd. The arguments must be percolating through society somehow. This crazy new notion of letting people organize their voluntary material interactions according to what suits them instead of according to what the king and cardinal think is best is still kind of in its infancy. People are still sorting out their ideas about whether it's in conflict with their morals. They're getting tremendously confused by envy, especially when envy takes the form of a conviction of a right to have as much as anyone else.

Grim said...

That last question is tricky, because if I can't sell something, to what degree am I really its ultimate owner? That's actually quite a limitation on ownership.

Grim said...

Tex:

I understand not wanting to waste your time arguing with people who won't listen! Still, it's worth thinking through, because there's a kind of reverse property right at work in the Left's claim.

You want to persuade these people in the middle that taking someone's property is a kind of theft. But the Left wants to persuade these same people that the theft is coming from the other side: that everyone has a right to a certain amount of material goods (i.e., to property: housing, shelter, food, education, etc), and that the people who are stealing are the ones who are keeping more than they need while others do without.

So even if you can never persuade someone who is hard on the Left, it's a good idea to understand the structure of their argument in order to argue to the middle. You might otherwise sound to the person in the middle as if you are conceding something crucial, something along the lines of "It may be that a right to property arises from a person's needs rather than from traditional ownership, but ownership still works out better."

In that case, you're on purely pragmatic grounds: we accept that it might be wrong, but it works. One reason people in the middle are swayed left is that they don't concede the moral argument about where a right to material goods comes from.

Texan99 said...

"First, is that the correct way to root the claim (which I assume we all take to be true) that a person has an absolute right not to be raped?"

See, that's exactly how I decline to think or talk about rights, especially property rights. I observe that people have to have some kind of privileges with respect to their property, or they don't interact with their property in such a way as to create prosperity. It has very little to do with what I think people are entitled to demand of others in the way of treatment, e.g., not being raped or killed.

There are lots of limits on privileges appurtenant to property ownership that work just fine. We can even get away with prohibiting the sale of some kinds of property without completely screwing up the necessary motivations. We just can't go too far. While I find it hard to define where "too far" is in all circumstances, I'm quite certain that a relentless push to equalize all property ownership goes too far. It strikes at the heart of what motivates people to create wealth, which means that inevitably people won't create as much wealth.

And it's not so much that people won't listen to some of the arguments I'm best suited to make, as that I don't know of any way to make them attractive or sensible to someone who's not grown up enough yet to realize that the proper model for his relationship to society is not that of a needy infant to its endlessly generous mother. That's got to be a task for someone else. I start with people who have a rather strong sense of duty, especially to the poor and needy, but who are trying to fulfill their duty in a way I find counterproductive.

It's possible that leftists who believe property is theft can be brought around by an argument that property ownership creates valuable motives in property owners that we want to encourage, even at the cost of what they see as an invidious distinction between the owner and the non-owner. That's assuming the leftists aren't simply expressing a personal grievance that other people aren't giving them enough -- if the latter, we probably can't talk with each other much. In my experience, people who think property is theft hold that view only about other people's property. Try to glom onto their property, and you'll hear some squawking.

"It may be that a right to property arises from a person's needs rather than from traditional ownership, but ownership still works out better." I can't imagine thinking such a thing. Did I say something that sounded like that to you?

I suspect that you and I don't agree at all on where a right to material goods comes from. I know where my duty not to take other people's materials goods from them by force comes from. I'm far less clear about a fundamental right to acquire materials goods in the first place. Let's say I find myself in a chaotic society where we're starting from scratch and proving new land. I provisionally assume I should back off of property that someone else has worked hard to improve. I expect to be able to reach compacts with people where we don't do that to each other, and we band together to prevent other people from doing it. These are more practical than fundamental rights.

Fundamental rights, for me, come from duties like loving one's neighbor, not bearing false witness, etc., and include what I take to be God's approach to respecting the dignity of other people's autonomy. For whatever reason, He appears to have opted for creatures who will be like sons rather than like slaves, animals, or stones. I take that as a model for how I'm supposed to treat other people: respect their free will and their responsibility for their own decisions. It generally follows that I avoid killing or maiming them.

Grim said...

"I can't imagine thinking such a thing. Did I say something that sounded like that to you?"

No, but you said something that sounded to me like it might sound like that to the sort of person you're thinking of trying to persuade. To whit: " In a discussion that presumes a duty to ensure some level of material prosperity for everyone, I tend to talk about how prosperity is created and how it is undermined."

That sounds to me like it could be taken as a concession of the moral argument that such a duty does exist, so that you were merely arguing about the best means to that end.

" suspect that you and I don't agree at all on where a right to material goods comes from. I know where my duty not to take other people's materials goods from them by force comes from. I'm far less clear about a fundamental right to acquire materials goods in the first place. Let's say I find myself in a chaotic society where we're starting from scratch and proving new land. I provisionally assume I should back off of property that someone else has worked hard to improve. I expect to be able to reach compacts with people where we don't do that to each other, and we band together to prevent other people from doing it. These are more practical than fundamental rights."

This is good! It is very much in line with the modern Western tradition, which assumes that property rights are pre-political in just this way. Thus, the purpose of the state (or whatever other social compact you enter) is precisely to protect property arrangements. That's more or less just what Locke and Hegel both think about it.

So in that tradition, you have a right and not merely a privilege to have your property claims respected by the state, because the state owes its existence to an arrangement built on protecting those rights. The rights pre-exist the state, and since they are a major reason that the creation of a state is agreed-to, they have priority over the state's claims.

That's a very defensible position. I don't actually agree with it. :) But it's quite respectable and well formed.

I find your religious arguments more persuasive, but again I must say to you as I did to Mr. Hines: I think that's right, but I don't think it is compatible with the strong anti-establishment reading of the 1A. That can't be a rooting of rights in our political society, because we are required to think of these religious doctrines as optional for other people. Increasingly I believe that was a core mistake of the Founding.

E Hines said...

...because I own a certain amount of land, I have the right to shoot on it. You have no right to shoot if you don't; you must go to a range.... And so on.

It appears you're conflating natural rights with civil rights created by government, either de novo or in an attempt to implement a natural right. I've been arguing source of our fundamental rights--natural rights. And of course rights--civil or natural--must be defended; no one is suggesting otherwise.

To be persuasive, you'll either need to convince them to abandon their view, or to give an account of your ideas that uses their view. ...
The second is easier as a practical matter, but ends up conceding the point of what rights are to your opponents.


Not at all, on the concession. The second also might be quite hard, though. The case is that these beneficial things are natural outcomes of that free market as informed by our Judeo-Christian obligations toward the least among us that I mentioned above. Especially, they're part of that we can do better than subsistence bit, with the attendant danger of blindly doing better. I've been arguing this for years, but my communication skills seem not as great as some....

Grim said...

...t appears you're conflating natural rights with civil rights...

I've heard this complaint before, but I don't buy it. In a very real sense rights are created by the defense of them. Nature will defend only one right for you: the right to die. That is one thing no one can take from you, by nature.

All other rights require a different defender. We can reason to what rights we ought to have by nature -- although be warned that this is Rousseau's project too -- but that "ought" does not create a right. It's just an "ought," in the sense of, "No one ought to be poor or hungry." What creates the right is the defense of it.

Now I take these rights not to be civil rights either -- they are pre-political, in just the sense I was telling Tex that property rights are taken to be. They have priority over the state, and the state has no legitimacy if it abandons the rights that were agreed-to as a condition of its formation. That is when revolution is morally justified.

E Hines said...

...I don't think it is compatible with the strong anti-establishment reading of the 1A. That can't be a rooting of rights in our political society....

This seems a misreading of the 1st Amendment: it misses the second clause of that--that the government cannot interfere with a man's exercise (by extension, his lack of exercise) of religion. Government must butt out of the matter nearly altogether; it's a matter solely for the compact's members individually (or their own subgroupings within the compact).

Thus, there is no conflict: we can think what we like; it's government that is required to ignore (and so to accept the optionality of) religious doctrine and religion generally.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

Yes, but it is to the government that you appeal to enforce your rights in a case of conflict. Thus, the rights are not just optional for us or our opponents in society to accept or reject; they cannot be enforced by civil institutions. You cannot root a right in an unenforcable notion, for if it is a right then you have a claim to it that will be enforced.

Texan99 said...

"In a discussion that presumes a duty to ensure some level of material prosperity for everyone, I tend to talk about how prosperity is created and how it is undermined. . . .That sounds to me like it could be taken as a concession of the moral argument that such a duty does exist, so that you were merely arguing about the best means to that end."

Well, not quite, though I did talk about a personal duty to help the needy and helpless (not quite the same an ensuring material prosperity to everyone). I have never doubted my own duty to help some people out of my own resources, and I assume that many people I'm talking to will acknowledge the same duty i themselves. As far as I can tell, that's one of the most common motives for the welfare state.

"I don't think [T99's religious argument] is compatible with the strong anti-establishment reading of the 1A. That can't be a rooting of rights in our political society, because we are required to think of these religious doctrines as optional for other people. Increasingly I believe that was a core mistake of the Founding."

I'm afraid that most specific religious doctrines were intended to be optional for other people. The Founding Fathers were tired of seeing sects persecuted. It didn't occur to them that the majority sect would become a nihilist one espousing moral relativism on all subjects except egalitarianism, tolerance, and Gaia.

But while I agree that no society can function without finding some core ground of moral agreement, and while I agree that it's harder than most people seem to imagine to eliminate moral judgments from their political views, I require surprisingly small agreement in order to get along with someone on the subject of the free market. (Adam Smith noticed the same thing.) Quite often it turns out our most basic moral precepts line up well, and what we're arguing is about how they translate into specific practical dilemmas like property rights, theft, charity, and welfare.