David Boaz

Communitarian "guru" Amitai Etzioni debated Roger Pilon at Cato two weeks ago. Also me, 18 years ago. And last week he had two postings at the Encyclopedia Britannica blog. I offer some thoughts on individualism, communitarianism, and implausible misrepresentations of libertarianism at the Britannica today.

When I hear communitarians like Etzioni describe the libertarian view of individualism, I wonder if they’ve ever read any libertarian writing other than a Classic Comics edition of Ayn Rand.... There’s no conflict between individualism and community. There’s a conflict between voluntary association and coerced association. And communitarians dance around that conflict.

Do you believe that "The libertarian perspective, put succinctly, begins with the assumption that individual agents are fully formed and their value preferences are in place prior to and outside of any society"? Of course not. Who would? Read the Britannica column to find out who says you do.

Three stories in today's Washington Post help us to understand why governments around the world are facing unmanageable deficits. On the front page:

When Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took power seven years ago, he and his Socialist Workers’ Party set out to perfect the welfare state in Spain. The goal was to equal— or even surpass — lavish social protections that have long been the rule for Spain’s Western European neighbors. True to his Socialist principles and riding an economic boom, Zapatero raised the minimum wage and extended health insurance to cover everything from sniffles to sex changes. He made scholarships available to all. Young adults got rent subsidies called “emancipation” money. Mothers got $3,500 for the birth of a child, toddlers attended free nurseries and the elderly got stipends for nursing care.

On page 3, a story about federal pensions, which still offer federal employees

a benefit lost long ago by many workers at private companies — a guaranteed retirement check paid largely by the boss. These traditional pensions, called defined-benefit plans, have long been an attractive feature of government work.

On the op-ed page, George Will notes that in 1975 then-governor Jerry Brown said that his plan was

To stand up to the special pleaders who are encamped, I should say, encircling the state capitol, and to see through their particular factional claims to the broad public interest.

Three years later, "Brown conferred on government employees the right to unionize and bargain collectively." Now, from prison guards to teachers, the public employee unions press for unaffordable spending and block efforts at reform. And again-governor Jerry Brown would rather raise taxes than stand up to the unions that helped elect him. As has been noted many times, politicians spend all the money that comes in when times are good. They don't put anything aside for the possibility of lean years. And they make commitments, like pensions and collective bargaining agreements, that will prove to be fiscal time bombs, exploding long after the next election. It looks like the long run is here.

The Gallup Poll reports today, "For the first time in Gallup's tracking of the issue, a majority of Americans (53%) believe same-sex marriage should be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages." Here's the history of Gallup's polling on the issue:

Gallup notes that the shift results from a substantial increase in support among Democrats and independents in the past year, but support among Republicans didn't budge from 28 percent. The most striking number, though, is that support among young people 18-34 soared from 54 to 70 percent, mostly reflecting a shift among men, who are now almost as supportive as women. The new poll comes just two days after Cato's forum, "The Case for Marriage Equality: Perry v. Schwarzenegger," featuring the prominent lawyers David Boies and Theodore Olson, who represent the plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to strike down California's Proposition 8. Find video of the event here. The event also featured Robert A. Levy of the Cato Institute and John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, co-chairs of the advisory board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, sponsor of the lawsuit. Read their Washington Post op-ed on the case.

The Washington Post just did a major poll of Virginians and tantalizingly included this note in writing up the results:

In contrast to four years ago, about as many Virginians consider themselves to be liberal on social matters as call themselves conservative. Fiscal conservatism is on the rise, but on these social issues, it’s liberalism that’s ticked higher.

But those questions were not included in the published data. Thanks to the generosity of Post polling director Jon Cohen, I can report that the percentage of Virginians who said they were socially liberal or moderate and fiscally conservative went from 16 in 2007 to 23 in the latest poll. This reflects a small increase in the number of social liberals and a larger increase in the number of fiscal conservatives. And here are the tables on those questions: We've written about fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters before, notably here and here, and in relation to Virginia and in the Republican party. Apparently when you ask people, “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?”, you get a higher percentage than when you ask the questions separately, as the Post did. When the Zogby Poll asked that question to actual voters in 2006, fully 59 percent said yes. Broader background on the "libertarian vote" here.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the documentary "Stonewall Uprising" and the line from a police official that caught my attention:

“This time they said, ‘We’re not going.’”

That’s how Seymour Pine of the New York Police Department’s Morals Division described the raid he led on the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969, and the unprecedented refusal of the gay men in the bar to hang their heads in shame and go silently into the paddy wagons. The “Stonewall riots” that resulted are generally regarded as the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States. Last night on PBS's "American Experience," I saw another excellent documentary, "Freedom Riders," about the white and black civil rights activists who boarded Greyhound and Trailways buses in May 1961 to travel through the Deep South, sitting together and dining together during stops. For someone too young to remember the Freedom Rides, it was a shocking and eye-opening film. Watching the violence directed at these "outside agitators" -- a bus firebombed, people beaten, a mob threatening to burn a packed church -- as police and elected officials stood by and let it happen, brings home the plight of black Americans before the civil rights revolution. And may also shed some light on the question of whether America is more or less free than it used to be. At the Stonewall Inn, gays were ordered into paddy wagons, and “This time they said, ‘We’re not going.’” Without planning to, they started a social revolution. The Freedom Riders planned carefully. They took training in nonviolence. When the first Riders encountered violence throughout Alabama, other young people decided, in the words of Diane Nash, who had been a student at Fisk University, "It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence." So she and other young Nashvillians decided to get on buses and continue the effort. John Seigenthaler, a Nashvillian who was working for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, called Nash and said, in effect, Don't go to Alabama. It's too dangerous. People will get killed. And Nash responded that the students had all made out their wills, knew what they were facing, and were getting on the buses in the morning. Eventually federal marshals got the Freedom Riders out of Alabama and into Mississippi, where they were arrested and sent to the notorious Parchman Farm penitentiary to do hard labor on a chain gang. And then yet more Riders, from all over the country, got on buses and headed to Jackson, Mississippi. It's an incredible story of courage and conflict, one that demonstrates the value of nonviolent resistance in dramatizing moral issues. And although they didn't quite use this phrase, I kept thinking that, in spite of cautionary advice from their parents and from the Kennedy administration, This time they said, "We're going."

Recently I criticized Sen. Jim DeMint for saying, "It’s impossible to be a fiscal conservative unless you’re a social conservative," and I noted that former governor Mike Huckabee had made similar points. Yesterday on "Fox News Sunday" Huckabee said, "all social conservatives I know are also fiscal conservatives. Not necessarily the other way around." Well, I can tell you one social conservative who isn't a fiscal conservative -- former governor Mike Huckabee. Here's what Cato's "Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors" reported in 2006, at the end of Huckabee's tenure as governor of Arkansas:

Final-Term Grade, F; Final Overall Grade, D Thanks to a final term grade of F, Huckabee earns an overall grade of D for his entire governorship. Like many Republicans, his grades dropped the longer he stayed in office. In his first few years, he fought hard for a sweeping $70 million tax cut package that was the first broad-based tax cut in the state in more than 20 years. He even signed a bill to cut the state’s 6 percent capital gains tax—a significant pro-growth accomplishment. But nine days after being reelected in 2002, he proposed a sales tax increase to cover a budget deficit caused partly by large spending increases that he proposed and approved, including an expansion in Medicare eligibility that Huckabee made a centerpiece of his 1997 agenda. He agreed to a 3 percent income tax “surcharge” and a 25-cent cigarette tax increase. In response to a court order to increase spending on education, Huckabee proposed another sales tax increase. Huckabee wants to run for the GOP presidential nomination next year. He’s already been hailed as a viable big-government conservative candidate by some. That seems about right: Huckabee’s leadership has left taxpayers in Arkansas much worse off.

We often criticize a focus on government waste here at Cato. We point out that the real spending problem is the big-ticket programs, not "waste, fraud, and abuse." But a series of recent stories in the Washington Post, several of them in Sunday's paper, led me to write about government waste in today's Britannica column. I followed up on my previous post about the scandal of the Alaska Native Corporation (SBA 8(a)) preference program:

Not much, even though it was hardly the first time that the problems with the Alaska Native Corporations program had been noted. There was a Senate hearing, with the reassuring title of “Promise Fulfilled: The Role of the SBA 8(a) Program in Enhancing Economic Development in Indian Country,” where “Alaska Natives and a Small Business Administration official defended federal contracting preferences for Indian and Native firms.” No critics were invited to the hearing. After all, “The purpose of the hearing is to allow the SBA, ANCS, NHOs, Indian tribes, shareholders and other stakeholders the opportunity to demonstrate the importance and legitimacy of the program to Native communities in fulfilling self-determination and self-sufficiency,” as 49-year senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Alaska’s own Sen. Mark Begich wrote in a letter to whippersnapper senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI), who has served in Congress for only 34 of his 86 years and chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

And I noted:

And for those who like big government, I have to say: This is the business you have chosen. If you want the federal government to tax (and borrow) and transfer $3.6 trillion a year, if you want it to build housing for the poor and give special benefits to Alaska Natives, if you want it to supply Americans with health care and school lunches and retirement security and local bike paths, then you have to accept that such programs come with incentive problems, politicization, corruption, and waste. Maybe it’s worth the cost.

More details here.

This article about donors who want to give colleges money with strings attached, published in Bloomberg Markets and splashed across a full page of the Sunday Washington Post, leads with the story of former BB&T chairman John Allison's campaign to get the books and ideas of Ayn Rand into college classrooms and is lavishly decorated with big photographs of Rand. Most of the story is actually about much less titillating demands -- donors who variously want a say in hiring the next football coach, a change in the school's tuition policy, a rejection of money from other donors. But apparently editors know that Ayn Rand's name can bring in the readers. So they act in their rational self-interest and put her name on the cover and her picture at the top of the page. At least the Post had the good sense to drop the dumb last line of the Bloomberg story: "As private donors gain more power on campuses, it’s just the kind of shift away from state control that Rand would applaud." Actually, giving private money to state institutions is not the sort of privatization that libertarians seek. (And Ayn Rand was a libertarian, whether she liked to admit it or not.)

The Washington Post splashes a story about "anarchists" in Greece across the front page today. The print headline is "Into the arms of anarchy," and a photo-essay online is titled "In Greece, austerity kindles the flames of anarchy." And what do these anarchists demand? Well, reporter Anthony Faiola doesn't find out much about what they're for, but they seem to be against, you know, what the establishment is doing, man:

The protests are an emblem of social discontent spreading across Europe in response to a new age of austerity. At a time when the United States is just beginning to consider deep spending cuts, countries such as Greece are coping with a fallout that has extended well beyond ordinary civil disobedience. Perhaps most alarming, analysts here say, has been the resurgence of an anarchist movement, one with a long history in Europe. While militants have been disrupting life in Greece for years, authorities say that anger against the government has now given rise to dozens of new “amateur anarchist” groups.

Faiola does acknowledge that the term is used pretty loosely:

The anarchist movement in Europe has a long, storied past, embracing an anti-establishment universe influenced by a broad range of thinkers from French politician and philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Karl Marx to Oscar Wilde.

So that's, let's see, a self-styled anarchist who was anti-state and anti-private property, the father of totalitarianism, and a witty playwright jailed for his homosexuality.

Defined narrowly, the movement includes groups of urban guerillas, radical youths and militant unionists. More broadly, it encompasses everything from punk rock to WikiLeaks.

And what are these various disgruntled groups opposed to?

The rolling back of social safety nets in Europe began more than a year ago, as countries from Britain to France to Greece moved to cut social benefits and slash public payrolls, to address mounting public debt. At least in the short term, the cuts have held back economic growth and job creation, exacerbating the social pain. And Greece is not the only place in which segments of society are pushing back.

So these "anarchists" object that the state might cut back on its income transfers and payrolls. That is, they object to the state reducing its size, scope, and power. Odd anarchists, as George Will told the crowd at the 2010 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty dinner:

It leads to the streets of Athens, where we had what the media described as "anti-government mobs." Anti-government mobs composed almost entirely of government employees going berserk about threats to their entitlements!

Lots of talk in the Post article about anarchists:

“They are taking everything away from us,” [19-year-old law student Nikolas] Ganiaris said. “What will happen when I finish law school? Will I only find a job making copies in a shop? Will I then need to work until I’m 70 before I retire? Will I only get a few hundred euros as pension? What future have I got now?” A radical minority is energizing the anarchist movement, a loose network of anti-establishment groups.... Since then, experts say, the economic crisis has helped the movement thrive, with anarchists positioning themselves as society’s new avengers. Long a den of anarchists, the graffiti-blanketed Exarchia neighborhood is alive anew with dissent. Nihilist youths are patrolling the local park, preventing police from entering and blocking authorities from building a parking lot on the site. On one evening at a local cafe, an anarchist group was broadcasting anti-government messages via a clandestine radio station using a laptop and a few young recruits.

The last vignette in the story is about 20-year-old Nikos Galanos, who has joined the anarchist movement in anger over his mother's losing her government job and his father's being the victim of a 15 percent salary cut in his own government job.

“I don’t support violence for violence’s sake, but violence is a response to the violence the government is committing against society,” Galanos said. He later added, “It is now hard for any of us to see a future here. I feel it’s my duty to fight against the system.”

In fact, the government has been committing violence against society for decades, by taxing people, overregulating business, and spending money it didn't have. No wonder youth unemployment is 35 percent. And what is the actual "system" that Mr. Galanos wants to fight? Greek journalist Takis Michas described it at a Cato Forum:

In Greece, the fundamental principle that has been dictating economic and political development since the creation of the Greek state in the 19th century is political clientelism. This is a system in which political support is provided in exchange for benefits. In this situation, rent-seeking — the attempt by various groups and individuals to influence the location of political benefits — becomes paramount. The origins of political clientelism can be traced back to the origins of the Greek state in the 1830s. As a left-wing political historian puts it, "The fundamental structure of Greece has never been civil society. Ever since the middle of the 19th century, nothing could be done in Greece without its necessarily passing through the machinery of the state."... The largest part of public expenditure was directed, not to public works or infrastructure, but to the wages of public service workers and civil servants.... What makes the case of Greece interesting is that Greece can be said, in a certain sense, to provide the perfect realization of the left's vision of putting people above markets. Greek politicians have always placed people (their clients) above markets, with results we can all see today.

Real anarchists, of either the anarcho-capitalist or mutualist variety,  might have something useful to say to Greeks in their current predicament. But disgruntled young people, lashing out at the end of an unsustainable welfare state, are not anarchists in any serious sense. They're just angry children not ready to deal with reality. But reality has a way of happening whether you're ready to deal with it or not.

The long Hayek Week continues, a full two weeks after Cato's all-star panel on The Constitution of Liberty. The Washington Post today features George Mason University professor Russell Roberts and his Hayek-Keynes rap videos. And by reading the actual print edition of the New York Times Book Review, I discovered that the same issue that included Francis Fukuyama's review of the The Constitution of Liberty last Sunday also included a letter from one David Beffert of Washington, D.C., coincidentally responding to a review of Fukuyama's own new book. Beffert wrote:

I enjoyed Michael Lind’s April 17 review of Francis Fukuyama’s important new book, “The Origins of Political Order.” But even as someone who prefers John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi to F. A. Hayek, I still feel compelled to defend Hayek from Lind’s mischaracterization. While I agree with Fukuyama’s argument that, as Lind puts it, “a strong and capable state has always been a precondition for a flourishing capitalist economy,” Hayek can hardly be accused of trying “to explain society in terms of Homo economicus.” A doctor of law and political science, Hayek afforded the state a central role in his philosophy — specifically, he saw the Rechtsstaat, constitutional government enforcing the rule of law, as a guarantor of liberty and a functioning capitalist order. In that sense he, like Fukuyama, is closer to the 19th-century sociological tradition than to neoclassical economists, who would appear to be Lind’s real target.

Speaking of misconceptions about Hayek, if you Google "soros hayek," the first item that comes up is a page of letters in the Atlantic Monthly taking Soros to task for misunderstanding Hayek -- in 1997. Tadd Wilson argues:

Soros cites Hayek as an advocate of laissez-faire and then goes on to reject laissez-faire economics on the grounds that it is a dogmatic system at once claiming and demanding perfect knowledge and equilibrium. Of course, Hayek's major contribution to economics was his critique of scientific assumptions in equilibrium-based economics. In a nutshell, Hayek argues that the market process relies on contextual, personal knowledge to coordinate the activities of millions of individual participants -- a vaguely Popperian notion. Soros misses Hayek's crucial point.

This is much the same criticism that Bruce Caldwell made of Soros's understanding of Hayek two weeks ago. Considering the many complaints that were raised about Fukuyama's understanding of Hayek, we can only ask: Why can't the Times get someone like, say, David Beffert or Tadd Wilson to review Hayek? By the way, if you Google Hayek, you'll discover that it's a big week for Salma Hayek, too. They're not related, but you can find a slightly dated comparison here.