Jonah Goldberg makes some very good points about human welfare and markets:

I’m no unmitigated fan of Wal-Mart, but it can’t be denied that Wal-Mart—and stores like it—have improved the lives of a lot of low-income families by making life’s necessities, and even its luxuries, affordable. Lightbulbs put a lot of candle makers out of business[*], but lightbulbs also made indoor lighting cheaper, safer, and more widespread. That’s a good trade.

Indeed, the market is the only thing that transforms luxuries into affordable indulgences. A low-end car today has features that the best Mercedes didn’t have a generation ago. Teenagers have phones that are more powerful than the computers that NASA used to put men on the moon. Indeed, even leisure has become democratized.

[…]

One last point. I love the Templeton Foundation and I think they do fantastic work. But questions like “Does the Free Market Erode Moral Character?” bother me a great deal. As opposed to what? Socialism? Socialism certainly erodes moral character. Some of the most alienated, selfish, deracinated people I’ve ever met were people who grew up under the yoke of Communism. Arthur Brooks’s work has definitively shown that large welfare states siphon off philanthropy and erode altruism.

Adam Smith’s case for the free market rested on the fact that it encouraged good character (as Yuval Levinrecently detailed), and I think Smith won that argument a long time ago. A more fruitful question, with deep religious and philosophical implications and precedents, would be “Does wealth erode moral character?” Debating that would still allow for some healthy attacks on the free market, because without free markets, wealth really isn’t something to worry about.

First of all, I know citing Goldberg round these parts will earn me a whole host of angry comments.  How dare I quote the man who wrote Liberal Fascism!?  He’s a fascist!  He’s not very nice!  He strawmans liberals!

I admit, I have a fondness for Goldberg which allows me to ignore our many points of disagreement long enough to point out the many smart, sensible things he does write.  And this is one of them.

[Read more →]

Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians.  I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well.  Jonah writes:

My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zillion times). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it’s working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you’re wholly in the government-is-bad camp you’re more properly a libertarian, but still on the right). There are those who believe that liberty is an end and those who believe that liberty is a means. For more than a half century now, modern conservatives have been debating and redebating the question of where to the draw the lines between freedom and order, liberty and virtue. And because that line continually needs to be redrawn given the evolution of attitudes, changes in technology, etc, conservative intellectuals (though not necessarily conservative activists, politicians and the like) are constantly revisiting first principles and philosophical assumptions or are at least capable of acknowledging the good faith of their philosophical opponents). I do not think you can say the same thing about liberals (again, as a wild generalization). What unites most, if not all, factions of the Left, from socialists to DLC moderates is a dogmatic acceptance that the government should do good when it can and where it can.  Hence the debates on the left tend to be procedural, wonkish, and technical or rankly political. The Right has such arguments as well, of course. But they do not define and dominate political discussions the way they do on the left. And that’s because our dogma is still unsettled.

I think this strikes upon a number of smart observations.  Certainly the continual re-drawing of the many lines between liberty and virtue, freedom and order, etc. is exactly the reason I enjoy reading (intellectual) conservative blogs so much more than I enjoy reading liberal blogs.  On the flip side, I think the best wonkish blogs and writers are found in the liberal corner.

Perhaps this reveals not only the strengths on both sides of the political aisle, but also the weaknesses.

I like thinking of conservatism in these terms – as an “unsettled ideology.” This gets at the bohemian conservatism I was talking about last week.  Russell Kirk was a self-described “bohemian Tory” and I think the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, with its distrust of centralized power and so forth fits that term nicely, if the red-meat activist wing does not.  The “unsettled dogma” concept seems so far removed from the conservative movement’s attempts at purity tests and activism that it’s a bit hard to reconcile the two.  And of course I’ve always been more attracted to the intellectual struggles within the ideology than with the political processes themselves, healthcare blogging notwithstanding.  But I think this can also be a trap for conservative intellectuals, or at least for bloggers with an intellectual streak (I am not really an intellectual as far as I know). More conservatives need to focus on policy and wonkishness if only to provide their ideas with a tangible foundation, but also because the effort to dismantle or reinvent the welfare state – to really limit big government – requires if anything even more policy and wonkishness than the other side.

 

Addendum: I’d like to point out that I in no way endorse some of the more caricatured views Goldberg expresses here vis-a-vis liberals.  Gross generalizations are not really my cup of tea, whether they can be applied to certain people within the larger group or not.  I will, however, note that so far the conservative and liberal response here has been hostile.  That means I’m doing something right.  Re: purity tests and so forth, it’s not so much that ideological groups shouldn’t set out some standards for membership, but that the standards become awfully silly and rigid in a political climate like the one we now have.

Jonah Goldberg (among others) seems offended by the fact that Obama blames the situation in Afghanistan on his predecessor. Blaming Bush may be evergreen for the Democrats, but in this case, it happens to be pretty darn accurate.

Thanks to John, I am pointed to these two rather strange arguments in favor of the Drug War and against libertarian use of statistics on race against the Drug War from Jonah Goldberg.  John does a pretty good job explaining why Goldberg’s arguments are so strange.  The only thing I’d really add is that the notion that libertarians don’t normally give a crap about race and poverty is a notion that is borne out of the coalition of libertarians with conservatives - libertarian and classical liberal philosophy, when divorced from coalition politics, actually have quite a bit to say about the problems of poverty and laws that disproportionately single out politically less powerful groups. 

Goldberg also makes this odd statement:

A justly convicted murderer should be punished regardless of his race. A justly convicted drug dealer should be punished, regardless of his race as well. If we’re punishing a disproportionately high number of blacks, that’s a sign we should crack down on more guilty whites, not give up on punishing crimes.

This is particularly puzzling because Goldberg has argued that anti-statism is at the core of conservatism and is also why libertarians should continue to coalition with conservatives.  Obviously, increasing drug prosecutions is not only inconsistent with any conception of limited government, it’s also an expansion of the size of government.  And not an insignicant expansion either, given that this can definitionally only be achieved by pursuing people with enough resources to put up a tough fight against drug prosecutions (a fact that at least partly explains the socioeconomic discrepancies in such prosecutions in the first place). 

Goldberg’s statement does indirectly suggest one point worth exploring, though – that human liberty is increased when laws are enforced more uniformly; unfortunately, he takes this point to be a justification for the expansion of drug prosecutions. 

Much has been written of late about the difference between small and limited government – specifically, small government refers only to the fiscal “size” of the government, whereas limited government refers to the government’s actual powers.  If you accept that the State must exist, as even most libertarians do, then one must have a desire that the Stated do well that which it is authorized to do.  If the State does its job poorly, then it will actually have a more negative impact on individual liberty than if it does its job well, because at that point enforcement of the laws becomes arbitrary and based on one’s ability to curry favor with the State in some other non-germane arena. 

If, on the other hand, the State does its job well, then people may act in reliance upon the law being enforced equally without regards to other issues.  So there may be a marginal decrease in liberty due to the existence of the law in the first place, but this is mitigated by the fact that uniform enforcement ensures that people may act in reliance upon the law and without having to curry favor with the State in some other arena.  This means less State corruption, less connection between wealth and power, and less fear of interference from the State more generally. 

The trouble is that very often uniform enforcement is simply not possible due to the State’s limited resources.  Put another way, in the words of the inestimable Wirkman Virkkala, “regulation is not scalable.” 

In the case of the War on Drugs, this problem is particularly apparent.  For any given drug, there are going to be potentially millions of users spread out over a vast country.  The only way to have uniform enforcement of the drug laws in such a situation is to have an incomprehensibly large budget far bigger than the already-incomprehensibly large Drug War budget we have.  Other programs, some of which may or may not be enforced in a relatively uniform fashion will need to be  scaled back (and thus enforced more arbitrarily).  Short of that, given the nature of prohibitions on the possession of banned personal items, the only way to truly enforce the law uniformly would be to turn our neighbors and friends into de facto secret police.

Still, under some circumstances, I suppose it’s possible to enforce such prohibitions in a more or less uniform fashion without creating a de facto secret police force – whatever Singapore’s flaws (and it has many), drug use is not something that flourishes there.  Part of that, though, is that Singapore is a tiny nation geographically, and another part of it is that it spends very little on many other types of restrictions, such as economic regulation. 

Which brings me to my final point – even regulations that are not outright prohibitions can be uniformly enforced only if they govern a sufficiently small number of actors or if the enforcing agency has the very substantial amount of resources necessary to enforce the regulations uniformly over a large number of actors.  Again, they are not scalable.  If the regulations are to apply to more actors than the agency has the resources to oversee, then the only solution an agency may follow will be to make the regulations so restrictive as to ensure the reduction of the number of actors over whom they have jurisdiction.  In other words, regulatory capture doesn’t just benefit the capturing business – it also benefits the captured regulator.

There is, I think, a solution to this problem: terminate any set of laws or regulations that cannot be uniformly enforced without an unrealistic budgetary expansion, and fully fund those laws or regulations that can be enforced in a relatively uniform fashion.   Unfortunately, this is impossible in a two-party system where the Executive is increasingly viewed by both supporters and detractors as omnipotent and where few are willing to admit the unrealistic nature of their pet programs.

Cross-posted at Donklephant.