Freedom: Because It Works or Because It’s Right?
By Robert Higgs • Thursday December 27, 2012 6:21 PM PDT • 38 Comments
Libertarians divide into two broad classes: those who espouse a free society because it gives better results than an unfree society, and those who espouse a free society because they believe that it is wrong to deny or suppress a person’s right to be free (unless, of course, that person is suppressing the equal right of others to be free). “Consequentialists versus deontologists” is the oft-encountered labeling of this difference. It is unfortunate that so much energy has been devoted to infighting between these two groups.
I first embraced libertarianism on utilitarian or consequentialist grounds related to my training as an economist. I was convinced that a free society—certainly in the long run, if not at every moment—would be healthier, wealthier, and happier than an unfree society. From economic theory and economic history, I came to understand the horrendous failures of the centrally planned economies in the USSR, China, and other countries. This understanding struck me as an adequate basis for anyone’s embrace of libertarianism.
Lacking a solid background in philosophy, I did not spend much time thinking about the moral case for libertarianism, at least in the early stages of my journey. Yet no one really needed to persuade me that people by nature deserve to be free, that each person possesses a natural right to control his own life insofar as the exercise of that right does not conflict with other people’s exercise of the same right. So, when I was first asked—more than twenty years ago as a panelist at a libertarian conference—whether I was a consequentialist or a deontologist in my libertarianism, I answered that I was both: I believed that people ought to respect other people’s right to be free of aggression (the initiation of violence or the threat of violence) and that if everyone behaved in this way, people would attain the best possible social and economic outcomes for the whole society.
Over time, I found myself making moral arguments for libertarianism more and more frequently. In some ways, I was simply expressing the grounds for my outrage against one coercive evil or another of which I became aware. Yet I never surrendered my belief that a free society works better than an unfree society along many social and economic dimensions. I was also persuaded by the great rule-utilitarian Leland Yeager that in the deepest possible sense, we must all be consequentialists. No one of good will can cling to the rule “fiat justitia ruat caelum” (let justice be done though the heavens fall) all the way down. If the most committed libertarian deontologist knew for certain that adherence to every critical element of libertarianism would entail, say, the utter destruction of the human race, even he would have to relent and to rest his decision on the consequences of a no-exceptions adherence to a normally binding moral rule.
Fortunately, this dilemma is one we do not face in reality. Indeed, almost always, if not always, we can follow the rule of perfect freedom and rest assured that not only will doing so not cause destructive outcomes, but it will actually conduce to the realization of the most constructive feasible outcomes.
In any event, after the more recent decades of my libertarian journey, I am now struck by a different aspect of this longstanding debate, which has to do with our strategy for winning people over to libertarianism. Strategy 1 is to persuade them that freedom works, that a free society will be richer and otherwise better off than an unfree society; that a free market will, as it were, cause the trains to run on time better than a government bureaucracy will do so. Strategy 2 is to persuade people that no one, not even a government functionary, has a just right to interfere with innocent people’s freedom of action; that none of us was born with a saddle on his back to accommodate someone else’s riding him.
In our world, so many people have been confused or misled by faulty claims about morality and justice that most libertarians, especially in the think tanks and other organizations that carry much of the burden of education about libertarianism, concentrate their efforts on pursuing Strategy 1 as effectively as possible. Hence, they produce policy studies galore, each showing how the government has fouled up a market or another situation by its ostensibly well-intentioned laws and regulations. Of course, the 98 percent or more of society (especially in its political aspect) that in one way or another opposes perfect freedom responds with policy studies of its own, each showing why an alleged “market failure,” “social injustice,” or other problem warrants the government’s interference with people’s freedom of action and each promising to remedy the perceived evils. Anyone who pays attention to policy debates is familiar with the ensuing, never-ending war of the wonks. I myself have done a fair amount of such work, so I am not condemning it. As one continues to expose the defects of anti-freedom arguments and the failures of government efforts to “solve” a host of problems, one hopes that someone will be persuaded and become willing to give freedom a chance.
Nevertheless, precisely because the war of the wonks—not to mention the professors, pundits, columnists, political hacks, and intellectual hired guns—is never-ending, one can never rest assured that once a person has been persuaded that freedom works better, at least in regard to situation X, that person has been won over to libertarianism permanently. If a person has come over only because of evidence and argument adduced yesterday by a pro-freedom wonk, he may just as easily go back to his support for government intervention tomorrow on the basis of evidence and argument adduced by an anti-freedom wonk. As John Maynard Keynes once cleverly replied to someone who asked him about his fluctuating views, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” If libertarians choose to fight for freedom solely on consequentialist grounds, they will be at war forever. Although one may accept this prospect on the grounds that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” this kind of war is deeply discouraging, given that the anti-freedom forces with which libertarians must contend possess hundreds of times more troops and thousands of times more money for purchasing munitions.
In contrast, once the libertarian has persuaded someone that government interference is wrong, at least in a certain realm, if not across the board, there is a much smaller probability of that convert’s backsliding into his former support for government’s coercive measures against innocent people. Libertarianism grounded on the moral rock will prove much stronger and longer-lasting than libertarianism grounded on the shifting sands of consequentialist arguments, which of necessity are only as compelling as today’s arguments and evidence make them. Hence, if we desire to enlarge the libertarian ranks, we are well advised to make moral arguments at least a part of our efforts. It will not hurt, of course, to show people that freedom really does work better than state control. But to confine our efforts to wonkism dooms them to transitory success, at best.
If we are ever to attain a free society, we must persuade a great many of our fellows that it is simply wrong for any individuals or groups, by violence or the threat thereof, to impose their demands on others who have committed no crime and violated no one’s just rights, and that it is just as wrong for the persons who compose the state to do so as it is for you and me. In the past, the great victories for liberty flowed from precisely such an approach—for example, in the anti-slavery campaign, in the fight against the Corn Laws (which restricted Great Britain’s free trade in grains), and in the struggle to abolish legal restrictions on women’s rights to work, own property, and otherwise conduct themselves as freely as men. At the very least, libertarians should never concede the moral high ground to those who insist on coercively interfering with freedom: the burden of proof should always rest on those who seek to bring violence to bear against innocent people, not on those of us who want simply to be left alone to live our lives as we think best, always respecting the same right for others.
Tags: Civil Liberties, Free Market, Law, Liberty, Morality, Natural Law, Personal Liberty, Philosophy, The State, Utilitarianism 
It’s like a Christmas present delivered two days after to read a Robert Higgs essay. Just today I cited and recommended reading his work to a friend who is interested in WWII and the Great Depression.
Bob D | Dec 27, 2012 | Reply
Bob:
Thanks for so elegantly expressing my own intellectual travels with these very difficult issues on a very similar path – consequentialist economist to moral defender – using both strategies as situation demands with an late developing understanding that the defense of liberty in essentially moral. Truly a Christmas present two (now three as I am reading this) after.
John P. Cochran | Dec 28, 2012 | Reply
Aahh, the irony...reading Crisis and Leviathan (it was required reading for a course you taught on American Economic History) played a pivotal role in a journey similar to yours...although far less notable. Yet, I landed a very similar position. I suppose that’s why I enjoy your work as much as the two previous commentators.
Adam Simpson | Dec 28, 2012 | Reply
Both tracks in promoting libertarian ideas are needed. My assumption is that a more productive way to show the effectiveness of a Libertarian philosophy is to have enclaves where free markets (entry and exit), very limited government intervention, an the rule of law, will show stronger evidence (would be healthier, wealthier, and happier than an unfree society) and may facilitate that individuals vote with their feet.
Guillermo Barba | Dec 28, 2012 | Reply
Beautiful and powerful. Thanks Bob.
Don Boudreaux | Dec 28, 2012 | Reply
I think the duality between consequentialism and deontology can be resolved by recognizing rights as the almost-always-true simplest cases of consequentialist reasoning. This resolves both the problem of exceptions where resolution by rights alone would have truly bad consequences and the problem of comprehending or conveying complex consequentialist arguments.
So I don’t think that consequentialism is a battle that must be fought forever. Rather, there is a meta-consequentialism that holds in most human experience, just as Newtonian laws hold in most human experience. And that meta-consequentialism directly yields the deontological understanding of rights and morality.
Using consequentialist argument for the examples that induce this meta-consequentialism through patterns that appear again and again leads people to a notion of rights that is very familiar and very robust.
MikeP | Dec 28, 2012 | Reply
I enjoyed the article as well, and agree with Guillermo that both strategies (and others perhaps) are needed. Redundancy is often a good thing. I also agree with Guillermo that the existence of small free market enclaves is a powerful argument in favor of free markets. Showing trumps telling, manifesting trumps arguing.
Clay Stallworth | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
Great article. However, it persists it speaking past what I have come to believe motivates a good deal of modern liberal argument for intervention: historical injustice. The fact that we need to make the moral argument for liberty in addition to the consequentialist argument is clear, but there is no way to get beyond historical injustices which entail transitional gains traps within the libertarian-economic framework. Starting from the status-quo and moving forward with just-processes (Nozick) seems to be the best we know how to do. We laud entrepreneurship for its ability to find new pareto-optimal moves which overcome historical injustices, but we do so only by saying that persisting historical injustices must wait until: 1. an entrepreneur finds the pareto-optimal move; 2. some exogenous shock makes Coasian bagraining possible which was not possible before. Quite often, however, libertarian economics arguments suggest the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency improving move, even if the losers are not able to be compensated. this cavalier move violates the consistency of a moral argument for libertarianism. I am well aware that there is a danger of falling into a nirvana fallacy here, but I am concerned about the cavalier attitude most often evinced by the libertarian (or classical liberal) economist regarding this issue. The Marxists specialized in historical injustice as a justification for their plans. Their problem, rightly identified by Mises and Hayek, was that their plans would not work, not that their motivation was wrong. But Libertarian economists so shrink away from anything that sounds Marxist, they wind up completely blind to the reality of issues surrounding historical injustice.
So what then? What do I suggest? If libertarians want to make a moral argument in addition to a consequentialist argument they must first acknoweldge the presence of historical injustices (a very real hurdle for some!). Next they must identify which historical injustices are likely bound by a transitional gains trap (those which persist most likely are). Finally, in order to claim moral attention, they must demonstrate willingness to engage in sacrificial altruism in proportion to the degree they sympathize with those caught in the transitional gains trap. Collective action for overcoming tgt’s nearly always results in the creation of factions which have their own set of inefficiencies. Further, individuals have advantages of monitoring against moral hazards. No, it must be individualist action toward the elimination of tgt’s. Until libertarianism takes this up as a prime element in its understanding of justice it will fail to provide an adequate answer to those whose primary concerns include historical injusitice.
Nathanael Snow | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
I think the problem is more difficult than what Higgs describes. Consider McCloskey’s review of Review of Michael J. Sandel’s “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limit of Markets” at http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/editorials/sandel.php, hat tip to http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/so-what-actually-is-this-liberal-bourgeois-deal-then.
Here are excerpts: “Sandel doesn’t raise the philosophical game of the people he is lecturing. Instead he plays to their least examined political dispositions—their disposition to mere fairness unanalyzed and their disposition to mere disgust unhistoricized...His moral thoughts in fact are two only, and thin versions even of these: that equality is good; and that the sacred can be corrupted by the profane. “The fairness objection [to what money should buy] asks about the inequality that market choices may reflect; the corruption objection asks about the attitude and norms that market relations may damage” (p. 110).”
Higgs’ approach will appeal to libertarians, but not to people like Sandel and his entourage. Their morality comes from their gut; it’s what they and people like them find personally disgusting or pleasing. Eradicating inequality of stuff has much more moral force for them than worrying about harming the rights of rich people, who are evil by definition.
Libertarians need to recall Hayek’s thoughts in “Fatal Conceit” on religion. Religion makes people respect principles for which they can find no immediate benefit.
The abolition of the corn laws and slavery in England took place in a period in which tradition Christian values were at their peak and people were striving to instantiate them politically. Traditional Christian values held the moral high ground at the time.
In fact, the liberties we now defend were forged in the fires of the Reformation during which Catholic and Protestant theologians argued for limiting the power of the state. We can thank the theologians of Salamanca, Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries for providing the moral argument that only free markets can generate just prices. The Dutch instantiated those principles in the 17th century and gave us the first modern, free nation, as McCloskey shows in her books on bourgeois values and Adam Smith emphasized in “Wealth of Nations.”
The decline of traditional Christianity in Europe and the US over the past century has removed the restraints against envy and turned envy into a virtue. Envy is the power behind socialism.
Roger McKinney | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
Nathanael: Nozick wisely pointed out that claims arising from historical injustice must attenuate to zero fairly rapidly over time. It will do us little good to spend our time and energy calculating who ought to do what for whom based on whose ancestors did what TO whom in times gone by. We need to be working for a freer society, in part because freedom is not a zero-sum game: people by & large gain from allowing the market to increase productivity. There is nothing “cavalier” about that, and no need to invoke Pareto, Coase, Kaldor, or Hicks one way or the other.
Nevertheless, from a moral standpoint libertarianism (unlike, say, Randianism) fully encompasses and embraces individuals’ liberty to help those they feel need help, with their own resources. Assuming that’s what you mean by “individualist action toward elimination of tgt’s,” it’s already there. But the word “justice” carries a strong connotation of enforceable obligation, which, in the absence of specific examples for which an argument might be made, seems likely to conflict with liberty.
Allan Walstad | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
“If the most committed libertarian deontologist knew for certain that adherence to every critical element of libertarianism would entail, say, the utter destruction of the human race, even he would have to relent and to rest his decision on the consequences of a no-exceptions adherence to a normally binding moral rule.”
Why would or should he care about the human race? How does one choose what is meant by “works”? Why should one care about what works?
These are deontological questions. Consequentialism has deontological foundations. One can ask and answer a question that appears non-normative and objective, but the choice of what question to ask is based upon and motivated by subjective preferences.
So a libertarian who somehow discovered a conflict between his beliefs in freedom, however deduced, and the existence of the human race, would in reality have found a conflict in his deontological system, or more generally, his metaphysical system.
Deontological foundations are not just appropriate, but inevitable. The real problem in persuasion is in getting someone to identify and resolve conflicts in his deontological system. Consequentialist arguments merely serve in the identification of some of those conflicts.
vikingvista | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
Ah, it must be nice to be libertarian. To ponder the beauty and purity of freedom – and shake our heads at all those benighted rubes who just don’t understand. It’s way too easy, and way too evident, frankly, in the self-congratulatory account of Mr. Higgs’s encounter with the Forces of Darkness. The problems in society are, I think, more complex, as in how do we reconcile Man and Society’s need for community, control – and, perish the thought, regulation, with the unfortunate human proclivity to turn the institutions and traditions of social control into tyranny. But that debate doesn’t reduce itself quite so easily to the trim categories of the ideologically pure. So you fellows pour another gin and tonic and ponder the ephemeral.
cliff lancey | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
This is a wonderful essay, and thank you for writing it. But you barely touch on something that has always troubled me about the libertarianism that I have sincerely espoused for decades.
The problem I have encountered with taking the consequentialist position, that freedom leads to better outcomes overall, is that those who accept it have to have as much faith in the “invisible hand” as others have faith in God. In every system, some people lose, and those people rightly lament, “why must it be me”? The religious ultimately accept their misfortune as being “God’s plan,” or the inscrutable “way of the universe.” But those without religion generally find it hard to accept that the “invisible hand” has chosen them to lose, when it seems clear (or at least possible) that active intervention by those with more power than they currently have can make them into winners. It is perfectly natural for such people to embrace some form of statism.
To believe that freedom promotes the greater good, and to accept your own misfortune in an environment of freedom (especially when you think that some variety of tyranny would actually leave you personally better off), is to sacrifice yourself for others — a notion that is antithetical to libertarian principles!
The way I resolve this for myself is to say that I value the freedom to make my own decisions, and that, if I am going to prosper or suffer, I would prefer that this come from my own direct interaction with the world, than via interaction that is shaped and restricted by a ruler or a government, i.e., by other fallible humans such as myself. But I also understand that other people may not share my value system, and that they may very well prefer a different environment, one in which some people, including me or even themselves, are subjugated. The most persuasive moral justification for libertarianism, which, I agree with you, is the stronger foundation for libertarian belief, boils down to the Golden Rule for me. But that leaves open the possibility that many (most!) people are quite happy, even eager, to be ruled, and just as happy to rule others — if not directly, then indirectly, through the king or governmental system they endorse. That is to say, the Golden Rule also seems to work for a sadomasochist.
James Anderson Merritt | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
I’m always disappointed by the moral arguments from libertarians because they ignore the moral arguments of their opponents. As libertarians, in order to win others over, its not enough to show them why its wrong to aggress on others. We must deal with arguments like that of Rawls and other leftists who claim nobody has a right to wealth and power they get from luck, that poor and disadvantaged people to not have real freedom and that coercing others a little may be necessary to protect (a more expansive view of freedom). Bleeding-heart libertarians do this to some extent, but not enough.
alex | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
James: I don’t know whether Bob plans on answering questions, but if you don’t mind I’d like to address yours.
“Invisible hand” is a metaphor (apparently invented by Adam Smith but only explicitly invoked once or twice in the Wealth of Nations) for our understanding of (not mere faith in) how non-coercive cooperation works to make people better off. Without going back and re-reading it, I recall the passage in which he points out that if you try to produce as much in the way of goods and services as possible, you may only intend your own benefit in terms of what you can get in exchange, but at the same time you are effectively working to increase the total output of society, which benefits all. Similarly, if you find ways to make your productive process more efficient, you may only be intending to increase your own profit, but at the same time you are increasing the productivity of society generally.
Competition among producers comes about because consumers naturally will choose to deal with producers who provide more and better for less. Some business enterprises will fail, but it doesn’t mean their owners and workers must drop off the face of the earth. There’s lots of other work to do, lots of other goods and services people would like, lots of opportunities for capital, labor, and entrepreneurship to earn returns. The productivity of a market economy makes people better off, by & large–even the “losers”– than they would be in a collectivist system.
To abstain from aggression is surely not tantamount to sacrificing yourself for others. Yet there is nothing anti-libertarian about voluntarily forgoing a higher monetary income or wealth in order to pursue the benefit of others–here you might be confusing libertarianism with Ayn Rand and objectivism.
Sadomasochism is a dysfunction to be defended against and hopefully cured, not a value system to be respected.
Allan Walstad | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
Bob Higgs:
“Marketing” liberty is an important topic. Let me suggest that, while reason may be a persuasive tact when dealing with intellectuals, its value is attenuated by the fact (noted by Schumpeter, Hayek and others) that intellectuals tend to find statism to be their class interest. Mandarins tend to favor an ever-expanding Mandarinate. One result is that, in the political/policy world, logic is for losers (as I and others have painfully come to realize) – people rarely accept information that threatens their self-interests. So we should not be surprised that our statist friends and relatives are so reluctant to accept the efficiency case for capitalism. Of course, the same self-interest bias means that intellectuals are unlikely to accept the justice case for capitalism – its reliance on voluntary transactions.
So, while we cannot abandon either logic or justice as arguments for economic liberty, we might supplement those arguments with communication strategies more likely to by-pass the intellectuals (their power, as Hayek noted, stems largely from their domination of the narratives that frame most issues for the general public). Thus, were we able to reach the public directly with alternative narratives, it is possible that we might still succeed. There are two challenges: first, finding a narrative that can reach more of the public than those culturally supportive of liberty already; second, crafting narratives that might better correspond to their values; third, find channels of communication large enough to reach the masses.
The first two elements of this agenda were long ago developed by Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas in their work of cultural value theory. They noted that most people would be rationally ignorant. (Only public (intellectuals – the decision influencing elites – would be expected to be rationally knowledgeable but the self-interest biases of most intellectuals (an observation again by Schumpter and others) would lead them to reject economic liberty – we’re the traitors to our class interest). Rational ignorance means that the public has little reason to devote the (always scarce educational) time that would be needed to sort through competing arguments about either efficiency or justice. They will have opinions but these cannot be based on reason – given their inability to influence a policy, it would be foolish to spend much time educating oneself in these matters.
From whence, therefore, do these opinions emerge? Wildavsky/Douglas argue that most will use their core cultural values as a heuristic to quickly reach an opinion. In effect: They don’t care what we know, until they know that we care! This suggests that our challenge is to craft narratives/myths that relate capitalism (economic liberty) to these core values (we must also select a spokersperson likely to be perceived as credible by your audience; and, then find a communication channel that reaches that audience). Once one has made a value connect, there may be limited opportunity to “educate” but the first challenge is to “communicate.”
What are these core values? Wildavsky proposed four: the Individualist value of freedom/liberty; the Hierarchic value of stability/security; the Egalitarian value of fairness/justice; and the Fatalistic value of acceptance/indurance. These values, they argued, emerged slowly as civilization (and the cultural underpinnings needed for that evolution) developed. All are relevant – most of us to varying degrees favor all of these. However, Wildavsky argued that most would cluster around one of these values. Thus, if we wish to market liberty, our challenge is to craft narratives that would appeal to others. This does not seem impossible: capitalism does enhance freedom, improve efficiency, and advances tolerance and other egalitarian values. Our challenge is to find the narratives, spokespeople and channels that can convey those different strokes for different folks Not surprisingly, this approach is now being explored diligently by liberals. Those interested might persue the work of the Yale Law School Project on Cultural Cognition website for details. See here for details – a good start would be to read one of the papers, “The Wildavsky Heuristic.”
Finding spokespersons and a channel pose other problems – but less difficult than in years past. The internet provides a means of by-passing the filters of the statist dominated main-stream media; we have some liberals and some conservatives who sympathize (on occasion) with economic liberty. Also, were we able to influence the marketing strategies of business (an entity that spends sums approaching one trillion annually in communicating to Joe and Joan Consumer – it would not be costly to tweak those communiqués so that they also reached Joe and Joan Citizen), we might well expect a public less hostile to freedom.
This approach (what we at CEI label a Value Based Communication strategy) may fail but it does enrich the array of approaches available to market liberty. A first project of my Center has been to produce an animated version (with supplemental lectures) of the Leonard Reed classic, “I, Pencil.” It seems to reach liberals too – but much more is needed. See the video here (Bob Higgs:
“Marketing” liberty is an important topic. Let me suggest that, while reason may be a persuasive tact when dealing with intellectuals, its value is attenuated by the fact (noted by Schumpeter, Hayek and others) that intellectuals tend to find statism to be their class interest. Mandarins tend to favor an ever-expanding Mandarinate. One result is that, in the political/policy world, logic is for losers (as I and others have painfully come to realize) – people rarely accept information that threatens their self-interests. So we should not be surprised that our statist friends and relatives are so reluctant to accept the efficiency case for capitalism. Of course, the same self-interest bias means that intellectuals are unlikely to accept the justice case for capitalism – its reliance on voluntary transactions.
So, while we cannot abandon either logic or justice as arguments for economic liberty, we might supplement those arguments with communication strategies more likely to by-pass the intellectuals (their power, as Hayek noted, stems largely from their domination of the narratives that frame most issues for the general public). Thus, were we able to reach the public directly with alternative narratives, it is possible that we might still succeed. There are two challenges: first, finding a narrative that can reach more of the public than those culturally supportive of liberty already; second, crafting narratives that might better correspond to their values; third, find channels of communication large enough to reach the masses.
The first two elements of this agenda were long ago developed by Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas in their work of cultural value theory. They noted that most people would be rationally ignorant. (Only public (intellectuals – the decision influencing elites – would be expected to be rationally knowledgeable but the self-interest biases of most intellectuals (an observation again by Schumpter and others) would lead them to reject economic liberty – we’re the traitors to our class interest). Rational ignorance means that the public has little reason to devote the (always scarce educational) time that would be needed to sort through competing arguments about either efficiency or justice. They will have opinions but these cannot be based on reason – given their inability to influence a policy, it would be foolish to spend much time educating oneself in these matters.
From whence, therefore, do these opinions emerge? Wildavsky/Douglas argue that most will use their core cultural values as a heuristic to quickly reach an opinion. In effect: They don’t care what we know, until they know that we care! This suggests that our challenge is to craft narratives/myths that relate capitalism (economic liberty) to these core values (we must also select a spokersperson likely to be perceived as credible by your audience; and, then find a communication channel that reaches that audience). Once one has made a value connect, there may be limited opportunity to “educate” but the first challenge is to “communicate.”
What are these core values? Wildavsky proposed four: the Individualist value of freedom/liberty; the Hierarchic value of stability/security; the Egalitarian value of fairness/justice; and the Fatalistic value of acceptance/indurance. These values, they argued, emerged slowly as civilization (and the cultural underpinnings needed for that evolution) developed. All are relevant – most of us to varying degrees favor all of these. However, Wildavsky argued that most would cluster around one of these values. Thus, if we wish to market liberty, our challenge is to craft narratives that would appeal to others. This does not seem impossible: capitalism does enhance freedom, improve efficiency, and advances tolerance and other egalitarian values. Our challenge is to find the narratives, spokespeople and channels that can convey those different strokes for different folks Not surprisingly, this approach is now being explored diligently by liberals. Those interested might persue the work of the Yale Law School Project on Cultural Cognition website for details. See here for details – a good start would be to read one of the papers, “The Wildavsky Heuristic.”
Finding spokespersons and a channel pose other problems – but less difficult than in years past. The internet provides a means of by-passing the filters of the statist dominated main-stream media; we have some liberals and some conservatives who sympathize (on occasion) with economic liberty. Also, were we able to influence the marketing strategies of business (an entity that spends sums approaching one trillion annually in communicating to Joe and Joan Consumer – it would not be costly to tweak those communiqués so that they also reached Joe and Joan Citizen), we might well expect a public less hostile to freedom.
This approach (what we at CEI label a Value Based Communication strategy) may fail but it does enrich the array of approaches available to market liberty. A first project of my Center has been to produce an animated version (with supplemental lectures) of the Leonard Reed classic, “I, Pencil.” It seems to reach liberals too – but much more is needed. See the video here(Bob Higgs:
“Marketing” liberty is an important topic. Let me suggest that, while reason may be a persuasive tact when dealing with intellectuals, its value is attenuated by the fact (noted by Schumpeter, Hayek and others) that intellectuals tend to find statism to be their class interest. Mandarins tend to favor an ever-expanding Mandarinate. One result is that, in the political/policy world, logic is for losers (as I and others have painfully come to realize) – people rarely accept information that threatens their self-interests. So we should not be surprised that our statist friends and relatives are so reluctant to accept the efficiency case for capitalism. Of course, the same self-interest bias means that intellectuals are unlikely to accept the justice case for capitalism – its reliance on voluntary transactions.
So, while we cannot abandon either logic or justice as arguments for economic liberty, we might supplement those arguments with communication strategies more likely to by-pass the intellectuals (their power, as Hayek noted, stems largely from their domination of the narratives that frame most issues for the general public). Thus, were we able to reach the public directly with alternative narratives, it is possible that we might still succeed. There are two challenges: first, finding a narrative that can reach more of the public than those culturally supportive of liberty already; second, crafting narratives that might better correspond to their values; third, find channels of communication large enough to reach the masses.
The first two elements of this agenda were long ago developed by Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas in their work of cultural value theory. They noted that most people would be rationally ignorant. (Only public (intellectuals – the decision influencing elites – would be expected to be rationally knowledgeable but the self-interest biases of most intellectuals (an observation again by Schumpter and others) would lead them to reject economic liberty – we’re the traitors to our class interest). Rational ignorance means that the public has little reason to devote the (always scarce educational) time that would be needed to sort through competing arguments about either efficiency or justice. They will have opinions but these cannot be based on reason – given their inability to influence a policy, it would be foolish to spend much time educating oneself in these matters.
From whence, therefore, do these opinions emerge? Wildavsky/Douglas argue that most will use their core cultural values as a heuristic to quickly reach an opinion. In effect: They don’t care what we know, until they know that we care! This suggests that our challenge is to craft narratives/myths that relate capitalism (economic liberty) to these core values (we must also select a spokersperson likely to be perceived as credible by your audience; and, then find a communication channel that reaches that audience). Once one has made a value connect, there may be limited opportunity to “educate” but the first challenge is to “communicate.”
What are these core values? Wildavsky proposed four: the Individualist value of freedom/liberty; the Hierarchic value of stability/security; the Egalitarian value of fairness/justice; and the Fatalistic value of acceptance/indurance. These values, they argued, emerged slowly as civilization (and the cultural underpinnings needed for that evolution) developed. All are relevant – most of us to varying degrees favor all of these. However, Wildavsky argued that most would cluster around one of these values. Thus, if we wish to market liberty, our challenge is to craft narratives that would appeal to others. This does not seem impossible: capitalism does enhance freedom, improve efficiency, and advances tolerance and other egalitarian values. Our challenge is to find the narratives, spokespeople and channels that can convey those different strokes for different folks Not surprisingly, this approach is now being explored diligently by liberals. Those interested might persue the work of the Yale Law School Project on Cultural Cognition website for details. See here for details – a good start would be to read one of the papers, “The Wildavsky Heuristic.”
Finding spokespersons and a channel pose other problems – but less difficult than in years past. The internet provides a means of by-passing the filters of the statist dominated main-stream media; we have some liberals and some conservatives who sympathize (on occasion) with economic liberty. Also, were we able to influence the marketing strategies of business (an entity that spends sums approaching one trillion annually in communicating to Joe and Joan Consumer – it would not be costly to tweak those communiqués so that they also reached Joe and Joan Citizen), we might well expect a public less hostile to freedom.
This approach (what we at CEI label a Value Based Communication strategy) may fail but it does enrich the array of approaches available to market liberty. A first project of my Center has been to produce an animated version (with supplemental lectures) of the Leonard Reed classic, “I, Pencil.” It seems to reach liberals too – but much more is needed. See the video here – your comments and criticisms are solicited. All this is a worthwhile goal, don’t you think?
Fred Smith
Director, CEI’s Center for Advancing Capitalism
– your comments and criticisms are solicited. All this is a worthwhile goal, don’t you think?
FRED L SMITH | Dec 29, 2012 | Reply
@Cliff
Actually, it is not easy being a Libertarian. Oddly enough the simple proposition that each of us is born free and should remain free for the duration of our existence seems beyond the pale of most human understanding. Man is indeed, the complicating animal as the history of science, let alone religion will attest. (To misquote a number of people, if the were no Occam’s Razor, then one would have to invent one.)
But to your point, not speaking for most Libertarians, but for myself, my Libertarianism (or anarchism) tends to focus on the distinction between a Society and its Government, which are two distinct institutions with very different sets of incentives.
An example of this is the day I bought a bunch of Tamales (store bought Tamales are an unrecognizable commodity compared to their fresh brethren) from a Hispanic woman in the parking lot a local grocery store.
No doubt, the grocery store cannot sell her Tamales. They most likely did not meet the regulations associated with food safety. But quite frankly, I do not need these regulations.
I am aware that anyone working at a fictitious Tamale producer (Los Buenos Tamales) have an incentive to produce quality Tamales, since failing this, they will lose their jobs, their livelihood. No doubt, some business owners fail because they lack the ability to produce good recipes. But all of these are unlikely to poison their food — and likely to guard against a disgruntled employee — from poisoning their food because such an event will wreak havoc on the health of the company.
The lady selling Tamales from her truck had no such incentive, except the fact that she probably lived in the neighborhood and had the intent of selling these every holiday season. That is, I probably can trust a bigger brand because any bad press will cause a fall in their profits. But I can trust my neighbor because she is visible to me and others, and I do not need regulations to buy from her. In smaller settings her word will suffice.
Given this was the case, I enjoyed really, really good tamales with my wife that evening and enriched — if only temporarily — my neighbor. No regulation was necessary, because I had enough information to make my decision.
The trouble comes when Los Buenos Tamales — because of the nature of refrigeration and the perils of shelf life, wish to put my neighbor out of business, because fresh Tamales are better. This is when “traditions [sic] of social control into tyranny”. But of course, regulation is not a tradition. It is a legislative tool used, most often, to disadvantage small producers, like my neighbor, in favor of larger producers, like Los Buenos Tamales.
Although not a Libertarian, I would urge you to read Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations, as to how special interest groups incentives work to create situations, such as Apartheid in South Africa, and turn legal institutions, as opposed to traditions of social control into tyranny.
The answer most Libertarians would give, is that in limiting the freedom of my neighbor to sell her Tamales, tyranny is already present. It is merely not present for those who do not make and wish to sell excellent tamales. (And she is denied the bounty she is able to reap from her skill at Tamale making) It only becomes apparent when the level of social control exercised by Legal institutions begin to encompass us all.
Matthew Snow | Dec 30, 2012 | Reply
Fred:
Thanks for your contribution to this discussion. Although it moves the debate onto more practical ground, I think it is not too early to look for methods of winning the war rather than simply understanding its dimensions better. Kind of a “ready, fire, aim” approach, if you will. This is not to take away from Bob Higgs’s masterful description of the issue, which as a closet academic, I find quite useful.
However, I am a businessman, given to action, and I believe we must provide direction our followers can act upon today. It has long been obvious that the people who matter in society – the citizens – are more inclined to make voting decisions based on emotion rather than rational thinking. I would argue that is why Reagan Democrats voted as they did. He gave them a vision, something to believe in, rather than a solution to a problem.
I commented earlier on a Russ Roberts piece (http://cafehayek.com/2012/12/bootleggers-and-baptists-in-the-drug-industry.html) that, if we are to regain control of this mess of a government we have, we will need to appeal more to emotion than logic. Yes, it is the enemy’s wheelhouse, but at this point, can anyone argue we don’t need to take it to the enemy?
In short, I applaud the Center’s work. We need to be better communicators, and we need to understand how to get the message across in ways that are compelling, as compelling as the truth of our arguments. In business, it is usually the sales guy that makes all the money, no matter how beautiful the product.
Dick Gillette | Dec 30, 2012 | Reply
Cliff: “how do we reconcile Man and Society’s need for community, control – and, perish the thought, regulation, with the unfortunate human proclivity to turn the institutions and traditions of social control into tyranny.”
Lovers of liberty have answered that question hundreds of times, beginning even before Adam Smith. The government provides the basic laws to protect life, liberty and property and no more. No one is allowed to kill, enslave, steal or defraud. The rest is left to the market.
Division of labor forces everyone to depend on many other people and therefore cooperate. That creates strong communities.
The writers of the US Constitution got it right. But generations to follow didn’t like the restraint on government enforced by the Constitution and so interpreted away all restraints, in other words, they became law breakers. There is nothing one can do about a nation in which only a small group is willing to follow the law.
Roger McKinney | Dec 30, 2012 | Reply
Alex, I agree, lovers of liberty don’t read the opposition enough. McCloskey is one of the few I have seen take them on, such as in the post I linked to above. A discussion of the morality of markets is absolutely necessary because socialists claim the moral high ground.
Libertarians have developed a morality schema based on self-ownership and property, which is very rationalistic, but as McCloskey wrote, socialists don’t care about such esoteric reasoning. They have a very different way of looking at morality: they know it when they see it.
As McCloskey wrote, their ideas of fairness are playground versions based on emotion. They have little time for reason and are suspicious of people who spin wide webs of syllogisms.
In their minds, they are good people, beyond reproach. That sense of superiority gives them the keys to good and evil, in their minds. They don’t need to reason; they know good from evil because they are the good. Anyone who disagrees is evil.
Inequality is evil, no matter the consequences of striving for equality. They really don’t care about the consequences. I have heard them praise Cuba and Castro, knowing how desperately poor the people are.
Traditional Christianity provided an objective morality to which liberty lovers could appeal. Without it, we have no weapons against the morality of the left because without it all moral ideas become just personal preferences.
They would apply the non-aggression principle by saying that inequality and poverty are the worst forms of aggression. Equality of things trumps all other values, even the principles of non-aggression and property.
Roger McKinney | Dec 30, 2012 | Reply
Great article! One couldn’t add anymore to it. Well stated, Bob.
Robert McKeown | Dec 30, 2012 | Reply
Can we be sure that abolition in GB was a good thing? Was the forging of evangelicalism beneficial in the long run for parlimentary government or for the advancement of the gospel? Or did it create heroes (Wilberforce, Penn) out of men who may have been motivated primarily out of desire for power? Even if their intentions were right, were the consequences beneficial? And was the GB model of abolition really any better than the US model? In which case did more slaves actually die? In which case did more slave owners lose a good portion of their wealth? Which situation lead to a more stable set of institutions?
The right model for abolition: buy a slave from a slave owner, and try to persuade them not to buy a new slave with the proceeds. Pay them not to. Sacrificial altruism is the only approach which both rescues the slave and redeems the slave owner. This is the model Jesus set.
Nathanael Snow | Dec 30, 2012 | Reply
1. I am not persuaded that historical injustice attenuates to zero over time. Sometimes it grows. There are historical injustices that persist over a great length of time. It also requires a very cavalier attitude to say to those suffering from historical injustices, “just wait, it will get better over time.”
2. I do not suggest that any “we” do anything. I suggest that if anyone choses to try to make a moral argument for libertarianism above the consequentialist argument the proof will have to be in the pudding. That is, without sacrificial altruism there is no morality. I am the one who should do something about historical injustice. If you want to make a moral claim, then you must do something about it. There is no “we” unless perhaps it is the church, apart from state support.
3. Working for a freer society is great. But it is empty for those currently suffering from historical injustice.
4. Ask someone suffering from historical injustice whether it has a cavalier attitude or not.
5. Of course many libertarians affirm the right of people to take voluntary action to overcome tgt’s, etc.. I am saying this needs to me emphasized, and become a central part of the message and evidence of action.
6. The connotation of justice suffers nothing if consequentialism is the only claim. Once morality enters in more is required. If I make a claim to moral libertarianism, the first evidence of its morality will be action on behalf of the oppressed through individualist voluntary processes.
Nathanael Snow | Dec 30, 2012 | Reply
Debating is not fighting. That idea is silly Romance. To debate within liberalism helps to clarify the ideas thus it is not a waste of energy if we think the truth of the ideas matters.
Joseph Priestley noted in the eighteenth century the natural rights and utilitarianism was a distinction without a real difference as there could be no purely consequentialists nor any pure deontologists in ethics for all go on about the right owing to the consequences and both were liberals as far as Priestley could see. I said much the same in my first Libertarian Alliance [LA: the alliance is between classical liberals and anarcho-liberals] talk in 1980 but that was before I read Priestley’s great books. My thesis then was that pristine liberalism needed no foundation as it could stand as a moral paradigm on its own, but that the conflict between natural rights and utility was largely, if not completely, verbal; lacking any theoretical difference. Similarly, Kant was not original in seeing that there were no pure rationalists or pure empiricists in the history of philosophy.
Higgs writes as if reason cannot convert people from politics to liberalism for he says
“If a person has come over only because of evidence and argument adduced yesterday by a pro-freedom wonk, he may just as easily go back to his support for government intervention tomorrow on the basis of evidence and argument adduced by an anti-freedom wonk.”
But only if both are equally right. Does he imagine that such equality could be the case in the empirical world? Equality can be found in arithmetic but hardly anywhere else. Anyway, all the state does is negative sum rather than the positive sum activity of the market. So all politics is always wasteful.
Keynes erred on facts for the facts never can change but, presumably, he meant that the world had changed. It is a fact that I was a boy in the 1950s but that I am not one today but rather that I am now an adult but both of those facts are eternal; a biography of any person is made up of many personal facts but whilst the meaning of the whole might change to any reader along the way, no actual fact is ever changed as other facts emerge, or seem to became manifest, later. A changing world is not about facts changing but about more facts emerging. Popper has W1, W2 and W3 or matter, mind and memes but the changing world here is W1 but seeing a change is W2. Matter, mind and memes tend to change but to get the domain of the facts we need the prior eternal domain of W0, which is also the domain of mathematics and ethics too.
Higgs says:
‘As John Maynard Keynes once cleverly replied to someone who asked him about his fluctuating views, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? “’
But the reply needs to be that the facts never can change. In any case, it is quite silly to suppose that only ethics can lead to one being a liberal, even though pristine liberalism is an ethical paradigm. The state is negative sum always and the market is always positive sum from an economic point of view.
As Nietzsche rightly said, in mere theory or in the realm of ideas anyone can take on the world. It is not one whit germane that most people are statists but Higgs seems to feel that it is. As Steven Goldberg says: “reality is always willing to give a theorist a lift but only if he is going her way.” So not only can one take on the world but also if he is truthful then the external physical world backs him up; all the facts will be on his side so it is quite easy rather than hard.
What is really rough going is going against the facts rather than merely other people. To correct deluded people is as easy as falling off a log but the problem is in getting the apathetic into conversation or debate. And it is not ever the case that the facts are ready to accommodate all assumptions equally. Any assumption will be either true or false depending on a successful citing of germane external facts. All statist assumptions tend to be false.
David McDonagh | Dec 31, 2012 | Reply
Nathanael Show seems to imagine past injustice. The state is always unjust and it always has been. What has lately been called Political Correctness is a call for more injustice in unjust privileges by the state for favoured groups, including all females, owing to imaginary injustice in the past propagated by many Romantic historians [a pleonasm, it seems] like the Hammonds, Mrs Gregg or the late Eric Hobsbawm. Ironically they tend to call for real injustice in state privilege to compensate for what they merely imagine to be unjust.
Marx was not concerned about past injustice, or even with justice at all. But then men like Eric Hobsbawm were more Bolshevik than Marxist.
There is no merit in equality. There is no way that politics can ever be just. We clearly cannot correct the past even if we grant the Romantic claptrap for the sake of the argument. The very idea that we ever could looks utterly unrealistic.
David McDonagh | Dec 31, 2012 | Reply
Don:
Now that I’m stepping down as president of CEI, I’m going to be posting more (and responding to the posts of others). As I think you know, one of my new center’s goals is to address how best to market liberty (what I refer to as Value Based Communications). This approach (as I noted in my response to Bob’s essay) is based on the cultural value theory work that the late Aaron Wildavsky developed.
Not sure whether postings of this type are valuable or not but would be very inuterested in your perspective.
Happy New Year.
Fred Smith, CEI
FRED L SMITH | Dec 31, 2012 | Reply
In reply to Roger McKinney I might report that J.J. Rousseau said somewhere in his Confessions (1782) [I never marked the page] that he would rather be ranked below all men that the equal of anyone. I think most people would agree to him on that, even if they would rather not rudely confess to it. Most people are completely indifferent to the ideal of equality. It has no merit so their indifference there is just as well.
The state thrives on sheer cant. But Michael J. Sandel confuses cant with ethics. What is odd about the statists is the camels they are all too willing to swallow while they fuss over the nits they find in their criticism of the market. They embrace war on the danger they fear that a freer market may cause central park in New York to be redeveloped. That is what some of them have protested to me. Yes, that is the sacredness of the likes of Sandel.
Christianity is more perverse than socialism ever was, even though it is of mere thought only rather than of immoral deeds so it is not immoral in what it does only in its dreams.
Although he managed to find an even dafter moral outlook than Christianity in his silly worship of war that he seemed to recommend, I think Nietzsche comes into his own on criticising Christianity. It is a creed of envy, as he says. That backward Christian creed certainly made hypocrisy into a modern virtue.
However, liberalism stands for freedom of religion, no matter how dotty, as long as it does not abuse others. But note that slavery is not one iota unchristian, even if it is clearly illiberal. The Bible says only that one should not take Jews as slaves. Releasing any other slaves is held to be immoral. See Leviticus chapter 25 from paragraph 39 on to the end of the chapter.
We generally earn our money by serving others: indeed, the market might be said to be institutionalised in an altruist way. Smith looks around for a hidden hand when the main institution he is concerned with is the division of labour that very clearly gets all who work on it to specialise in serving others in a way that is not one whit nebulous or difficult to realise. The hypothesis of the hidden hand of Jupiter is hardly needed. The market serves the people as clearly as the wars the state cause ruins people’s lives around the world, if not at home in the UK or the USA.
Cobden did appeal to Christianity in holding that Wilberforce was right opposing slavery and in his own opposition to the Corn Laws but he appealed to what he, and others, thought it was rather than to the perversity of what the Bible has to say.
Envy is not the main motivation behind socialism, though it is often there too, for false economy clearly is. Listen to them and hear what they say.
David McDonagh | Dec 31, 2012 | Reply
David, You should read more about economic history, especially the series by McCloskey on bourgeois values. McCloskey does a great job of slaying the most common explanations for the rise of capitalism in the 16th century. She replaces them with the idea that attitudes toward commerce had to change first and they changed in favor of the bourgeois values.
But McCloskey hasn’t yet gone into the cause of that change in values. The answer to that is found in the writing of the Church scholars at Salamanca, Spain. Hayek and other Austrian writers have acknowledged the Salamancan scholars as the fathers of modern Austrian economics. But more importantly, they gave people a reason and a theology to back free markets and limited government. Protestant theologians also contributed to the theory of limited government in response to the atrocities committed by governments against their own people in the name of religion.
McCloskey does note that the bourgeois values were first instantiated in the protestant Dutch Republic, Adam Smith’s shining example of the nation most advanced in his system of economic liberty.
In summary, the very freedoms you seek to advance came to us through Christianity. In addition, many philosophers of science attribute the rise of modern science to Christianity’s obsession with reason, which most other cultures at the time lacked.
BTW, Greeks and Romans were very rational, too, so why didn’t they develop capitalism? Because they lacked the bourgeois values that Christianity gave us.
Freedom in the West peaked with the peak of traditional Christianity, and declined with it. Freedom declined because the bourgeois values fell out of favor with the decline of Christianity.
One of those values is the evil of envy. Envy is the power behind socialism. Socialism elevates envy to a virtue. Envy trumps all reason.
You wrote: “Most people are completely indifferent to the ideal of equality.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Read the research on happiness. It’s all about relative comparisons. People care more about equality than anything else, socialists especially. Why do you think President Obama and the Democrats have made such an issue of it? Why do socialist web sites fixate on rises in the gini coefficient? You are totally out of touch if you think people don’t care about equality of wealth/income.
Roger McKinney | Jan 1, 2013 | Reply
Well done! However, we cannot ignore that libertarianism is also a question of graduation (like salt) and as such we should set boundaries and look for the golden average (in Aristotle’s sense), but still allow for individual preferences.
That is why I consider constitutional liberalism as a must, while being more tolerant in what concerns moral liberalism.
See my post.
Marques Mendes | Jan 1, 2013 | Reply
Thank you very much for your reply, Roger.
I always do mean to read more.
I have not read much of Donald or Deride, early or late, but both are highly thought of and I expect that it is quite rightly so. Engels was upset that the workers rather liked bourgeois values but he attempted to make that refutation of the materialist conception of history into an eccentric example of it rather than the counter example that it objectively was.
Was there was a change in values from what were previous hostile values to trade? My own answer is that there were none such. I do not think highly of the Weber/Tawney outlook. The likes of Tawney never realised how alien the crass idea of equality always was to the general public. Chaucer seems to say more about the past than historians of his time do.
Christianity as it is in texts and as the people imagine it to be seems to be very different as far as I can see. Many do take it as way more bourgeois than it ever was. Chaucer, despite writing about pilgrims hardly shows us any Christians at all. The texts are as Tom Paine said they were in The Age of Reason (1793).
But I will make an even greater effort to get hold of the now authoress that you recommend. I think I have read the odd article.
Reason seems innate to me. Ray Percival’s Myth of the Closed Mind (2012) gives a fair account of reason in humans at all times. I do not think that Christianity aided science or liberty but maybe I simply err there. But I do think that Christianity was spread by the use of reason.
I think that Julian Simon explains why the market emerged when it did: population growth. See The Ultimate Resource (1981; II 1996).
Why do the socialists go on about equality if most people are indifferent to it? It is not the only thing they go on about that is never going to be popular, Roger. Democracy is another; politics in general is a third idea that bores most people. Why have the ideals then? Because the socialists think they are good, that is why; but Marx was one who hated the schoolteacher ideal of equality so many Marxists do not like it too, as a result.
The likes of Richard Layard do love equality but how sincere is he? We got him a bit depressed in a discussion once. I think that Francis Bacon was right that mere language obfuscates from us what we really think tacitly, by getting us to adopt false idols.
I would say that no one is sincere on equality.
David McDonagh | Jan 3, 2013 | Reply