If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride -- A Pony!

I think Matthew Yglesias' response to Josh Chafetz' exercise in wishful thinking was about right, even if Brad DeLong's is more nuanced. I'd like to note, though, that Chafetz is selling himself short. You see, wishes are totally free. It's like when you can't decide whether to daydream about being a famous Hollywood star or having amazing magical powers. Why not -- be a famous Hollywood star with amazing magical powers! Along these lines, John has developed an infallible way to improve any public policy wishes. You just wish for the thing, plus, wish that everyone would have their own pony! So, in Chafetz' case, he should not only wish that Bush would say a lot of good things about democracy-building and fighting terrorism in a speech written for him by a smart person, he should also wish that Bush should actually mean the things he says and enact policies which reflect this, and he should wish that everyone gets a pony. See?

John came up with this "and a pony" scheme during a discussion we were having about crazy libertarians. (He was bathing Zoë as I told him about the article I'd read, and Zoë chimed in that she wanted to get a pony too. Duly noted.) Reason recently published a debate held at its 35th anniversary banquet. The flavor of this discussion is indescribable. In its total estrangement from our political and social life today, its wilfull disregard of all known facts about human nature, it resembles nothing so much as a debate over some fine procedural point of end-stage communism, after the state has withered away. Child-care arrangements, let's say. Position A: there will be well run communal creches! Position B: nonsense! the amount of work required from each individual to maintain a perfectly functioning society will be so small that people can care for their own children and those of others on a spontaneous basis, as the need arises!

Allow me to summarize.

Richard A. Epstein: even in the libertarian utopia, some forms of state coercion will be required. If we must assemble 100 plots of land to build a railway which will benefit all, and only 99 owners will sell, then we may need to force a lone holdout to accept a fair price for his land. Similarly, the public enforcement of private rights and the creation of infrastructure will require money, so there will have to be some taxes. [Note to self: no shit, Sherlock.]

Randy Barnett: Not so fast! Let's cross that bridge when we come to it rather than restricting liberty in advance. We'll know a lot more about human liberty in the libertarian utopia, and private entrepreneurs will solve these problems somehow without our needing to grant to governments the dangerous ability to confiscate our property in the name of some nebulous "public good." And as for rights enforcement -- look it's Halley's Comet!

David Friedman: Epstein places too much confidence in his proposed restrictions on government power. Rights could be enforced privately, and imperfect but workable solutions to the holdouts in the railway case could also be found. "To justify taxation we need the additional assumption that rights enforcement cannot be done by the state at a profit, despite historical examples of societies where the right to enforce the law and collect the resulting fines was a marketable asset."

Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters who used to provide such "services" in old New York and Tokyo, medieval tax-farmers, or a Lendu militia. (In general, if thoughts of the Eastern Congo intrude, I suggest waving them away with the invisible hand and repeating "that's anarcho-capitalism" several times.) Nothing's happening but a buzzing noise, right?

Now try it the wishful thinking way. Just wish that we might all live in a state of perfect liberty, free of taxation and intrusive government, and that we should all be wealthier as well as freer. Now wish that people should, despite that lack of any restraint on their actions such as might be formed by policemen, functioning law courts, the SEC, and so on, not spend all their time screwing each other in predictable ways ranging from ordinary rape, through the selling of fraudulent stocks in non-existent ventures, up to the wholesale dumping of mercury in the public water supplies. (I mean, the general stock of water from which people privately draw.) Awesome huh? But it gets better. Now wish that everyone had a pony. Don't thank me, Thank John.

UPDATE: John wants me to point out that he got the idea from a Calvin and Hobbes strip in which little Susie first wishes that Calvin was nicer, then realizes she might just as well wish for a pony while she's at it. So, thank that Calvin and Hobbes guy, or something.

2ND UPDATE: Thanks to Ben Wolfson for alerting us to the miracle of searchable Calvin and Hobbes! (Now get to work on your abandoned wasteblog, Ben.) Here is the original 'might as well wish for a pony' strip. I humbly submit that it deserves to be a catch-phrase. Just say 'plus a pony' on suitable occasions and watch your opponents whither away like the state itself.

Comments

[Russell Arben Fox]

Those libertarians. They so silly.

[Adam Kotsko]

Ernesto Laclau and Chantall Mouffe, in attempting to chart a course beyond Marxism ("we wish to be post-Marxist, but post-Marxist"), write that emancipatory politics might be advanced not only by Marxism, but also by liberatarianism and certain forms of Christianity. Most people reading that would respond, quite cleverly, "Pipe dreams of the world, unite!"

[Matt]

Really, does anyone think it's a coincidence that it was largely Marxists (Cohen and the like) that took Nozick seriously, while liberals like Rawls shrugged it off as transpartent idiocy? The links between the two views are not so small. (And since Cohen now calls for a neo-christian "revolution of the spirt" so we can _really_ achieve justice, maybe we can throw in some more pie-in-the-sky views, too.)

As I'm wont to do in such situations, I'll recommend Sam Freeman's "Illiberal Libertarians: why Libertarianism Isn't a Liberal View", from Philosophy and Public Affairs in 2001. A really terrific paper.

[Carlos]

Libertanianism and emancipatory politics? Considering the antipathy -- often crossing the line into psychotic hatred -- many libertarians feel towards Lincoln, that must be a *crack* pipe.

As for Friedman fils, aka the Bad Seed... no, too long a story. And it involves Usenet, which automatically turns anything into a baroque and incoherent revenge fantasy anyway.

C.

[ben wolfson]

There's also this Calvin & Hobbes strip, though.

[Mike]

So what form of government actually promotes a successful society that doesn't trample on the individual?

Socialism? Show me a socialist society that isn't collapsing under the weight of its own welfare expenditures. Many of the welfare states of Europe are moving away from socialism because they realized that, *gasp* it just doesn't work!

Communism? Violently overthrow the government, impose a totalitarian socialist state and hope like hell that the man at top will relinquish power? And you people talk about pipe dreams?

The Social Conservatives' government? Selective socialism, selective capitalism. Selective freedoms and selective invasions of private actions? The most schizophrenic type, though in theory it could work to a degree

Fascism? Only one country has tried it and even they, the Italians, found it to be less than workable because men and women were too afraid of breaking ranks to take risks necessary for national growth.

You people make the mistake of labeling libertarians like we're all the same. Many of us reject the irrational allegiance to principles when they fly in the face of reality. We tend to oppose violating principles when they involve hurting people and society, especially for personal or group gain by a minority. If you would spend more than five minutes reading libertarian commentary you'd know that what separates us from conservatives in America is that despite our differences, we agree on at least 2/3 of the issues.

Libertarians do not want a weak and ineffective government. Rather we want a government is very strong in its core competencies, but that doesn't meddle in every aspect of public life. We're not about firing 90% of the police in America, we want them enforcing the basic laws like murder, fraud, rape and theft, not drug laws.

Perhaps you should read the Libertarian Party's platform on education if you think that we favor an "everyone for himself" education system. The LP states clearly that it supports using vouchers to pay for education and private schools. The solution is to give parents more options, ie more freedom, where their kids go.

It is commentary like what you linked to that shows a lack of understanding of human nature. We libertarians tend to be well aware of Nietzsche's Will to Power concept. Sadly it seems that many of our critics, who view human nature as essentially benevolent, have never heard of it. Why is it that democratic systems rarely last longer than a few centuries? Because they become too powerful and the basic human drive to dominate and control takes over. The bureacrats take over and run via fiat.

The goal of libertarianism is efficiency. The government should have limited power to tell groups what to do. How many wars have been fought because one ethnic group took control of a big government? Too many to count. Africa is a good example of big government causing civil strife, not libertarianism. That the governments of most of its countries are all but nonexistant is not a sign that libertarianism holds sway but that the society is too weak to sustain them.

Of course if you want to argue the Civil War, please bring something more than the simplistic "Abraham Lincoln was good because he freed the slaves" rhetoric to the table. Lincoln was as racist, if not more so, than David Duke. Lincoln tried to offer the South a compromise which would have prohibited the federal government from altering or abolishing any state law or institution. The South didn't care because the war was about trade restrictions, not slavery for the southerners. In fact slavery was dying in the south at the time anyway.

Lincoln drafted over 2 million northerners and immigrants to fight a war against a part of the country that didn't want to control the government, thus it wasn't even to fight a civil war! And lest we forget, it was the illustrious Supreme Court of the United States that ruled that blacks could not be citizens.

[Belle Waring]

Umm, Mike, before you get all "Lincoln was a racist" on me, maybe you should read the Reason debate I was specifically responding to? I know there are lots of minarchist libertarians around who aren't utopian dreamers. I submit that Randy Barnett isn't one of them.

[Michael Duff]

Confessions of a backslidden libertarian

[Nicholas Weininger]

Um, have you actually ever read any of David Friedman's longer works? In particular, have you read _The Machinery of Freedom_ or, even better, _Law's Order_?

The historical examples of private, profit-making enforcement mechanisms he's discussing are, in fact, real historical examples, and in those works where he has the space to do so (unlike the Reason Forum) he discusses them in some detail. He also discusses, at length, the reasons why such agencies might or might not come to resemble mafias, marauding rebel militias, etc., and the mechanisms by which they might be kept from doing so.

In short: Friedman's philosophical approach is the *antithesis* of wishful thinking. He claims it is plausible that we might eventually be able to have private rights enforcement because he's actually sat down and thought at length about how to do it, how to handle the hard problems involved, and what historical examples can teach us about same.

Many of _Reason's_ readers are likely familiar with his work, and so understand that he's making reference to that serious thought. You, apparently, are not, and so can satisfy yourself with a dismissive sneer.

[Nicholas Weininger]

Aggh, I now see that Micha has made the same point, with less outrage, in his comments to your followup post. Good for him, bad for me. Feel free to ignore the previous (but do read _Law's Order_-- only two or three chapters actually say anything much about anarchy, and the rest is brilliant economic analysis of law even if you're a hardened statist).

[Carlos]

Told ya.

[David Sucher]

Do any pro-libertarian folks have anything specific to offer about the problem of the "hold-out?" i.e. how do you solve it absent state coercion? Whenever I raise the hold-out issue with a libertarian they always start talking about ponies.

(I would be happy to be convinced that that the pony exists and can be saddled.)

Btw, I heard David Friedman speak at a conference on population some 35 years ago. He was brilliant, no question, stunningly so, but also totally unpersuasive...I believe he was arguing for the abolition of public police forces.

[Larry Hastings]

I'm a Libertarian, and I'll try to answer your question. Though I don't claim to represent all Libertarians.

I believe that if someone doesn't want to sell something, they should not have to sell, period. In my view, "slippery slope" is inadequate to describe "eminent domain" laws--it's more like a cliff. I've heard plenty of stories of thriving businesses, or peacable homeowners, being threatened with having their property taken away just because some large developer wants to make a new mall, or a highway interchange... or, in Donald Trump's case, a parking lot for limousines. If we take away the right to refuse to sell, we eviscerate property rights, and I don't think any public need exists that is worth destroying property rights over.

And Mike, not all Libertarians agree with the LP's stated position on school vouchers. Harry Browne speaks long and eloquently against them, and I agree with him--government money means government control. Once a school gets dependent on government vouchers, the government will start dictating how the school must run itself, and before too long the private schools are no different from the government schools. Florida's school voucher initiative was a failure from day one because of the litany of regulations that accompany them.

[Micha Ghertner]

David,

The hold-out problem is perhaps the most difficult one for anarchist libertarians, especially when applied to large public goods like national defense. Friedman suggests a number of possibilities in Machinery, but acknowledges that none of them are fully satisfying. His willingness to acknowledge the flaws in his theories is the primary reason why I find these attacks on him as an unthinking clod to be extremely unfair.

For smaller holdout problems on the community level, solutions are much easier to come by. For one thing, less signatures need to be collected and it is easier to collect them all before everyone finds out what your doing and realizes that it might be in their self-interest to free-ride. Other possibilities include an entrepreneur who purchases a large area of land and then sells it back to consumers with an additional public good thrown in as an additional benefit. Similar proposals involve homeowners associations formed by either voluntary individuals exclusively, pre-purchases by entrepreneur or some combination in between.

One other important thing to remember, even while acknowledging that public goods do present a problem for anarchism, is that maintaining good government is the largest public good of all. To wit, from Bryan Caplan's Anarchist Theory FAQ (the whole section on public goods is worth reading, but this is the best part):

Perhaps most fundamentally: government is not a solution to the public goods problem, but rather the primary instance of the problem. If you create a government to solve your public goods problems, you merely create a new public goods problem: the public good of restraining and checking the government from abusing its power. "[I]t is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey," wrote Thomas Paine; but what material incentive is there for individuals to help develop a vigilant national character? After all, surely it is a rare individual who appreciably affects the national culture during his or her lifetime.

To rely upon democracy as a counter-balance simply assumes away the public goods problem. After all, intelligent, informed voting is a public good; everyone benefits if the electorate reaches wise political judgments, but there is no personal, material incentive to "invest" in political information, since the same result will (almost certainly) happen whether you inform yourself or not. It should be no surprise that people know vastly more about their jobs than about their government. Many economists seem to be aware of this difficulty; in particular, public choice theory in economics emphasizes the externalities inherent in government action. But a double standard persists: while non-governmental externalities must be corrected by the state, we simply have to quietly endure the externalities inherent in political process.

Since there is no incentive to monitor the government, democracies must rely upon voluntary donations of intelligence and virtue. Because good government depends upon these voluntary donations, the public goods argument for government falls apart. Either unpaid virtue can make government work, in which case government isn't necessary to solve the public goods problem; or unpaid virtue is insufficient to make government work, in which case the government cannot be trusted to solve the public goods problem.

David Friedman has a particularly striking argument which goes one step further. Under governmental institutions, he explains, good law is a public good and bad law is a private good. That is, there is little direct personal incentive to lobby for laws that benefit everyone, but a strong personal incentive to lobby for laws that benefit special interests at the expense of everyone else. In contrast, under anarcho-capitalist institutions, good law is a private good and bad law is a public good. That is, by patronizing a firm which protects oneself, one reinforces the existence of socially beneficial law; but there is little incentive to "lobby" for the re-introduction of government. As Friedman explains, "Good law is still expensive - I must spend time and money determining which protection agency will best serve me - but having decided what I want, I get what I pay for. The benefit of my wise purchase goes to me, so I have an incentive to purchase wisely. It is now the person who wishes to reintroduce government who is caught in a public goods problem. He cannot abolish anarchy and reintroduce government for himself alone; he must do it for everyone or for no one. If he does it for everyone, he himself gets but a tiny fraction of the 'benefit' he expects the reintroduction of government to provide."

[Nicholas Weininger]

David: by "hold-out issue" do you mean the "99 people will sell at the going rate to pay for the highway but the 100th guy insists on staying put" issue?

If so, then I can think of at least three libertarian answers: hard-core principled, non-incremental pragmatist, and incremental pragmatist.

The hard-core answer to how you solve it is: you don't. If a person really won't sell their property even if you offer them way, way more money than they could get elsewhere, you leave them be and route around them, or you don't build. Sure, that will sometimes cause some inefficiencies, but that's the price of liberty. We are not, after all, utopians. :-)

The usual objections to this boil down to: "But we reeeeeally neeeed highways!" To which the philosophically principled libertarian answers: how do you know that you need them more than that one guy needs to stay on his own land? If he won't take $10 million for his wretched little postage stamp plot, maybe he really values that postage stamp at more than $10 million, and then how dare you take it away for only $500,000? For, to a principled libertarian, interpersonal utility comparisons are wrong, period. There is no "common good" which you can appeal to to make the case for denying a peaceful, honest person their possessions.

The non-incrementalist pragmatist would argue: look, hold-outs exist, but they won't *always* exist-- far from it. When they do, you can usually get them to go away non-coercively by paying them several times *more* than the going market rate for their property-- and if the highway is really that important, shouldn't you be willing to do so? That leaves the minority of "ultra-holdouts". They will cause some economic difficulties. But eminent domain powers also cause economic difficulties-- since they are inevitably, and often grotesquely, abused-- and indeed these may be worse than the holdout-caused difficulties.

The incrementalist would build on the non-incrementalist's argument by saying: even if we can't get rid of eminent domain laws, we ought at least modify them by making the gov't pay the dispossessed owners 5X or 10X the going market value, rather than the 1X currently allowed. This would reduce abuse by making it more costly, and restrict the use of the power to cases where it truly provides overwhelming benefits. Also, it would allow us to see whether true "ultra-holdouts" were actually common enough to justify keeping eminent domain powers around at all.

[Carlos]

I've conversed with Friedman fils online, and have found him to be dogmatic, intellectually dishonest, and willfully blind to historical evidence. And yes, I've read the DDFR oeuvre, such as it is. It's amazing how he can write an entire popularization of economics and not have any macro in it.

IMO, he's not even worth debating. He's the sort of thinker who is only right by happenstance or by borrowing from his betters. I am saddened but not shocked by libertarians who use him as a touchstone. It's not like Nozick or Coase are inaccessible. His dad's book is good, too.

C.

[David Sucher]

Wow. I am impressed. Thanks for the thoughtful answers.

Much food for thought and my first reaction (after agreeing that there certainly are abuses in eminent domain) is now I understand why we have eminent domain: The arguments against and the alternative schemes all so theoretical and abstract that it is no surprise eminent domain exists happily side-by-side within capitalism: the business people who control the western economies recognize its necessity in the overall scheme of things, even when it may come back to bite them at the individual level.

For the vast majority of people who own little or no real property, the issue is pretty simple: why should the public forego or pay more for a site for, say, a rapid-transit line than market value because you have to bribe, so to speak, a hoild-out?

But the answers set forth here are stimulating and I will answer a bit on my own blog where I can opine at boringly great length.

[Micha Ghertner]

David,

It's usually not the big business people it comes back to bite; big business people have lobbyists and government influence to ensure that their ox does not get gored. Rather, it is the small business owners and small property owners who cannot afford their own lobbyists and therefore suffer the most. When it is your property being taken, the arguments against eminent domain don't seem all that theoretical or abstract.

For the vast majority of people who own little or no real property, the issue is pretty simple: why should the public forego or pay more for a site for, say, a rapid-transit line than market value because you have to bribe, so to speak, a hoild-out?

Perhaps because they feel that it is their property that they worked hard for and imbued with sentimental value. The home that has housed a family for multiple generations. Perhaps because even "market value" is not an objective value, in the sense that is is merely an aggregation of all of the subjective values of willing buyers and sellers. Because, unless someone is willing to sell something for a certain price, you do not know how much value they actually place on it, and you must instead impose your values or someone else's values where theirs should be.

Perhaps the greater good for everyone else is so great that it outweighs these concerns. But this kind of decision should not be taken lightly.

[Navigator]

Omigod,
this is too good to pass up:
Mike has this to say about the nature of big government:
"Africa is a good example of big government causing civil strife, not libertarianism. That the governments of most of its countries are all but nonexistant is not a sign that libertarianism holds sway but that the society is too weak to sustain them."
Stop - you're killing me! Africa is a good example of big government causing civil strife, because African governments are mostly nonexistant! Fantastic!
Anyone else reminded of the Saturday Night Live spoof of Hardball, wherein Harry Belafonte declares that "the poodle is the black man of the dog world," and then, when Chris Matthews begs for more material, insists that "Osama bin Laden is an Uncle Tom"? Classic. If these people didn't exist we'd have to invent them.

[Bryant]

My, that's an ugly trackback. I apologize sincerely; I forgot to add a title.

[Anton Sherwood]

The holdout problem for roads, at least, seems obviously easy (for most cases). Instead of picking the exact line of the road in advance and buying up the land on that line, you identify a wide area where the road could run and buy options on parcels within that area; when your accumulated options add up to a good route, buy only the needed parcels. This way you make the holdout compete with neighbors to the left and right.

[W. Kiernan]

Regarding eminent domain: I am a land surveyor so I've seen quite a few occasions when the State of Florida or Pinellas or Hillsborough County exercise it. Here's a fact: almost every time I've seen an eminent domain taking, the so-called "hold-out" is getting royally fucked.

See, they give you (you, the graveyard-bound retiree living the downhill slide in the familiar homestead you've occupied for four or eight decades) so-called "market value" for your shitty old run-down wreck of a house, on its nice big private old lot - as though you were eager to sell - but what you don't get is enough cash to relocate to any place half or even a quarter as nice.

I sure don't look forward to being an old man in this country, no indeed.

[novalis]

Your suggested usage of "pony" is actually already in common use in the Perl community.

[Michael Rudmin]

Just a comment here: emminent domain seldom bites the powerful. In my hometown city of Harrisonburg, for example, it was dually used [in the same month] to

(1) buy $10000 pieces of undeveloped property for $100000 as "parking", after an independent audit showed that the city had 5 times as much parking as it would use in the next 20 years

and

(2) expropriate a working restaurant (Old Virginia Ham Cafe), paying only $12000 for the site, in the heart of the downtown region, where the cost of relocation was in the around $70k.

That to build the "Justice Building", with a special contract with a building contractor who seems to get all the city contracts, regardless of bids or overruns.

So that said, emminent domain has something really going for it: powerful corrupt people want it, because it gives them what they want.

Now, for my own reality bite: until you have a way of interrupting the current system and progressing to your own system, in a natural progression, then you can't get there from here.

And if you're a libertarian, then starting a revolution is out [talk about raising the level of force?], so I'd say that libertarianism as a practical goal is usually not rational. Nice to talk about, but not rational.

However, there are libertarian societies. Consider the Amish. The way they got there, was through common striving at a *different* goal. When their striving was unified, and their behavior moral, then libertarianism was a natural consequence.

That said, I've only seen one goal that has given that benefit: Christian striving to follow God and be holy. At that, it's seldom that libertarianism has been achieved -- usually in the end, the Christians are distracted from their goal, and fall to bitter disputes and warfare. (Read the book of James... it even happened in the old Christian churches).

So the Amish, or Teen Challenge, or any of a number of other small groups that have succeeded, really have something special.

You want libertarianism? Go look at them, and observe closely.

[bob]

your calvin & hobbes links are dead.