Freedom of choice, but only for "responsible" choices

Freedom of speech is worthless if it's restricted to things that'll never offend anybody. 

Freedom of choice also requires that we be able to choose things other people think are dumb. Otherwise, what's the point? You might as well flip to a world where you're given a menu of permitted choices and where you're forced to pick one of them instead of carving out your own path. 

Here's Will Wilkinson at The Economist on Cassandra C's forced chemotherapy. She's 17 and refused chemotherapy, with her mother's support. She is likely to die as consequence.

Will writes:

It's simply maddening. Let's recap. Cassandra's mother does not force her to submit to an unwanted treatment, so she is an unfit mother. Cassandra is therefore held hostage by the state and allowed to return home only if she pays a ransom: submission to the unwanted treatment. Held against her will, and very afraid, so she agrees under duress. But she hasn't really changed her mind about the treatment, so she reneges. This is then used as evidence that she was insufficiently mature to be allowed to make her own decisions about the treatment in the first place. Dizzy yet? It seems that the only thing that would have counted as dispositive evidence of Cassandra's maturity, of her capacity to withhold consent, was a willingness to grant it.   

I suspect Cassandra has some dotty ideas about chemotherapy. Perhaps she inherited them from her mom. It may be that if she were allowed to act on her dotty ideas, she would die, while chemotherapy may save her (Hodgkin Lymphoma is one of the more treatable cancers). But liberty is a completely empty ideal if we are free to act only when our conception of our interests coincides with those of experts, medical and otherwise. If we are entitled to choose on our own behalf—or on our children's behalf—only when we are deemed rational, and rationality is defined to mean a consensus with the authorities, then autonomy is a bad joke. Cassandra's case illustrates the technocratic tendency of American culture and politics to nibble away at the edges of our autonomy, to deprive us of the right to make anything but the medically correct choice.

Emphasis added.

Every time I make this point on rationality, the public health brigade here insists that I'm arguing in favour of some blackboard model of perfect rationality. Rather, deviation from what public health doctors think is best, where those doctors don't seem to give a whit about the patient's experience other than QALYs, sure ain't evidence of irrationality.

For fear of risk

Will Wilkinson on the stuff that encouraged my emigration to New Zealand:

Shutting down sledding hills is inspired by the same sort of simpering caution that keeps Americans shoeless in airport security lines and, closer to home, keeps parents from letting their kids walk a few blocks to school alone, despite the fact that America today is as safe as the longed-for "Leave It to Beaver" golden age.

As an American (and Iowan!) I find this sort of flinching risk-aversion profoundly embarrassing. We might like to locate the blame for things like sledding bans somewhere out there in the unruly tort system (and indeed Messrs Ramseyer and Rasmusen do), but we must face the possibility that the blame also lies within. Perhaps it's better to be safe than sorry, but one wonders whether we won't become sorry to have made such a fetish of staying safe. In much the same way that dominant firms, jealous of market share, tend to become over-cautious and lose their edge, America the weak-kneed hegemon risks losing the can-do, risk-taking, innovative pioneer spirit that made it the world's dominant economic and military power. Is it worth devoting so much zeal to protecting America's young minds from brain damage if the finest among them wind up too conservative to seek anything but a sure paycheck? If Americans need something to fear, it should be that by continuing to inspire this surfeit of heedfulness in generation after generation, America risks heading downhill, and not in the fun way.

Please let's make sure that New Zealand stays out of this particular asylum. What it's done to America isn't pretty.

The scar

Kevin Vallier over at Bleeding-Heart Libertarians asked whether a non-ideological political philosophy is possible. And Will Wilkinson gave his answer; I bolded the especially good bit.

It's mostly personal epistemic virtue, but the content of belief helps too. I think a moderate general Pyrrhonism plus conceptually savvy empiricism plus pluralism plus a socially deliberative/procedural bent (not just democratic but also scientific) adds up to something close to non-ideological -- as close one is likely to get, at any rate.

I stopped calling myself a libertarian in part because I thought my many marginal disagreements added up to something really substantive and categorical. Mostly, though, because ideological self-definition inwardly encourages a spirit of community and camaraderie and partisanship that is one of the blessings of life, but which also makes true philosophy next to impossible. I struggle daily with the possibility that I have made the wrong decision, and that belonging, even on the basis of shared error, is more important than truth. Where my label was, there is a scar.

I read that, and I thought about the new Church of Atheism.

I instead choose multiple churches. Pluralist libertarian consequentialist rationalist attempted-truth-seeker contractarian sometimes-anarchist. So long as I don't think too hard about the weightings on the different parts, I don't think that forces too strong a commitment to any bit of it. I choose the hat to fit the setting as needed, trying to keep the truth-seeker one closest to the scalp. That doesn't give me the same shared-community benefits as pure identification could give, but the Economics Department here at Canterbury is a pretty good alternative source of such benefits for pluralist libertarian consequentialist rationalist attempted-truth-seeker contractarian sometimes-anarchists.

HT: @AdamGurri

Paternalist visions

Will Wilkinson and a colleague at The Economist have been sparring over paternalism. Where M.S., Wilkinson's colleague, argues paternalistic policy is an acceptable democratic way of getting towards desirable social goals, Wilkinson reminds us that a liberal democracy tries to leave a lot of decisions about the good to the individual.

Notice that we may convert any paternalistic argument into a benignly "democratic" argument simply by asserting that the intended subject of the proposed law is the character of society as a whole. Well, do we want a society in which the influence of heretics is left wholly unchecked, threatening public spiritual health? Torquemada didn't. The Taliban doesn't! Suppose we concede, just for the sake of argument, that this sort of public-spiritedness isn't paternalistic. Is it better than paternalism? It may be democratic. But is it liberal?

Liberal democracy is liberal in the first instance because it removes the protection of basic rights from the domain of collective deliberation. Do we want to be the kind of society that allows people to worship any way they like? That allows poor people to vote? That lets folks say sexy things, communist things, impertinent things, stupid things, Thomas Friedman things. Yes, yes, and mostly yes. Indeed, we think this stuff is so important, we mostly agree it ought to be illegal to put it up for a vote! My colleague suggests that there's something downright anti-social in making a principled argument against limiting the scope of peaceful individual choice. But I love society. Especially liberal ones.

The liberal society allows the existence of a personal sphere that's outside of the political sphere; I really like bright line rules keeping the two separate.

But I share Wilkinson's concerns about "Thomas Friedman things".

Brian Wansink and David Just, two of the academics on whose work Bloomberg leaned when pushing his ban on big soda cups, warn that their work really can't justify Bloomberg's ban; people forced to consume less than they'd like tend to compensate on other margins. Canada's Dan Gardner disagrees, suggesting changes in social norms coming from the changed cup size can, in the longer term, change consumption:

It wasn’t so long ago, remember, that no one expected to be able to buy 64-ounce soft drinks. Or even conceived of such a thing. If “mega jugs” were to go the way of leaded gasoline, the banning of which was also fought and resented, they would some day be forgotten. Like leaded gasoline.

It's an empirical question whether the ban winds up affecting anything. But there's a categorical difference between bans on leaded gasoline and bans on large soft drinks. Leaded gasoline increases concentrations of environmental lead and imposes harms on others; bigger drinks at the cinema might make a bigger mess if spilled on a non-drinker but otherwise only really affect the drinker.

If the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, why does it get a seat beside me in the theatre?

Paternalism - for children, and for the lower orders

Will Wilkinson's excellent post at The Economist highlights the less-than-hidden classist underpinnings of New York's soda ban.

GIGANTIC sugared soft drinks are disgusting. Let's just get that out of the way. Can we also agree that the high-calorie drinks rich people like to consume—red wine, artisanal beer, caramel frappuccinos, mango smoothies with wheatgrass and a protein boost—aren't at all disgusting? At any rate, we yuppie pinot-drinkers know how to look after ourselves. In contrast, the wretched classless hordes, many of them being of dubious heritage, lack the refinement of taste necessary to make autonomy unobjectionable. Those who abuse their liberty, filling the sidewalks of our great cities with repulsive shuffling blimps, can't expect to keep it, can they? 

But should we really be surprised that paternalistic regulation would be so-targeted? When I work backwards from the set of paternalistic regulations to the most plausible underlying motives, I still wind up with the conclusion I'd reached a year ago:

The behaviours of the lower orders disgust me [the regulator]. They give in to base animalistic sensory pleasures. We need to fix them. Tax and regulate them until they stop being noticeably annoying. We'll say it's for their own good, but we'll really stick to the kinds of things that annoy us. So things like making sure everyone in low decile schools takes a course in basic personal finance so they understand how hire-purchase works and avoid making mistakes with loans, we'll not worry about that. But we'll tax fatty foods because obese people are unpleasant to look at and we'll tax the kinds of booze that the lower orders drink because few things are more unpleasant than poor drunk idiots.

It's not implausible that poorer cohorts are more in need of paternalistic regulation than higher income cohorts, if only because of differences in intelligence across cohorts. Do flip back to the linked post and consider the stylized facts there presented:

• The kinds of alcohol that poor people like get taxed far more heavily relative to overall price than do the kinds of alcohol that rich people like. That isn't unreasonable where the external costs of alcohol use are proportionate to the pure alcohol consumed, but when we start going for minimum price regulation and specific taxes on RTDs, it looks an awful lot more targeted.
• Official government agencies ignore the evidence on the J-curve and instead promote an abstinence only line. The only sense I can make of this is the noble lie: dumb people who'd otherwise be tempted to drink too much if they drink at all shouldn't drink; smart people can see through the official line.
• The war on drugs is more heavily enforced against poor people than against rich people.
• "Fat taxes" would disproportionately hit the poor. The tax will be a greater portion of the purchase price of hamburger meat compared to scotch fillet, even if the fat proportions are identical. And, the higher the proportion of ingredient cost in total price (as opposed to say the input of a high quality chef), the greater will be the the proportionate burden of an ingredient tax. Any bets on whether the price of a McDonald's burger goes up by more, percentage-wise, than a Ruth's Chris steak if we put in a fat tax?
• If the point of an "internality" tax like a fat tax is to force the individual to weigh the health costs to himself when purchasing, we'd need to scale those taxes by income if we think that rich people respond less to a small per unit increase in food prices than do poor people but suffer from similar behavioural anomalies; if we think that smart rich people are already weighing up those costs and compensating with increased exercise, then it doesn't matter that the per unit charge has less effect on the that group.
• There's all kinds of talk of mandating that fast food restaurants prominently display nutritional information and calorie counts. But folks tend to overestimate calorie counts at fast food places and underestimate them at the fancier restaurants where rich people eat. Because everybody expects fast food to have lots of calories.
• Finally, high IQ folks may be better able to route around whatever regulations are put in place.

It still looks to me as though paternalistic regulation is generally targeted at annoying behaviours exhibited by poor people, with sufficient route-arounds to keep the regulations from being too annoying for higher income cohorts. Bloomberg's soda restrictions were just a bit more blatant than most. Again, pulling from last year's post:

One of the better critiques of policy prescriptions based on behavioural economics is that it requires the modeller to step out of the system and to assume that he and the regulator who implements his policies are less subject to the problems ascribed to the regulation's subjects. Public choice folks worry that the paternalistic regulators suffer from the same behavioural foibles as everyone else but have worse incentives than do individuals who have to suffer the consequences of their own decisions. But if the implicit model is that all of this behavioural stuff really only applies to those people over there - poor dumb people, then there's good reason to keep the modeller out of the system.

Recall that Berggren found very few articles in behavioural economics advancing policy prescriptions consider the possibility that regulators might also be subject to behavioural anomalies; I think it's because of a general assumption that they do in fact sit above those they're regulating.

Paraphrasing Robert Frank

Will Wilkinson points to the latest from Robert Frank. I'm going to change a couple words in the quote here; you tell me if it still makes sense. If it doesn't, why does it make sense if we switch it back to talking about forced income redistribution rather than forced kidney redistribution?

Each year as the April 15 health filing deadline draws near, healthy older libertarians mount the stump in high dudgeon to denounce the government for seizing kidneys that are rightfully theirs. They might do well to reflect briefly on the fact that no matter how much they've exercised, they wouldn't have had any kidneys to seize in the first place if they'd grown up in a country like Nepal or Somalia; they're already older than the average life expectancy in those countries. The infrastructure that made their health possible was built by those who today need kidneys. Much of that health is thus an unearned return on investments made by others.

Once we start viewing income in excess of that possible in the state of nature as a rent available for redistribution, I don't know what particularly stops the argument's extension over to forced kidney redistribution from those older than the typical life expectancy in the state of nature.

A public responsibility?

When we have a public health system, and when folks worry about costs others impose through the health system, all kinds of private behaviours have external effects. Will Wilkinson rightly chastises Mark Bittman's food nannyism:

Before getting to the problems with Mr Bittman's price-fixing plan, let's ask why this might be thought a legitimate function of government? Mr Bittman says:

[P]ublic health is the role of the government, and our diet is right up there with any other public responsibility you can name, from water treatment to mass transit.

"Our diet"? Interesting. Try this: Our pattern of sexual conduct is a public responsibility. Or: Our convictions are a public responsibility. Right up there with dog-catching, even! After all, one can come down with a killing disease rogering the wrong lad or lass. Moreover, wick-dipping is the leading cause of new citizens, many of whom will turn out to be a net drain on the public purse. Can we afford to continue allowing just anyone to inseminate just anyone? To ask this question is almost to answer it. And how about our convictions?! If folks get their heads full up with wrong notions, they might want to invade Yemen, vote Republican, draw to an inside straight, or eat a Twinkie, to the detriment of us all.

Wilkinson is right to use the reductio. But that can be dangerous; not long after I used mandatory ski helmets as reductio, I started seeing proposals entreating that mandatory helmets would save lives. When I wrote in the NZ Med Journal about the logical end of seeing public health costs as being basis for policy - bringing one's sex life from the private to the public realm - earnest healthists replied that they've happily prescribed subsidised condoms. Setting up signposts about what's logically implied by positions might well be taken as suggestions of where to go next....

Too many people?

Bryan Caplan's new book tries to convince middle to upper income folks to have more kids. The kind of folks who are holding back because they reckon that they can't afford the time investment. Caplan argues that kids don't need to be as big a time sink as folks think - since the marginal effect of parental effort on kid outcomes is very low, why not just have fun with your kids instead?

It's a reasonably convincing argument. It won't change the equilibrium size of our household as we don't think we can afford the additional childcare expenditures and we'd likely need a bigger house. And if your consumption bundle requires family trans-Pacific travel, additional kids are definitely not low marginal cost.

But I've been most surprised at one of the more common lines of critique he's been getting in comments. Here's a representative selection.

From NPR:

Boy, what an appropriately named book. I'm amazed that with dwindling natural resources your show would promote the selfish (and environmentally irresponsible) act of having more than two children in a family. That makes me one of a very significant minority, but I don't think it's something to brag about in the current environment. At some point, societies are going to have to address the spread of humans is having on the planet--not unlike a virus.

128 people "recommended" this comment over at the New York Times:

There are great reasons to have fewer children, or none. Overpopulation, for one--and it's behind so many of the other social problems we have. ...

I didn't see any such comments over at the Wall Street Journal.

Even if you want to come down on the side of the folks freaking out about population, middle to upper class Americans having more kids is hardly the cause of any problems. It's far more likely rather to be a solution.


Caplan's talking to Trevor and Carol, the couple who hesitated too long and had no kids, not to Clevon, whose great great great grandkids wind up starring in "Ow My Balls!" It's mildly insane to think that his argument, directed as it is, does harm by contributing to overpopulation.

The more kids Bryan and Corina have, the better for everyone else.

Will Wilkinson's critique misses the mark as well, and more widely if you consider just how damned good he is on everything else.

Economists generally begin from the assumption that we’re rational decision-makers who do the best we can to achieve our aims given the constraints we face. In Mr. Caplan’s previous book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” he lays out an elaborate theory of “rational irrationality” in order to explain how it is possible for voters to act on irrational beliefs about politics and policy without having to abandon the economist’s foundational rationality assumption. But Mr. Caplan offers us no analogous theory of the rationally irrational mother. He simply begins with the ad hoc hypothesis that mothers are forgoing body-reconfiguring pregnancy, excruciating childbirth and the massive time-cost of additional children (which women disproportionately shoulder) not because they are rational beings taking into full account the manifold considerations relevant to profoundly life-shaping choices, but because they are in error about the power of parenting to shape “adult outcomes.” I like it better when Mr. Caplan reasons like an economist.

All that is required for Caplan's argument to hold is that parents largely misattribute good outcomes to high parental effort when high parental effort generally is confounded by good genes. The misattribution leads to overestimation of the amount of effort required for good outcomes and consequently leads parents to perceive the marginal effort cost of acceptable quality children as being higher than it really is. If the amount of effort needed for good outcomes is really lower than folks think, at least some of those people will be having fewer than their optimal number of children. Caplan's not trying to convince folks like Will to have children - best evidence suggests he sees them as a bad rather than a good; rather, he's trying to convince the folks who already like kids and are waivering about having one (another) because of the costs.

What's the model?

Karl at Modeled Behaviour says that Peter Orszag's flip from OMB to Citigroup is about what we expect when high level public sector salaries are too low.

One thing the low pay of senior public officials allows for is a pump-and-jump. Even in the most noble of circumstances smart folks will notice that they can get to the front of the line pretty fast in the low competition public sector, build an impressive resume and then jump ship to the private sector to make a load of cash.

Less noble would involve actively selling the benefits of one’s position to the highest bidder. What would stop people from doing this? The fear that they would be fired and thus loose out on a lucrative salary. However, with no lucrative salary there is little incentive not to do this.

I do hope that economically oriented folks aren’t suggesting that we use moral suasion to control government corruption. People respond to incentives. If you don’t want them to sell you out then you have to pay them more.

But the only way this works is if public salaries are no less than the relevant private alternative. If the bundle of connections and institutional knowledge embedded in a high ranking official is worth more to folks in the private sector than in the public, we're going to have problems. At best, we'd delay folks jumping ship for a few years: lots of these appointees are dumped whenever there's a change in administration. Their value to the private sector then is less than it would be as a mid-term jump, but the problem isn't much changed.

The only way I can see higher pay being a solution to the problem is if much of it comes as a bond that pays out if, after some period of time, the official hasn't flipped to work for somebody he was regulating while in office; the bond would have to be big enough to outweigh the official's value to the private sector. That seems unlikely.

We can also build a pretty reasonable efficiency case for allowing these guys to jump to the private sector. Suppose that the regulatory barriers facing firms are exogenous and largely silly. A official bringing to the private sector knowledge of how to best avoid those costs brings real value. The main worry is if the barriers are endogenous or if the private sector reward is endogenous to diversions made by the official to private agents.

First best is to reduce the value of these guys to the private sector by having fewer private sector profits be contingent on intimate knowledge of political processes.

Will Wilkinson writes more eloquently than I do:

In my opinion, the seeming inevitability of Orszag-like migrations points to a potentially fatal tension within the progressive strand of liberal thought. Progressives laudably seek to oppose injustice by deploying government power as a countervailing force against the imagined opressive and exploitative tendencies of market institutions. Yet it seems that time and again market institutions find ways to use the government's regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very public these functions were meant to protect.

We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism. So it's no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power. But it really isn't the Citizens United decision that's about to make Peter Orszag a minor Midas. It's the vast power of a handful of Washington players, with whom Mr Orszag has become relatively intimate, to make or destroy great fortunes more or less at whim. Well-connected wonks can get rich on Wall Street only because Washington power is now so unconstrained. Washington is so unconstrained in no small part because progressives and New Dealers and Keynesians and neo-cons and neo-liberals for various good and bad reasons wanted it that way. So, what is to be done? Summon a self-bottling genie-bottling genie?

The classically liberal answer is to make government less powerful. The monstrous offspring of entangled markets and states can be defeated only by the most thorough possible separation. But public self-protection through market-state divorce can work only if libertarians are right that unfettered markets are not by nature unstable, that they do not lead to opressive concentrations of power, that we would do better without a central bank, and so on. Most of us don't believe that. Until more of us do, we're not going far in that direction. And maybe that's just as well. Maybe it's true that markets hum along smoothly only with relatively active government intervention and it's also true that relatively active government intervention is eventually inevitably co-opted, exacerbating rather than mitigating capitalism's injustices. Perhaps the best we can hope ever to achieve is a fleeting state of grace when fundamentally unstable forces are temporarily held in balance by an evanescent combination of complementary cultural currents. This is increasingly my fear: that there is no principled alternative to muddling through; that every ideologue's op-ed is wrong, except the ones serendipitously right. But muddle we must.

Ridiculously depressing. Two brighter notes:

• The world as it is is still a pretty decent place
• Seasteads may come

Onanistic voting

Wilkinson argues the case for voting's rationality over at The Economist.

Unlike some benighted economists, I don't think voting is irrational. Individual participation in collective activities are perfectly rational when one has a taste for participation. Voting is a bit like clapping at the end of a performance or doing the wave at a baseball game. It affects the outcome not a whit whether or not you clap at the symphony or throw your arms in the air when the wave rolls around to the cheap seats. But most of us like to go along and we do. Nothing irrational about that!

I don't think any economist would argue that voting is irrational if done for the intrinsic joy of voting. But few voters go to the ballot box singing a tune about how they love standing in queues and pulling arms on machines; they really seem to think that it's important and that it makes a difference. If voting is performed as an instrumental act in pursuit of better policies, it's irrational.

Andrew Gelman says it's not necessarily irrational if you count up the benefits to all the other folks who are benefited by your changing policy. But what about all the people you harm by pushing outcomes away from what they'd prefer? Surely if your vote winds up being the decider between A and B, half the population is going to be pissed off at you, right? But suppose that you, the deciding voter, really have better knowledge and know which party's bundle of policies is better for the country as a whole. We're then relying on your willingness to provide public goods to make the voting act rational. And we already know that folks in large anonymous environments defect in provision of public goods. So it's pretty unlikely that that's what's going on.

I'll stick with voting as onanism. If done for its own sake, you can't call it irrational. But if you think it's productive activity, you're probably a bit nuts. We'll see how many Americans today prove that they're masters of their domain and how many are tempted by the seemingly attractive candidate across the street....

Wilkinson at The Economist

If you're not reading The Economist's Democracy in America blog, you should be now that Wilkinson's there. The W.W. posts are his. On Glenn Beck:

Mr Goldberg sees it differently, I presume, because he is convinced that a call to the defence of our heaven-kissed American heritage is ipso facto a call to the defence of liberty. I am not so sure. Those whose souls sing to the message of providential American exceptionalism and misty non-denominational pieties are also those most likely to support the use of force to impose conservative morality at home and Western-style democracy abroad. I suspect the tens of thousands who answered Mr Beck's call emerged predominantly from the ranks of those who vigorously defend Arizona's nativist crackdown, who are trying to shout down the so-called "ground-zero mosque", who have cast Barack Obama as a pretender bent on destruction, and who continue to support the strafing of innocents abroad with taxpayer-funded remote-controlled death kites. And I suspect few of them see dishonour in any of it.

In the end, Mr Beck's personal libertarian streak is simply irrelevant if his populism is pitched to and invigorates some of America's most conservative and least libertarian voters. But Mr Goldberg should take heart. Canada is nice this time of year.

Liberaltarian exit

Brink Lindsay and Will Wilkinson leave Cato.

Writes Weigel:

I asked for comment on this and was told that the institute does not typically comment on personnel matters. But you have to struggle not to see a political context to this. Lindsey and Wilkinson are among the Cato scholars who most often find common cause with liberals. In 2006, after the GOP lost Congress, Lindsey coined the term "Liberaltarians" to suggest that Libertarians and liberals could work together outside of the conservative movement. Shortly after this, he launched a dinner series where liberals and Libertarians met to discuss big ideas. (Disclosure: I attended some of these dinners.) In 2009 and 2010, as the libertarian movement moved back into the right's fold, Lindsey remained iconoclastic—just last month he penned a rare, biting criticism of The Battle, a book by AEI President Arthur Brooks which argues that economic theory is at the center of a new American culture war.

Did any of this play a role in the departure of Lindsey and Wilkinson? I've asked Lindsey and Wilkinson, and Wilkinson has declined to talk about it, which makes perfect sense. But I'm noticing Libertarians on Twitter starting to deride this move and intimate that Cato is enforcing a sort of orthodoxy. (The title of Wilkinson's kiss-off post, "The Liberaltarian Diaspora," certainly hints at something.)

I'm a fan of liberaltarianism, especially in a place like New Zealand where economic liberalism is less strong a predictor of social liberalism than in the States.

Wilkinson now blogs as W.W. over at The Economist.

Libertarian diasporas

Will Wilkinson asks why so few American libertarians fond of Tiebout ever have exercised their exit option; I waved a friendly hello from New Zealand which, despite its problems, I'd argue still offers greater personal freedom than does the United States.

The US beats NZ on:

• Firearms ownership
• Ability to do what you want with your own property if you're way out in the back woods where nobody's watching: in NZ, you'd still need Resource Consent and tourists may still have right of access to your property's rivers and streams.
• Income taxes are higher in NZ on folks on a Professorial salary: 40% top marginal tax rate kicks in at $70,000 (including the 2% ACC PAYE Earner's Levy). A comprehensive Goods and Services Tax at 12.5% increases the overall tax burden: on the next dollar I earn, I'll get to spend $0.475 $0.533 (thanks Sam) net of GST. But, local rates are relatively low: I pay about $2100/year on our house: schools are funded out of income taxes, not local rates.
• Smokers face greater restrictions here than in the US

We roughly tie on:

• Ridiculous city zoning and bylaw enforcement (swimming pools, subdividing and the like)
• Most day to day living

But NZ dominates on:

• A less enthusiastic War on Drugs: what drug raids we have tend not (yet) to be conducted by paramilitary squads who seem to like killing corgis and terrifying the children. If California passes legalisation, rank ordering here may change.
• Civil asset forfeiture is new here and hasn't as yet generated the horrible abuses seen in the US, though that may well change
• Gay marriage is legal via civil union: Eleanor's birth certificate even had a tick box in case Eleanor had two mommies instead of the standard mother and father; in the former case, the lesbian partner would have counted as "Second Parent". This kind of respect would have to count for an awful lot for folks in that category.
• Prostitution is legal and seems to have improved outcomes for sex workers. Recognition of same sex relationships and legalisation of prostitution were the two best things achieved under Helen Clark's Labour government; John Key has done nothing that comes close and seems likely to do nothing that comes close. A couple points reduction in income taxes rates, if ever enacted, counts for less in terms of aggregate liberty than these two achievements of the Clark government.
• Ease of starting a business: nothing like the US regs that force someone wanting to open a hair braiding salon to get professional certification as a hairdresser, for example.
• Relatively simple and hassle free income tax system; the majority of wage earners don't even need to file a return
• Free trade, both domestic and international, is the norm: I don't need the permission of any marketing board to grow, sell, or purchase a potato or to milk a cow
• If I wanted to, I could buy a still and start distilling my own whiskey with no fears of the Revenuers. Overall alcohol policy is far more liberal than that in the US, though that's under some current threat.

So, why haven't all the libertarians moved to New Zealand? Well, negative liberty isn't all that matters. A Senior Lecturer here at Canterbury at the top of that scale earns about $100,000 NZ, or about $72,000 US at current exchange rates. That's not all that high by US standards: entry level salaries at lots of places Stateside are higher. But it's enough to put me at the 97th percentile of earnings here. A round trip ticket that would have my family visit both sets of grandparents would cost about ten percent of my before-tax income; we don't get home often. As Susan also works, our household income would be even higher on a New Zealand decile scale, but isn't all that impressive in US terms. Cost of living here is relatively high too: fixed costs and small market problems. Think hard about how much value you put on Amazon one-click free shipping.

I can understand why libertarians placing high weight on gun rights relative to other civil liberties would stay in the US rather than moving here. Those with a broader rights-weighting system ought to prefer New Zealand; the income loss could perhaps give a way of measuring how greatly the non-movers value those freedoms. Suppose the expected income loss for someone moving here is a quarter. Can a gay couple value legal recognition of their relationship by more than a quarter of their income and still remain in the US rather than moving to New Zealand?

So, Will, why aren't you here yet?

Status

I'd quibbled a bit with Half Sigma over here. HS argued that, even in a world with no rent seeking, value transference is unavoidable: creating a new product that increases total welfare also results in an increase in the creator's status; if status is a fixed-sum game, then the creator of value has also transferred status from other people to himself. HS recommended progressive income taxation as means of compensating folks who consequently lost status.

I suggested rather that status is properly viewed as multidimensional, with folks being able to choose in which status game they'd like to compete. Money status is only one dimension; being "#1 Dad" may be another; being able to lift heavy weights a third (see the Mandelbaums in classic Seinfeld for examples of both of those); having a maxed out World of Warcraft character yet another. There are as many status dimensions as there are activities in which folks can seek excellence. In that case, why ought we single out status transfers through value creation as being the dimension demanding transfers? Shouldn't I get a transfer whenever somebody else goes to the gym, pushing me further down on the "able to lift weights" status dimension? It all seems a nonsense.

I've seen reasonable argument that status may well wind up loading on a single dimension - basically Roissy's "alphaness" measure, your effective attractiveness to the gender of your choice. Of course, the range of corrective status taxation measures in that case would be more complicated, more comprehensive, and more ridiculous. How do we tax Brother Sharp for his fashion sense? It's not implausible that status might reduce to this single dimension, but neither is it obvious to me that it does.

HS replies, pointing to his older post arguing that World of Warcraft status isn't real status. I'd been thinking less of his post when I commented (hadn't started reading him until recently) and more of Will Wilkinson's rather nice essay of a couple years back on the multidimensionality of status; WoW is just one of the near-infinite ways folks can choose to acquire status. HS makes a false consciousness argument, clearly but forgivably not having read my prior piece with Boudreaux arguing against the notion. If folks can get happiness from upweighting the dimensions on which they do better, who are we to say that isn't real happiness?

Campaign speech

Wilkinson's column in The Week is excellent:

So I was caught off-guard when MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann called the Citizens United decision "a Supreme Court–sanctioned murder of what little democracy is left in this democracy." When others followed with similar howls of wounded outrage, I became aware of a gap in my understanding of the progressive Left. I suddenly realized that free speech for big business is to the Left what due process for alleged terrorists is to the Right: an unbearable burden that threatens freedom itself.

For most progressives, democracy is more than a mere instrument for throwing the bums out. Democracy is instead the embodiment of the liberal ideal of equal freedom. This sacred ideal is threatened, progressives argue, by concentrations of wealth that enable inequalities in political voice. If victory in the public sphere is determined by the size of one’s megaphone, then wealthy interests with large megaphones will capture the system and rig it to their permanent advantage. Consequently, megaphones must be regulated to ensure an equitable democratic process.

...
But the granddaddy of all progressive errors – the one that breeds all others -- is the assumption that greater government power can rectify the problem of unequal citizen power. Government can only act as a “countervailing force” in this regard if it is not acting already to serve corporate and special interests. But it is. That is why new government powers merely augment, rather than offset, the already disproportionate power of entrenched interests.

The biggest, baddest corporations, unions, and special interests already use government to exert power on their behalf. With the heft of the state behind them, they can swing sweetheart deals (witness earmarks) and they can foil upstart competitors (through regulation) who might otherwise eat their lunch. A government unhindered by limits retains the discretion to pick winners. A government that can make or break great fortunes invites a bruising and wasteful competition for its favor. It cannot be surprising, then, that those with the most -- thus most to lose -- assiduously seek favor from the state. It should not be surprising that those with powerful Washington connections are handsomely compensated by big special interests. And it should not be surprising when the well-connected exploit their relationships with people in power in the same way they maximize any other valuable asset.

The guy can turn a phrase.

Also worth checking out: a new Kiwi blog on campaign finance. Its first posts basically cover the articles I use in my public choice class, so they're heading in the right direction!