Evolving standards in the moral case for war.

Sometimes drinking with friends produces exactly the kind of heated political conversation you are looking to avoid on a night out. This was last night.

My views on war have evolved dramatically over the past four years. I’m not a pacifist, but at this point I think war is probably never justified unless the prospect of successfully freeing very very very large amounts of people from extreme destitution seems promising, or the state faces a concrete imminent existential threat (or has already been attacked).

Forget the political reasons for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. People on the left don’t get this if they haven’t paid adequate attention but these wars are not isolated — they are the manifestation of a philosophy called neoconservatism which ironically has a very liberal flavor in the Wilsonian tradition: the world is fraught with good and evil, and military force is justified to make the world safe for liberal democracy to flourish. This is the philosophical foundation for the war and subsequent nation building efforts in the middle east.

So I have a hard time swallowing liberal ire at George Bush but admiration for Barack Obama, who has made humanitarian justification and “finishing the job” a reason to justify the continuity of the Bush foreign policy agenda. This should be no more palatable to people who have objections to this kind of war.

Yet objections I heard last night centered on that humanitarian elements.

What about the women in Afghanistan if we left tomorrow?

What about the Libyans?

That there would be pain and suffering in Afghanistan if we left tomorrow is doubtless. However, there has been pain and suffering for a decade already, and there will be pain and suffering tomorrow if we stay.

War is not all upside. It involves huge economic and moral costs. It is a systematic campaign of the destruction of capital, infrastructure, and human life in direct violation of national sovereignty. If you’re an uber-Libertarian, it may also bother you that war often involves the state sending its own citizens (and their financial resources) to fight and die on foreign soils based on a policy decided by a very few individuals. Hundreds of thousands of people will be reasonably expected to perish in a protracted campaign, mostly in the country we are “freeing.” This is irrespective of whatever moral justification the aggressor nation settles on to rationalize the pursuit. These costs must be subtracted from the benefits. Often the benefits never accrue because the hubris of nation building is terribly ill-founded. Yet that there will be costs is certain.

Up till now I haven’t even mentioned the moral decay that war brings about in the aggressor nation. Citizen assassinations, indefinite detention, the expansion of the security state.

Not that Republicans would be better (with the exception of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson), but I’m not persuaded that Obama is progressive on foreign policy or has been particularly more progressive than Bush.  Maybe on the margin, at most. But I would expect my liberal friends, who claim to be more enlightened than the right, to see that.

Real regulation problems.

Meaty post from Reihan Salam over at The Agenda. It’s all worth a read but it’s all over the place. There was much to like, though.

One section worth discussing. Reihan is quoting a lot from other sources, but here he writes:

If we accept this framework, the deeper cause behind insufficient business investment becomes clear. Incumbent firms aren’t as frightened of new entrants as they should be.

Think about this across sectors of the economy. Sectors in which barriers to entry are relatively low are sectors in which firms are not stockpiling huge amounts of cash. Rather, firms are in a never-ending arms-race against rivals and potential rivals. They must engage in exploratory investment in order to maintain some fleeting advantage.

But then a few things happen: incumbents find ways to protect themselves through the patent system, as Alex Tabarrok and Michael Heller have argued. And regulations designed to protect workers and consumers grow so onerous and complex that new entrants are stymied by them.

This is what he means by the “incomplete neoliberal revolution,” which he metaphorically describes in totality as the “invisible hand” and the “invisible foot.” Today, we have more of the hand (upside profit motive) but we never really got around to the foot (decline/irrelevance from defeat).

What I like about this is that it offers a more eloquent way of articulating the problems of the current regulatory environment than the kind of whiny and inane “regulatory uncertainty” argument. Conservatives are consistently hammered by the left, with Paul Krugman at the helm, when they invoke the “confidence fairy” argument of unemployment: businesses won’t hire because they don’t know what their costs will be under Obama’s regulatory assault on free enterprise.

The way in which what Reihan is saying is better is that it comes across as less pro-business and more pro-free enterprise and thus seems less like implausible and shallow kowtowing to the business lobby and the 1%. It is also seemingly more plausible, although that is largely irrelevant from a political standpoint.

Instead of

Regulatory uncertainty –> hiring cost uncertainty –> less investment in expansion

the connection becomes

Current/prospective regulatory burden –> barriers to entry –> less emphasis on innovation versus deleveraging/productivity increases at incumbent firms –> less investment in expansion

Notice the connection shifts to the effect of regulations on prospective new firms, while the investment effects still fall on incumbent firms. This seems more plausible because 1) we know incumbent firms are investing meagerly and 2) regulations are intuitively more likely to have influence on the margin in making the decision to take startup/innovation risks to enter a market versus whether to simply bear increased costs and stay in business.

In fact, knowing that regulations could raise barriers to entry opens up the possibility that firms face a net positive effect of regulation on profit, rendering increased compliance costs negated. But this still doesn’t challenge the narrative that investment would remain low because the action incumbents take is not dictated so much by the regulation as by the adverse competition effects. Knowing a startup isn’t going to cause industry upheaval means you can hunker down, bring in a few consultants, and exploit cost-cutting and stream-lining. You might invest in automation, but you’re not investing in much expansion and you’re not hiring new labor.

Ironically, this means that left-championed policies adversely empower capital over labor. No one should want that.

This is a potentially powerful argument for conservatives because it’s not pro-business — we’re actually trying to eat into firm profit by making incumbent firms vulnerable to disruptive innovation. What’s better for society, Apple sitting on $80 billion in cash as a patent war chest, or Apple with little in cash on hand in a better patent environment? The latter, duh. Think of all the dead-weight loss in foregone innovation and unspent investment — patent attorneys’ fees notwithstanding.

This narrative also challenges the left on their basic assumptions about the efficacy of certain regulations. Not to say that regulations are bad, but they cannot be all upside with no downside risk. This speaks to that.

Here’s a great and scary chart of bank mergers from the recent past up to 2009

Yeah. This is what happens in an economy with higher barriers to entry. And what’s scary is that this is the industry we most agree needs new regulations. But to the extent that financial reform solidifies the market concentrations of the few winners that emerged from the financial crisis, that reform has made our financial system even more vulnerable and unhealthy from a pro-market perspective.

I’m bearish on conservatives articulating this well. But I think it’s terribly salient. Great work to Reihan for piecing all this together. And go read the original in full.

Cutesy with graphs, Ron Paul edition.

The Washington Post did a nice job utilizing a free Google search metric called Insights to get a handle on what’s going on with the Ron Paul surge. The post is called “The Ron Paul Phenomenon — in one graph,” but is it? The graph they posted, for the last 30 days, is this:

Pretty cool. I’ve been using Google Trends, a similar metric service, in my prediction markets research. Let’s just say these metrics track candidate popularity pretty well, and they should. But as for telling a story with this graph, it might be better, as is often the case, to zoom back and start with the big picture. Here’s this metric since 2004, when Google began.

The absolute maximum of this time series is actually in January 2008. And we know how Paul ended up doing in that election.

Today’s metric, if anything, suggests something perhaps even more underwhelming. Or maybe this metric doesn’t really tell us as much of the story as we thought. Be wary of geeks bearing one graph.

For fusionism.

Anyone who reads my blog posts (on those occasions when I decide something bothering me requires lengthy explication) or who is familiar with my Twitter feed is probably aware of my admiration of Will Wilkinson’s blogging. He’s in my Google Reader, I read almost everything he writes, and I tend to agree with the substance and enjoy the style.

That being said, I’m a little confused about Wilkinson’s handling ideology.

At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, he has, in part, the following to say:

I’m not interested in identifying which among the many kinds of bleeding-heart libertarian I am because I’m not interested in identifying myself a libertarian. Ideological labels are mutable, but at any given time they publicly connote a certain syndrome of convictions. What “libertarian” tends to mean to most people, including most people who self-identify as libertarian, is flatly at odds with some of what I believe. So I guess I’m just a liberal; the bleeding heart goes without saying.

Here are some not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all, maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity. (See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights. I could go on.

There is a point here. This tension is the very reason why left-libertarian blogs like BHL exist. I think the problem is that there are two ways of thinking about what it means to be libertarian, liberal or conservative in America. There’s what you think qualifies as philosophically justified beliefs in the subset of each respective ideology, and there’s the practical political coalitions that lay claim to those ideologies.

Wilkinson is great at articulating the former. I think a lot of what “liberaltarians” believe could easily be philosophically aligned with liberalism more than libertarianism. But I remain skeptical that libertarians who are particularly interested in positive liberty should abandon the right and/or claim the title “liberal.” I just don’t think they are what liberalism means as a political movement in the United States. Libertarianism is it’s own small tent with various groups but it’s a tent outside of what is politically liberal or conservative. That’s crucial.

The most glaring issue with overplaying the liberal connection is economic liberty, which Wilkinson concedes is a sharp point of divergence with the left.

Standard academic liberals badly understate the importance of economic freedom to freedom more generally. This conviction, that the protection of robust economic rights is essential to any regime shaped by a genuine concern for liberty–is essential to a fully liberal regime–is more than enough get you branded a sort of libertarian by many standard liberals. But one can hold to that conviction while siding with standard liberals against libertarians on many, many other important questions.

It’s one thing to hold this conviction while siding with liberals where you can and against libertarians where you should. It’s another thing entirely to be welcomed into a coalition with liberals while holding this belief. Wilkinson can’t demonstrate that American liberalism is willing to do this and I suspect it’s because it isn’t.

Don’t get me wrong: conservatism today is a philosophy of statism. But so is liberalism and to a greater extent. Our liberal transformative president has failed to lead on important issues of social progress and on instituting a more humane and modest foreign policy, while expanding the welfare state in ways that seem hardly optimal at actually helping Americans. On the other hand there’s at least some indication that libertarians have made headway with conservatives in supporting economic liberty. While such liberty need not be the end of the project, it is foundational and crucial. And while I wish that a more enlightened and sophisticated libertarian wing of the GOP electorate existed, I, like Wilkinson, can’t deny that there are at least some benefits accrued from the populist Tea Party/Paulista factions — especially on foreign policy. But it’s more than that, even. Go to CPAC and see the Campaign for Liberty people: young guys, often with dreads and copious body art and jewelry. They could be at Occupy encampments but instead they are at a yearly establishment event, warping conservative conventions. Gary Johnson stands up and rails against the drug war to cheers. These people don’t run the party but they’re an increasingly vocal minority. In the case of Paul, it’s, among other things, proof that paleoconservatives have in the past married racism and libertarianism into a workable coalition. In the case of Gary Johnson, it’s proof that someone from the right can govern a state on good libertarian principles and remain popular. There’s good on both fronts, especially Johnson’s. The establishment wants to suppress him from rising further in the party, but time and momentum could be against them.

American liberals — Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in particular — masterminded the foreign policy doctrine that has brought us so much grief. Neoconservatives cooped it, but we have every indication that conservatism is at least in part drifting away from it. Surely not enough. But the left is going to perpetuate the same thing, if begrudgingly, because Americans like America beating up on other people in the name of liberation. That’s the pragmatic fact of the matter. All the Glenn Greenwalds and Matt Yglesias-es in the world won’t change it. Time and the progressive forward march of the Enlightenment might, but that has implications for both political wings. Philosophically, there’s every reason to believe that endless war is a great neo-Jacobin liberal project. But that’s another debate.

American liberals have also doubled down on supporting public sector labor unions as a way to preserve a vital part of its coalition (labor) that was previously shrinking (private labor unions). As such, they have declared war on anyone who thinks it’s unreasonable for organized political organizations to lobby for and extract rents from tax payers for the employees who serve their public needs. The point here is that for those who are frustrated with social conservatism and it’s attendant racism and bigotry (however soft it may be), I see no reason to think that running to the left would be much less dissatisfying — just in other ways. What’s more, far right ideas skew older. Hateful people are dying off and being replaced by less hateful. The world is becoming more moral. I can’t say if liberal ideas I find anathema are so monotonic.

Philosophically, Wilkinson can be whatever he wants to say he is. He’s well-versed and can make a compelling argument for being liberal if he thinks that’s what he wants. I’ll take his word for it. Wherever he is, I’m nearby. Like I said, I almost always agree with his writing.

But politics isn’t philosophy. And in America there exists, crudely, two spheres: social/economic liberals and social/economic conservatives. I absolutely believe Libertarians have it right that liberty is most compatible with the classical liberal formulation that takes parts of both spheres, and that it’s at least the best foundation for liberty to build upon. As such, I’ll keep calling myself a libertarian because in American politics, that’s what I am.

And why will I stick, for now, with the American right? Wilkinson says:

Labels aside, I’m more interested in arguing with standard liberals about the nature and scope of specially-protected rights and liberties within the settled context of the liberal-democratic nation-state than in arguing with standard libertarians about the justification of taxation, publicly-financed education, or welfare transfers. After all, there are many orders of magnitude more standard liberals than standard libertarians, and they possess many orders of magnitude more influence. We pick our fights, and I’d like to pick ones that stand a chance of making a real difference.

Let’s argue philosophy with anyone and everyone, left and right. But politically, the above dichotomy is less relevant. The seminal question libertarians face and have always faced is whether our battles for political change are best fought on the left or right. People on the right read Hayek and Friedman and not Rothbard. Bring any of these names up and it’s those on the right who are most interested in discussing how to translate the noble aspects of Hayek and Friedman — and there is much nobility — into political programs. You can argue this is circular — libertarians find reception on the right because that’s where they made efforts to be, but it was a mutual marriage with a receptivity by the right that I don’t see on the left.

That being said, I strongly believe libertarians should be willing to reach out to the left where it can, at least standing with liberal thinkers who oppose racist over criminalization and endless war against the rest of their coalition. But we ended up on the right for a reason, and have been embraced if not always heeded. Even if a viable left-libertarian coalition can exist — a possibility we should explore — I will never, politically, call myself “liberal.” I think Wilkinson downplays how important that is. Politics is the medium through which we will translate our philosophy, whatever it is, into reality. And politically, libertarian still best-encapsulates what we are and what we are not.