Survey Results

I think most libertarians would tend to agree with Hayek's presentation of the Economic Calculation Problem as a fairly fundamental obstacle to successful government planning. There are a couple of problems with government attempts to improve society: one is their practical ability to do so (given a clear goal, are they able to achieve it) and the other is how they decide what constitutes 'improvement'. The fact that they generally fail at the former tends to mask the fact that they don't really have a good way of doing the latter. Given all the relevant inputs, perfect rationality and unlimited computational capacity I concede the theoretical possibility of a central planner producing more optimal outcomes than a market. Such a planner would be so far from any government that actually exists or could exist given current technology however that I don't consider it particularly relevant whether it is theoretically possible or not. That could perhaps change if Eliezer is successful.

The more immediate problem is that governments are not structured in a way that provides incentives to improve society. The reality of politics is all about special interests, rent seeking, regulatory capture and political maneuvering. The system as it actually exists is certainly not capable of making rational policy choices to improve society, though it remains possible that by some happy accident some policies may not be terribly harmful.

My views on morality are certainly interconnected with my support for libertarianism. In the case of healthcare for example, my idea of what would constitute a good system may well differ from someone who takes a more utilitarian view of morality. For example, I think there may well be a place for some kind of government involvement in the control and treatment of infectious disease since there are externalities to consider if someone foregos treatment for cost reasons and a free at the point of delivery treatment service for infectious diseases is arguably a public good that would be undersupplied without government involvement. I don't however think that anyone has a fundamental right to healthcare and utilitarian arguments for healthcare reform that advocate a system based on a more 'equitable' allocation of healthcare resources are not going to carry much weight for me.

This does mean that I will tend to judge empirical evidence according to somewhat different standards than someone who takes a different view of morality. If someone is arguing for universal healthcare based on a particular set of moral premises, I am likely to point out evidence suggesting the reforms won't work even to achieve their stated goals rather than to try and argue with their premises. It's entirely possible that the evidence would suggest that the proposed reforms would achieve their goals and I would still not support the reforms however since I might not share those goals. There's an obvious risk that I will tend to view evidence selectively because of this but once you're aware of confirmation bias and make an effort to allow for it I'm not sure how much more you can do to protect yourself.

Many of the economic arguments for libertarianism stem from the fact that people don't act like pure altruists/utilitarians and instead act largely in their own self interest. I'd argue that if you start from utilitarian premises and try to devise policies to further those goals you are often going to find that the evidence indicates that the policies won't work because people respond to incentives according to their own self interest. Healthcare is full of examples of such problems - once people are insulated from the costs of their own treatment they will have a tendency to over-consume healthcare resources. In order to control costs rationing must be implemented by some kind of bureaucracy rather than by individual choice and the results are seldom optimal by any reasonable measure.

In France at least, "Libertarians" ("Libertaires") are traditionally left-wing anarchists, US-style Liberterians would be what we call "Liberals" ("Liberaux"), though it seems recently some started calling themselves "liberaux-libertaires".

I hadn't heard the term in the UK before encountering it in discussions with American libertarians online. I believe Classical Liberalism would be the closest term commonly (though not very commonly any more) used in the UK.

When speaking about politics in general, and current governments in particular, my rhetoric tends to be negative and focus on problems. This is because I hope that talking about the problems will get people to help fix or work around them.

It is my impression that the public, though perhaps not people on LW, have too much faith that a) they know what good public policy is, and b) that current policy is good. You would probably respond, and would be correct to respond, that government, and the political process, can do good. This should be recognized... I am not a libertarian extremist.

I know a fair bit about American politics, and the disciplines of political science/economics/sociology. But I know little about Europe, and I should have admitted that straight up. I hadn't / still don't fully understand the differences in how ideological politics is across the Atlantic. Don't people trumpet Rights-based claims a lot? Or draw on what are considered admirable nationalistic characteristics in framing debates? Or talk about the dangers of neo-liberalism or capitalism? I'll have to think/read about that more. Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm not at all sympathetic to the libertarian point of view, but I have to say that this does not sound like your true rejection. I find thomblake's Boyle's Law analogy quite apt: if you are really interested in thermodynamics, you have to start with material at the Boyle's Law level. Likewise, if you are truly interested in understanding libertarian thought, it behooves you to start with a basic text.

Your celebration of ignorance angers me. You asked for a recommendation and got one from probably one of the best-qualified here to answer that question.

Really, it's a very short book. And it's one of the basic works on classical liberalism, one of the foundations (along with Locke's Second Treatise on Government) of all current discourse on liberalism.

Mill is arguably the fellow who invented consequentialism (with a hat tip to Bentham, and J.S. Mill's father). It's like if someone referred you to Boyle's Law and you insisted someone from the 17th century couldn't possibly have anything useful to say about physics.

EDIT: correction - as noted above, it was not taw who asked for a recommendation in the first place. Mea culpa.

Fair enough, I'd like to believe that my libertarian sympathies are based on a lot more than that as well.

I'm sure you've read a lot of Robin Hanson, do you feel he focuses a lot on a deontological justification for libertarian ideas? I also recommend http://www.marginalrevolution.com for learning to see the world through the eyes of thoughtful libertarian economists. Both of these sources are more libertarian than I am, but I find reading them very worthwhile and often convincing. In important respects, even Paul Krugman is more libertarian than most Americans.

I think we'd probably do well to discuss individual policies, which can be done more precisely than overarching political philosophies.

"don't think about it too much" as in "don't think about things you cannot affect". Unless you want to go and convince Eliezer to remove downvoting and leave only upvote and report links like on Hacker News.

This will leave more garbage in the comments of course, I think it's smaller problem than "downvote to disagree", but I have no strong evidence about it.

Unless or until we get separate voting for "agreement" vs. "quality", as people have mentioned a few times.

This is a problem for deontology in general, not a specific problem that arises when trying to combine it with consequentialism.

Whatever probability Y a deontologist would accept can simply be built into the constraint. If the constraint is satisfied, then you do A iff it maximizes X. Otherwise you don't.

Can't both of these questions be asked of pure consequentialists?

Assigning value to potential entities seems fraught with peril.

Such as?

Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen are more reasonable...

Along with a few others, I mentioned them both by name in an earlier version of that post. I didn't want to get bogged down presenting all the relationships needed to establish that all these people were in fact libertarians:

Arnold Kling, who writes at EconLog, has done a fair amount of thinking about the unique worldview in the Economics department at George Mason University (see here and here). I claim the position he lays out is essentially the same as mine above, with the explicit partisan identification removed. Kling is an adjunct professor of economics at GMU, along with Robin Hanson, Alex Tabarrok, and Tyler Cowen (whose blog cites his frequently). Kling's co-blogger Bryan Caplan has a written a popular book about public choice theory, which presents a thorough critique of government intervention and is supported by a lot of important research and some cool math. Caplan and Kling are both adjunct scholars at the Cato Institute, which also sponsors Will Wilkinson, whose wife is an editor at Reason.

Instead of beating that glob of stuff into something readable, I got lazy and went for the low-hanging fruit instead, specifically the over-the-top claim that there's no such thing as a coherent, consequentialist, libertarian argument against (e.g.) European-style socialzed health care.

It isn't a strawman.

Let's not argue semantics. I had intended to express the following simile:

(3-bullet-points : rigorous libertarian thinking) :: (straw-facsimile-of-human : actual-human)

That is how most libertarians argue. I liked that post much better, but it still doesn't say why these actions by the majority of libertarians matter.

I'm afraid I'm having trouble understanding what you mean here. Can you clarify? I recognize it may not speak to the question you're actually asking, but my immediate reaction to this is: "Arguments employed by most libertarians are completely irrelevant. It's the arguments employed by the strongest and most sophisticated libertarians that demand our attention."

I am not afraid of fakely consequentialist libertarians, because I think I can tell the difference. Except that I am afraid of Cato, which argues from the conclusions and might be clueful enough to invest in rhetoric. Why would you ever look to lobbyists?

I'm confused here, too. You mention falsely consequentialist libertarians and seem dismissive of them. You mention the Cato institute, and suggest they are arguing in bad faith and therefore very likely to be wrong. Your reference to "tell[ing] the difference" suggests you might entertain the idea of a consequentialist libertarian who argues in good faith. Is it possible that an earnest consequentialist libertarian could be right? What about?

Do you go looking for merit-worthy religious apologetics?

Yes. Diagnosing the faults in Alvin Plantinga's reasoning is important. Am I to understand you'd prefer a frank exchange of views with Jerry Falwell?

That said, do you know of any libertarian arguments that do not assume either 1) economic freedom as the primary terminal value or 2) assume the efficiency of real-world markets? Both are unwarranted assumptions that seem to underlie many libertarian arguments I've seen.

Yes. I included one such argument in the post you just replied to. I quote myself:

One interestding claim [of policy libertarianism]: State actors are (made up of) people who are subject to the same irrational biases and collective stupidity as market actors, and often have perverse incentive structures as well."

In other words, government decision-makers (i.e. bureaucrats) have just as much trouble integrating new information, violating social norms, and admitting error as consumers or decision-makers for firms, but bureaucrats are also subject to perverse incentives, regulatory capture, etc.

The implied primary terminal value here is welfare-maximization, according to some material standard that I'm assuming we could agree on, given that we're both here. No specific claim about the efficiency of markets is made. A fortiori, the argument derives some of its strength from the acknowledgment of certain deviations from rational behavior that (once again) we both presumably know about, because we're both here.

Some people use ideology more broadly. Others use it exactly as ideologue. It's pretty clear from taw's later comment that he meant it as ideologue. I responded to the short comment rather than the long comment because it merely insinuates.

Most human beings in any forum, anywhere, will be more obsessed with signaling and other concerns than The Truth -- even in a pseudo-anonymous survey -- and will be subject to most of the standard cognitive biases that bodybuilders will be, even if to a lesser degree. Being obsessed with The Truth does not mean never lying or exaggerating (or reporting just that one internet IQ test you took that was 1 std dev higher than your real-world test).

I thought you were a believer in the wisdom of crowds, though? The magic of collaborative estimation doesn't occur if everybody who isn't absolutely sure shuts up.

When providing what you think is the correct answer, there is still some probability that you're mistaken. That probability could be 10^-10, but it can't be zero. And when answering "I don't know", you can still guess, and produce a probability that your guess was correct. Lumping all low probabilities of being correct into a single qualitative judgment of "I don't know" sometimes makes sense, but sometimes a concrete probability is useful so you should know how to generate one.

At the time of this comment, thomblake's above comment is at -3 points and there are no comments arguing against his opinion, or why he is wrong. We should not downvote a comment simply because we disagree with it. Thomblake expressed an opinion that differs (I presume) from the community majority. A better response to such an expressed opinion is to present arguments that correct his belief. Voting based on agreement/disagreement will lead people not to express viewpoints they believe differ from the community's.

I'm intrigued. Please point me to a discussion of these issues or make a top level post.

I'll see what I can do. There was a fair bit about second-order desire in my self-knowledge class and if people would be interested in a distillation/summary of it, I'll provide.