Mechanism Not Policy: response

Nick Szabo has written a response to my Mechanism Not Policy article. Here's my response to Nick.

I really enjoy when I get a good, hostile reading of my ideas by somebody with an axe to grind. First, because it stimulates my thinking a great deal, and second because such emotional, ideological responses invariably contain many errors whose debunking educates me.

Nick, you start out with a gross misreading: I didn't say "the law", I said "the Constitution". I stuck to one example, primarily because I wanted to make a point about interpretation.

As for common law evincing "mechanism, not policy", no. It's just historically not true. Bob Black's White Man's Ghost Dance provides lots of counterexamples. First, we wouldn't expect a distributed decision making system to be able to adhere to such a restriction. Second, decisions about the nature of contracts or property amount to policies. Third, common law does not set up its own mechanisms of judges and courts, the sovereign does (to the best of my knowledge: you may know better.)

I'll grant that the common law does provide mechanism for the people (as opposed to my example of providing mechanism for itself.) Of course, statute law often does that as well. For example, laws creating limited liability corporations (which I think I recall had to override common law.) These too are important modern inventions by common law countries, but not inventions of common law.

But common law (a common libertarian obsession) is a distraction from my point, that the US Constitution was primarily intended to define mechanism, not policy such as rights. Now that statement may be "absurd and awful" to you, Nick, with your heavy investment in ideology and received interpretation of law. But it's a fair historical hypothesis begging for an unbiased examination. So what examination do you give it besides crying "absurd and awful"?

Not much that I can see. Instead you unleash a torrent of unbacked and arguable (if not incorrect) assertions. For example, you write:

"In this case, the Founders (which for the Bill of Rights are the anti-Federalists, not generally the Federalists as Mike suggests) clearly had in their minds that the main purpose of the mechanisms was to protect individual rights..."

While the anti-Federalists won their Bill of Rights, it was written by arch Federalist Madison. And mechanism proponent, if I'm right. If anti-Federalists had written the Bill of Rights, we'd expect rather clear statements of rights not just against the federal government, but against everybody. Instead, we see extremely skimpy statement of rights, almost as if invoking the principle of least authority in rights. But exactly enough for mechanism purposes. I don't know if the anti-Federalists were snookered into thinking the rights were more generous, or if they were satisfied that they were adequate. But it's obvious that they don't resemble the Virginia Bill of Rights very much in ways typical of Madison, as I discussed.

You also say:

""Life" and "liberty" occur three times in the Constitution; "property" is protected in four different places. Mike's beloved welfare state, on the other hand, occurs nowhere in the Constitution. Much of the Constitution was intended to protect the mechanisms of the common law from the hubristic policymaking of legislatures and the arbitrary actions of government officials."

Far be it from me to snicker at the lame argument of counting uses of words without context, but you're really silly here. And if you want to say welfare state doesn't occur in the Constitution, well neither does common law. But I wouldn't expect such an anacronism, would you? If I'm right about mechanism, not policy, then there's no contradiction between the Constitution and the welfare state. Unlike, say, the Virginia Bill of Rights.

Now, if you're going to insist that the idea was to protect the common law from legislators, then I really have to wonder how the 5th Amendment came to permit deprivation of life, liberty, and property by due process of law. How do you read that as protecting the common law?

"The recent great strides of progress in human history, such as the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, and the abolition of slavery, were propagated by common law countries."

Now that's just silly. Those were widespread events, taking place over many nations with many different legal systems. Slavery, for example, was abolished innumerable times in innumerable countries. And we were among the last, with our commonlaw protecting slavery to the end. And slavery was never abolished by common law: always by legislation or other centralized fiat. The industrial revolution occurred in many other non-commonlaw nations, such as Germany. And the Information Revolution has prospered in large part due to non-commonlaw nations such as Japan and Sweden.

I recommend that you re-read my essay, and put up some real objections.

The easy way to deal with trolls and haters.

You'd think that with all the fuss over trolls and hate mail in blog comments that somebody would have come up with the obvious solution.

Instead of censorship or turning off comments, simply have a second set of comments. Nobody can post to them: they are the deprecated, shameful, unwanted, proscribed, improper, hateful, obscene, or otherwise inappropriate comments. Blog editors can consign noisome comments there (or back) with a simple checkbox. Perhaps checking an explanation category too. Perhaps some posters' comments are automatically put there. Readers can see exactly what is and isn't thought appropriate.

This accomplishes too things. It allows blog editors to maintain the atmosphere they want with the same effort it takes to delete a post. And it produces editorial transparency: communication of disapproval without censorship.

Doubtless some won't want this system. In my 30+ year experience of mail lists and news groups (starting on the PLATO system), trolls actually benefit many groups because they lead people to face their own understanding of the topics with more than just belief. But when there is a high volume of obnoxious or off topic posts, this might be a good solution.

A divider, not a uniter.

Bush came into office claiming to be a uniter, not a divider.

That lie was transparent from the start, though of course all of his ilk swore it was what made him great.

Well, what more evidence do we need than the most divisive supreme court nomination ever?

There were probably dozens of eligable candidates for the supreme court who would have sailed through the confirmation process essentially unopposed: which indicates they would satisfy the American people somewhat better than this extreme right ideologue.

Medical Care, Insurance, and Socialized Medicine

I've just now made a new index for Medical Care, Insurance, and Socialized Medicine. I don't know why I've not had this long ago.

The first (new) entry is Paul Krugman's "Health Care Confidential" artical from the New York Times, as quoted by Brad DeLong. It pretty much thrashes the libertarian-preferred idea that markets do it best. And it does it with the bane of ideology: real world facts.

If anybody would like to suggest the best sites that oppose the market-oriented provision of health care, I'd like to add some.

Spying on our own people.

Why is it that I haven't seen people pointing out that every major dictatorship of the past Century or so has has their power cemented by extensive, unsupervised, secret spying on their own people? The Soviet Union. East Germany. Every other communist party you can name. Saddam. Pinochet. Hitler.

Why is it that I haven't seen people pointing out how bad it was when J. Edgar Hoover was spying on Americans, and how it gave him incredible power to blackmail and otherwise destroy leaders and members of legitimate organizations for his own political purposes?

Where are the conservatives, who you'd think would want to preserve freedoms? Where are the liberals, who'd also want to preserve freedoms, but also would be the first ones victimized by radicals with such power?

Idiotarian = Sexcrime

Yesterday, I started thinking about the term idiotarian. Basically, it's a term of hatred, like sexcrime, newspeak for "our enemy", or "them, not us". Despite attempts at a defining FAQ, it resists more precise definition. Users revel in their childish power to denounce, much as others did with "commie" or "doodyhead". Usually attempts to justify such terms illustrate how the authors are accusing others of their own sins.

So, I've added a new entry to my "Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism" page.

Why We Fight: An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (2.0)

Eric Raymond, Open Source self-promoter and self-appointed libertarian savior, seeks new levels of pomposity and foolishness He declares that people who don't worship his views are his poopeyhead enemies.

Anybody who can accurately count the strawmen gets an honorable mention.

Mechanism, Not Policy: Creation Of The Second Invisible Hand

Here's my new year's offering, my first substantial writing in a while.

Mechanism, Not Policy: Creation Of The Second Invisible Hand

It was triggered by a discussion with Nick Szabo at his blog Unenumerated: Negative rights and the United States Constitution. Nick was arriving at conclusions by methodologies that I considered weak at best.

As I've often been challenged by libertarian interpretations of the constitution, I thought it was about time that I attempted to write down my own thinking as to how to interpret it. My idea is rather idiosyncratic, and sure to annoy pretty much everybody if they take it seriously enough.

This is a first version. As I've never really discussed it with anybody before, I'm sure I'll get lots to think about from criticisms and eventually fix problems in it.

Latest quote added at end of collection...

The evidence strongly shows that Hong Kong and Singapore benefit from being small island economies on major trade routes, established as entrepots. They are not models for development of tropical agricultural economies such as those in Africa. Switzerland shows that a landlocked country can flourish if it is itself surrounded by rich nations, such as those in Europe, and serves as a long-standing land bridge between them.
Jeffrey Sachs, Scientific American Jan. 2005 p.14

This quote is relevant because many libertarians decry aid to developing nations, saying Hong Kong is the libertarian-like example that should be followed. One responded to Sachs' article on development with this argument, and Sachs responded.

Of course there are MANY other reasons why the countries libertarians claim are models are not libertarian. For example, almost all property is owned by the Hong Kong government, and public housing accounts for roughly half the population.

Adam Smith's Soft Side

Adam Smith's Soft Side
US Congressman Sherrod Brown points out that Adam Smith was not the one-dimensional "classical liberal" portrayed by libertarian historical revisionists.

The whole "classical liberal" term is a propaganda ploy (unhappily adopted by some innocent academics) designed to convince us of authority and historicity of modern libertarian dogma. It's as if libertarianism needed papal succession to justify authority descended from Peter (Adam Smith) to modern popes (Hayek, Mises, Rand, etc.)

And like Catholic dogmas, it's full of gross historical inaccuracies and conveniently overlooks other contemporaneous Christian (liberal) sects.

Added to the Libertarian Revisionist History page.

For Mises' Sake

The latest addition to Critiques is a delightful blast at Austrians.

Tom G. Palmer savages Llewellyn Rockwell, the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Hans-Hermann Hoppe for Austrianism above and beyond the call of sanity in For Mises' Sake.

The money lines are:

"If Hoppe is the leading light of Austrian economics as the Mises Institute presents him, then Austrian economics should prepare for a long dark age. At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not only economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics, as well. This bizarre claim turned a serious scholar and profound thinker into a comical cult figure, a sort of Euro Kim Il Sung. Hoppe's scholarship is so pitiful that one of his own colleagues -- who is still involved in the Mises Institute -- once remarked to me that Hoppe's book on ethics was a truly remarkable achievement; it was the only book he had ever read in which every step of the argument was a logical fallacy."

This has been placed in the "Libertarians Criticizing Each Other" and "Austrian Economics" indexes.

The worst crime of the 20th century. Whodunnit?

In my Libertarianism in One Lesson, I point out the libertarian principle that "All food, drugs, and medical treatments should be entirely unregulated: every industry should be able to kill 300,000 per year in the US like the tobacco industry."

Reality dwarfs my cynicism. Tim Lambert, in
The worst crime of the 20th century. Whodunnit? points out that the pesticide industry is attempting to blame Rachel Carson and her green followers for malarial deaths. But in reality, that industry is responsible for the deaths because they have fostered pesticide resistance in mosquitos through indiscriminant sales of their pesticides. Their accusations range from 50 to 90 million.

Criticisms of Anarcho-Capitalism

Thanks to Minhea Tudoreanu for a couple of suggestions, now added to the Libertarians Criticizing Each Other index.

NEW 10/05: A Fatal Instability in Anarcho-Capitalism

NEW 10/05: Anarcho-Capitalism Dissolves Into City States

Paul Birch shows some good reasons to think anarcho-capitalism is a utopian pipe-dream.