Primitive Political Strategy

Megan McArdle points to an example of primitive political strategy. This kind of thing seems all too prevalent, especially among progressives. People call for ridiculous, giant institutional change for short-term political goals, and can forget about the fact that those institutions have served useful in protecting other policies that they favor. They compartmentalize. None of this is a surprise if you know that politics isn't about policy.

Calling for this kind of institutional change for short-term goals is a form of the belief that if only the proper people were in charge, policy would be implemented in the best possible way. Never do these folks question why these institutions exist. They might have important functions, you know, such as protecting individual liberty.

Life Experience Should Not Modify Your Opinion

When I'm debating some controversial topic with someone older than I am, even if I can thoroughly demolish their argument, I am sometimes met with a troubling claim, that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I'll come around on the topic. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that my opinion is based primarily on nothing more than my perception from personal experience.

When my cornered opponent makes this claim, it's a last resort. It's unwarranted condescension, because it reveals how wrong their entire approach is. Just by making the claim, they demonstrate that they believe all opinions are based primarily on an accumulation of personal experiences, even their own opinions. Their assumption reveals that they are not Bayesian, and that they intuit that no one is. For not being Bayesian, they have no authority that warrants such condescension.

I intentionally avoid presenting personal anecdotes cobbled together as evidence, because I know that projecting my own experience onto a situation to explain it is no evidence at all. I know that I suffer from all sorts of cognitive biases that obstruct my understanding of the truth. As such, my inclination is to rely on academic consensus. If I explain this explicitly to my opponent, they might dismiss academics as unreliable and irrelevant, hopelessly stuck in the ivory tower of academia.

Dismiss academics at your own peril. Sometimes there are very good reasons for dismissing academic consensus. I concede that most academics aren't Bayesian because academia is an elaborate credentialing and status-signaling mechanism. Furthermore, academics have often been wrong. The Sokal affair illustrates that entire fields can exist completely without merit. That academic consensus can easily be wrong should be intuitively obvious to an atheist; religious community leaders have always been considered academic experts, the most learned and smartest members of society. Still, it would be a fallacious inversion of an argument from authority to dismiss academic consensus simply because it is academic consensus.

For all of academia's flaws, the process of peer-reviewed scientific inquiry, informed by logic, statistics, and regression analysis, offers a better chance at discovering truth than any other institution in history. It is noble and desirable to criticize academic theories, but only as part of intellectually honest, impartial scientific inquiry. Dismissing academic consensus out of hand is primitive, and indicates intellectual dishonesty.

New reason.tv series on Ayn Rand's legacy debuts Novermber 2

When Cops Play Doctor

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak on Markets and the "Molecule of Love"

Address to The Right Way

This evening The Right Way was put on by some conservative and libertarian groups at UVA. It was an information session for people interested in these groups. I made some comments on behalf of the libertarian student group. Here's the text of my speech.

So why are we here? We don't really consider ourselves part of the political Right, but our relationship with the Right has been complex. Maybe we're more accurately described as "liberals" because we appreciate and welcome the change and progress that free markets bring from their dynamic processes.

Libertarians in America have had a shaky alliance with the Right and the Republican Party for the last few decades. The conservative movement is not often described as heterogenous, but it is. It's full of social conservatives, national security hawks, and economic libertarians. These interests are at odds.

We fear that the conservative movement has strayed. Ronald Reagan told Reason Magazine in an interview in 1975, "I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism." We are concerned that conservatives have by and large abandoned a rich intellectual tradition of defending the empowerment of individuals, and lost their focus on individual rights and individual responsibility. The way we see it, conservatives have neglected the positive moral and practical cases for free markets, and unfortunately have let the Left frame economic issues. Resources aren't granted to people from governments. The government can't create wealth, but it can easily confiscate it. So, it's troubling to us that conservative responses have been reactionary. For instance, there's no real market-oriented health care reform on the table today.

Libertarians strive for consistency in the way we think about freedom. It doesn't make any sense to us to trust people with firearms but not marijuana. William F. Buckley understood this. We don't care for authoritarian obsessions with individual moral choices. If we're truly advocating individual responsibility, the government has no role to play in legislating personal morality.

We understand that free markets lift the poorest in society up more than central planners ever could. Winston Churchill famously said, "for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."

Having a free market means that it's silly to waste money by "buying American" when we make more wealth available by purchasing goods and services from abroad for less money. We also understand that free markets include free labor markets, which means that people should be free to move across borders.

A free market means that we don't funnel money from taxpayers to reward mismanagement in the private sector. We believe that it is immoral and impractical to use military force to impose our will on the world. Striving to accomplish such an enormous task through government sounds like something the Democrats would attempt, but it too will fail as with all their quixotic attempts to engineer a utopia. We believe that international free markets intertwine the interests of all parties, so these arrangements lead to freedom, prosperity, and peace. We don't pretend that we can offer a utopia like those on the Left, but we can do better with free markets.

If you're interested in these ideas, I hope to see you at our events this year. We're excited to have the opportunity to participate in events and activities with the other groups present tonight. Thanks.

No Cognitive Dissonance from Bill Moyers

It was fascinating tonight to watch Bill Moyers on Real Time with Bill Maher. He commented how disappointing it is that Obama is becoming entangled in Afghanistan, just as JFK did in Vietnam. Moyers explained that both conflicts were viewed as ventures that were originally regarded as morally justified and well-intentioned, but they would consume more of the nation's resources than was anticipated, and ultimately, more than what was acceptable. He said this right after he called for universal health care.