Unpopular Ideas Club

One upside to my working double time on real estate renovation is the far flung signage opportunity.

I just kept throwing up signs until I ran out, without concern for how the neighbors might react. Indifference is what I expected. Then one day I came to work on a house and found this taped over poor Ronnie.

If you can’t load the image, here is the transcript:

I was invited to guest lecture at a casual Show-Me Institute lunch on the topic of market anarchy. I will just post here my opening statement and some notes on pre-written questions, but the talk varied from this in depth and topic, lasting about an hour. It was a fun honor.

In the broadest sense, the scientific process involves making observations until a pattern emerges, then you isolate variables until you can confidently hypothesize a logical rule for predicting future cases. For the rule to be valid, it has to hold sway in even the most extreme cases. The law of gravity applies equally to a slinky falling down the stairs and an astronomical body that bends light.

I see no reason why the phenomenon of trade and decision making in human groups is any less open to scientific analysis than the physics of motion. And the net results of observations by myself and lots of other intelligent commentators has outputted the hypothesis that “trade is better than force.”

By “better” I mean more efficient, which means with a given pile of resources, how do we get the most stuff, better quantity and quality of goods and services across the board, cheaper?

And just to be clear, “force” covers 100% of government operations, no matter how well intentioned, or even well received.

I posit that “trade is better than force” is a law of nature on par with the physical sciences, and as such it holds true in ALL cases. This means that public goods do not exist. There is nothing special about the services that government, even a minarchist one, might provide that allows them an exception to the more syllable-intensive versions of the law, such as, “privatization outproduces collectivization” and “individualism is superior to centralization.”

If it’s bad to have socialized health care, why is it ok to have socialized police? You are way more likely to need a doctor than a cop.

What is police protection? It is a valued service. So is financial advice and dish washing and event planning and anonymous sex. So everyone with a comparative advantage in any of the above will, as we know well, compete to innovate and undercut each other, then trade their proceeds with the other specialists. Dispute resolution is valuable! So pay for it!

So the reason I am an anarchist boils down to two fundamental principles:

1. Economics is a science, and the law we have extracted from our countless observations points unambiguously to a law describing transactions as either consensual or coerced. The degree to which transactions are contractual indicates the degree to which wealth accumulates in that society.
2. This applies for every situation, with every type of good. There is no sacred function performable only by monopoly states.

Has this ever been tried? Not in any particularly compelling way. That governments have essentially always existed is not particularly surprising based on how the human mind works. My model of human mind is a biological machine evolved to solve n-dimensional game theory grids. Lower animals are very good at the 2D prisoner dilemma–style puzzles. Fight or Flight. Feed yourself or your young, etc. Humans can solve grids, where the payoff in each cell is itself a grid, with an arbitrary number of players, etc. Like being able to see multiple moves ahead in chess, humans are subconsciously calculating multi-dimensional game theory matrices all the time, and this directly underlies things like time preference (the further in advance you are investing, the higher your n) and the sophisticated power struggles which appear in every social group and level.

So out of this tendency, a niche evolved very early on, in which an individual who has the knack can defect, yet send a signal of cooperation, thus short-circuiting the optimal tit-for-tat strategy. If you are willing to cooperate so long as those around you are cooperating, but you are in fact receiving a cooperation signal, but a defected payoff, most will keep playing the game, without stopping to assess what they are really getting out of this. The extreme depth at which the game-theory-mind is operating at the human level allows for this kind of manipulation.

This results in three kinds of people:

• Those capable of masking defection as cooperation, and fearlessly reaping the higher defect payoff.
• Those who see the defection as defection, and then advocate defection, or actually defect.
• Those who see what the defectors want them to see, and cooperate ad infinitum.

Which translates into our experience as:

• Politicians, corporatists, interest groups, etc.
• Malcontents (libertarians and other assorted revolutionaries)
• Everybody else.

So long as the “Everybody else” is the lion’s share of the population, the parasite class can feed at leisure, and the malcontents will be ignored. Of course there can be overlap, and a parasite might use the malcontent class to overthrow the current parasite regime and install his own group.

So that is my spin on the theory in summary. I will briefly go over the questions Josh posed for me, and will gladly go into more detail as desired.

“If there were no government, what stops someone from just taking things from someone else?”

Given the unapologetic pathetic rate of recovery in property crimes under our current system, the same question could be asked minus the “no.” A professional thief has a fairly paltry upside to his labor, the fence value of his target, and the down side is quite real and extremely negative, i.e., being killed by the rightful owner. The deterrence to theft is, in any system, first and foremost the fact that someone is going to be sporadically guarding that item, possibly with lethal force.

Insurance
Incentives

“Who or what would maintain public order?”

There is no public. If a mob trespasses on private land, the owner can call upon whatever security service he has contracted with to disperse them, or by whatever means he deems necessary.

“How would people who do bad things be punished?”

It’s important to understand that taking out a protection contract is not one-size-fits-all. The more enemies you have, the more expensive it is to protect you, and thus higher premiums. It doesn’t matter to your insurer why you have these enemies, but they will certainly notice patterns, like people who commit murder tend to be under vastly greater threat of retaliation than the actuarially average customer. If you are a wanton public threat, your premiums will skyrocket. If you are not a fabulously wealthy villain, you will eventually run out of money, and then be at the mercy of companies who have been contracted to avenge/compensate your victims.

But again, your insurer doesnt necessarily care about the nature of your enemies’ complaints against you, only that they exist. If, for example, there was a relatively peaceful society that had a lot of people that agreed with the idea that women who don’t cover their heads should be stoned, then a woman who flouts that custom would find it more expensive to insure her personal safety. Then it becomes a market equilibrium.

Women who want to wear what they want, and seek damages from people who throw rocks at them.
vs.
People who want to throw rocks at hatless women, and be protected from retaliation.

Whoever on net pays more for the service will tend to get their way. If I’m willing to pay a higher premium in order to go out of my way and make enemies, that is a luxury I can indulge, regardless of which side of this arbitrary dispute I fall. The women can save money by wearing their hajibs, and the fundamentalists can save money by not caring if women forgo their scarves. If a lot of women pay extra for a contract that says “if I get hit by a rock, pay me $500,” then their insurer has to raise their rates and eat the outpayments, or go extract from the men.

If the men sign a contract “if someone asks me to pay $500 for throwing a rock, make them go away,” then THEIR insurer has to either pay the $500 or physically deter debt collectors at some cost for guards. Every time they have to hire another guard or pay the other insurer the $500 for the claim, they have to raise rates on their customers.

“What stops police from just taking things over?”

They are specialists in taking voluntary payments from customers and providing protection against third party initiators of force. If the cops become predators themselves, they have vacated their market niche and will be replaced by a competitor.

“How do we ensure that people’s natural rights are protected? Do you believe in natural rights?”

I believe that things we call natural rights are things that people would be willing to be pay to have protected, and are free to make whatever contracts or take whatever action they deem necessary to achieve that goal.

“What about national defense?”

This is always a rather alarmist argument. On a pragmatic level, anti-statism will demonstrably increase wealth production, and place no restrictions on personal acquisition of armaments, thus resulting in a situation akin to the Nazis’ unwillingness to test the Swiss resolve.

“What about intellectual property?”

This a non-existent concept. Rights enforcement is a commodity. If an individual or organization can cost-effectively enforce, or contract out the enforcement of, intellectual property rights, more power to them. In the absence of state support, I sincerely doubt this is the case.

The consumer surplus boom from just music distribution is unprecedented.

For example, without internet, the music experience I get from say Pandora.com would cost, I don’t know, thousands of dollars to reproduce. But it’s virtually free, and while Pandora makes some profit, my life is literally wealthier. It’s not directly transferable, of course, because if I had exactly as much extra money to create the Pandora experience, but had to pay for it the old way, I would spend that money on other things. But since it IS so cheap, I get this benefit, as do millions of others. So music experience, which had a previous market value of perhaps billions of dollars, is being produced for next to nothing. This bonus has to be weighed against any enforcement regime, and will necessarily come up lacking for the overall wealth output.

“Without public education, what keeps the poor from falling behind the wealthy permanently?”

And the status quo is doing what about that? There will always be wealth disparity, the real question is whether upward mobility is possible. The extent to which property rights are protected increases the ease at which an impoverished individual can accumulate capital, take a risk on a long-term investment, and leverage himself into the middle class.

“Would you describe yourself as a Georgist?”

Georgists are equivalent to any other minarchists, with a radically simplified tax program. I would certainly support a Georgist candidate with any kind of chance, over the status quo; but I am not a minarchist, so the peculiarities of their funding method is irrelevant next to the fact that they are financing dangerous and unnecessary state activity.

“If there are no public roads, won’t it be hard to get from place to place?”

Under the Trade Trumps Force Law, it is necessarily true that either:

• privatized roads will be better, cheaper and more efficient
   
  OR
• roads as a subsidized good are currently too cheap, and if privatized roads become more expensive to use, other areas of the economy will improve by a greater proportion than roads lose, resulting in an overall increase in wealth.

Some other common tropes:

• Somebody wants to buy a nuke
   
  Nukes are expensive. If you have $20 million to spare, you can probably do whatever you want in the current system as well. There are legitimate reasons for a widely subscribed security insurance company to consider the nuclear option. Mutually Assured Destruction works. This is why there was no WWIII.
• You can buy and sell slaves
   
  Slavery only exists via state subsidized police forces. Without that monopoly power, if someone’s output is valuable enough to make them worth enslaving, then a free labor competitor will always be able to pay less in protection costs to pay the same effective wage as the slaver was paying in survival expenses plus enforcement overhead, because the worker is cooperating with the free-labor employer, and resisting the slaver.
• Anarchism means no heirarchy period, including workplace.
   
  I am fine calling myself “absolute propertarian” or “market anti-statist,” etc., if the word anarchism is so utterly sacred as to forestall any further discussion until our labels are settled. In any case, stateless socialism is rather short-sighted in that it ignores the possibility of comparative advantage in management, and that such talent might be scarcer, and thus better paid, than general labor.

About every two years or so I start listening to talk radio in the car again, as opposed to nothing. This usually lasts about a month before I start to disintegrate my steering wheel from overclenching frustration. The two local offerings are 97.1 Fox and 90.7 NPR. Although I am ever so slightly more likely to be ideologically aligned with Fox than NPR, the latter is order of magnitude more professional. Fox is not one to let trivial remarks from the opposing camp pass by unroared upon. The melodrama that comes out of these people’s mouths is quite embarrassing. From Sean Hannity’s perspective, every single news item is somehow construed as a literally violent assault on Western Civilization. By comparison, NPR is a model of dispassionate reporting and level headed commentary, even if I basically never agree with any of their respected guests.
When Fox happens to stopped-clock their way into saying something correct, their reasoning is reliably The Worst. For example, I think it was Dana Whoever, that was complaining about red light cameras. Aha, common ground, I too enjoy complaining about red light cameras! However, one of Dana’s key points: the use of cameras should be avoided because its “probably costing police jobs, just like ATMs are taking away bank teller jobs.”

what what what

A) If the police departments are rabidly in favor of keeping cameras, rest assured, their union is not losing any sleep over mechanization.
B) If we could get the same amount of policing at less cost by using cameras, bravo! Just like firing a teller and installing an ATM is good! Now I don’t have to park and walk into the bank, and in any case, the ATM manufacturer is employing people too.
C) If anything, this is adding police jobs, because the same number of officers are patrolling, but now there are people reviewing thousands of photos, and the revenue justifies their salaries.
D) These jobs should not exist in the first place! I don’t WANT officers, human or otherwise, giving out traffic fines. This is all a dead weight loss operation that is getting deader and weightier.

Later on, I hear Laura Ingram, vitriolic hag by day, and out of hearing range by night, griping in her usual sulky tone about environmental regulations that are increasing construction costs. Its a legitimate point, if material costs go up due to government mandate, less buildings are erected, less construction workers hired, less payroll tax collected, more unemployment benefits go out, fewer locations means rents are higher on the margin, so fewer businesses are formed, and so on. Altogether, the implosion of Federal debt looms closer. Let tenants decide how green of a building they are willing to pay for, and the commercial real estate market will swiftly follow. This is not Laura’s tact though.
She ends one tirade with “…of course we need requirements, we can’t have poisonous products around, but it needs to be common sense requirements, not this Green fantasy micromanagement.”
From this I instantly gathered that Ms. Ingram has no real philosophy. Whatever her opinion of reasonable Federal environmental laws is as arbitrary as Obama’s. What she really wants is just to scream about it ad nauseum. If there was a consistent underlying logic to public policy, like say respecting private property, that trumped all other concerns, then a simple check against this baseline principle would pass/fail any (all) proposed law. But the livelihood of Ingram et al, is based on pitting one vague gut feeling of appropriate restriction levels against another. She doesn’t want a clearly defined mission statement for government, she wants a world run by a morass of populism, compromised expediency, euphemised protectionism, and hair-trigger demagoguery. Because that is a world she can contribute to, if only by being the screamiest and disgustedest.

Meanwhile, NPR is airing a thoughtful interview with a West coast professor who thinks teacher salaries should be increased, by cutting administrative spending, since he considers it politically unfeasable to raise general education spending right now.
Wow, I agree with a fraction of that! And no one acted like their political adversaries were trying to murder their children in the dark of night.
So, yes school district administrative budgets should be mercilessly slashed, great point! Redistributing it to teachers is neutral. If it were politically feasible to throw another blank check at education, I would fiercely oppose this. In the long run, this shouldn’t be a public debate at all, and privatized schools could determine their own compensation levels for teachers and administrators, etc.
But the point is, I would MUCH rather talk to this guy, than endure the emotionalized browbeating that passes for debate from the conservative station.

Al Jazeera is where its at.

I recently listened to my friend John Payne speak before old guard conservative club The Pachyderms on the topic of drug legalization. John did a fine job, and I agree wholeheartedly with all his points, yet he pushed some ideas that only irritated the audience, and missed some opportunities to resonate.
Hence this primer. In order to avoid constantly using the sentence starter “To the social conservative…” I am going to write that role from the first person. I will assert what objectively appears to be their viewpoint, and not use this as an excuse for hyperbolic parody. Take this as an entry in the Ideological Caplan Test.

How To Sell Drugs to Vroman the Social Conservative

Rule #1. You MUST convince me you are a member of my tribe or I will simply write you off completely. If you do not emphasize STRONG conservative credentials, I will just assume you are spewing bald faced lies. You need to establish common values as priority one, or nothing you say will register.

Rule #2. NEVER portray addicts as sympathetic in any way shape or form. Drug use is a serious sin, and any argument that hinges on the well being of drug users is a non-starter.
The argument that prison is ineffective at ending drug use doesn’t matter, because the decision to use drugs shows a fundamental moral weakness, and thus its highly unlikely that the individual will sober up by any means, and even if somehow they did stop using, they are and will always be highly suspect. I actually want to proactively punish these people, regardless of whether this will change their behavior. Drug users are sociopathic hedonists, and I want to punish them for this character flaw in and of itself, the fact they are using drugs is just an easily detected external indicator. If I somehow could prove sociopathic hedonism innately, I would still call for society to condemn such people, even if they gave no outward sign.

“Treatment is better than prison” fails on me for multiple reasons.
A) I think these people actually deserve prison
B) Treatment smacks of socialized medicine, and even if I privately agreed treatment was replacing a less effective and more expensive alternative, I will never publicly endorse a new welfare program.
C) I do not believe treatment will work as advertised, and if addicts are going to be permanent wards of the state in either case, I am offended by the idea of them being coddled by social workers, rather than what I fantasize to be the stripped down and efficient prison system.

[I am also underwhelmed by the 'treatment over prison' argument. -Real Vroman]

“Prisons are horribly abusive places/ convicts have a hard time reintegrating into society.”
I have no sympathy for addicts and dealers. While I probably won’t advocate official torture or execution of drug criminals (unless I’m in a particularly righteous demagogue mood), I have a fairly “so be it” attitude towards whatever short and long term consequences they may suffer.
“The punishment is excessive for non-violent crimes”
I will always assume the worst about anyone involved with drugs. Just because they happened to be convicted of possession or distribution, doesn’t mean they weren’t getting away with burglary, or worse, in the mean time. I assume that every drug user is robbing to get their fix, and that every dealer has killed at least one competing dealer or bystander, but that they won’t always be caught for those crimes.
Sometimes I will also say that harsh punishments on a few, to deter use by the many, is justifiable, and am uninterested in any data on how weak the justice system is as a deterrent. However, mostly, deterrent or not, I simply am happy to see drug users punished for its own sake.

“Increased law enforcement efforts lead to rising fixed costs for dealers, which incentivizes more concentrated products, leading to more prevalent incidences of overdoses” [ie the Alchian-Allen theorem. When the risk premium goes up, dealers want to minimize transactions for the same quantity of drugs, so users end up with more per dose, whether they are expecting it or not.]
See also:
“Legalization would allow dealers to openly advertise the ingredients in their products and be publicly held responsible by the market. Thus users would have a much better idea what they are ingesting, and overdoses would become very rare.”

This doesn’t phase me in the least. While I would like for no one to die of drugs, once someone has taken steps to become a user, it doesn’t particularly bother me if accidents befall them.

RULE #3 It takes a LOT of police state to scare me.
Stories of no-knock SWAT raids to serve routine warrants with tragic unintended outcomes do not sway me. I might be a fan of the PATRIOT act! There’s a high likelihood I have a “guilty until proven innocent” or “cops only arrest criminals” mindset. I will glom onto counter-anecdotes of individuals who were caught red handed with drugs that were not convicted due to legal technicalities, and internally justify any 4th amendment violations in other cases as “balancing the scales”.
Even if the victim had absolutely nothing to do with drugs and it was a total error on the SWAT team’s part, I will internally assume that you are cherry picking examples. I mean if cops screw up and accidentally shoot someone in the process of serving a warrant for a murder investigation, and some other party ends up being proven guilty of the crime in question, that doesn’t imply we should legalize murder. Unless there are fewer people in prison for murder than there are lethal victims of sloppy police work, then its on net a good system.
So two million people in jail for drugs, and a handful of botched raids? Sounds like drug cops are nearly flawless!
You might score some points if you delve into the expansive wiretapping and financial scrutiny that the drug war spills over into the white collar world. Talk about asset forfeiture, but be VERY careful to only mention cases of persons who were never found to have anything to do with drugs. Make it very explicit the cops are just opportunistically stealing. Be bold enough to tell your audience “This could happen to you!”

RULE #4 Don’t try to tell me drugs are not as dangerous as I think they are. I will just call you a liar and drag you into a meta-debate over quality over sources. I don’t believe that alcohol is worse than marijuana, and I might even be an alcohol prohibitionist too, now that you mention it. Besides, we both know there are some drugs that really are quite dangerous, even if there are anecdotes of high level functioning addicts, and yet you still think all drugs should legal. Thus, the physical danger posed by drugs to their users shouldn’t be a necessary part of your argument. Move on, for both our sake! I won’t listen!

RULE #5. Don’t make reference to successful decriminalization efforts in foreign countries. I have no respect for other countries, or if I do, I will still automatically write off their liberalized drug policies as a face-palm exception from an otherwise stalwart ally.
Since its impossible for you to comprehensively cover every detail about their policy and its effects, I will fill in the blanks with the worst case scenario. If they have reduced crime, I will imagine they have reduced productivity as well, or have an outrageously ballooned welfare state. Depending on whether I judge that country as limp wristed and permissive, or iron fisted and oppressive, I will reinterpret any statistics on reduction in addiction rates as people being reclassified as ‘disabled’ or ‘disappeared’, respectively.
Further arguments against international interdiction efforts will almost certainly fail on me. If I am willing to swallow the flimsy bullshit reasoning behind the Mesopotamian Campaign, then I will certainly find great comfort in the comparatively solid internal logic of funding death squads in Columbia and Panama to contain their manifestly evident drug trade. If some aboriginees get massacred in the process, well, they are far away and brown.

What MIGHT work:
-Comparisons to Prohibition. The necessity of a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. The obvious preferability of Budweiser vs Smirnoff over Capone vs Moran. The huge reduction in crime on the supply side when a comparative advantage in product quality, distribution logistics and advertising becomes the dominant strategy, over comparative advantages in violence and willingness to risk incarceration.
-The drug war spawns two kinds of police corruption: The over-zealous cop and the dirty cop. The former is a true believer in the cause and will cut corners to convict people he “knows” are guilty. I probably won’t openly be an apologist for this kind of behavior, but stopping it is not a high priority. The latter, the police officer who has given in to the temptation of the lucrative drug trade is impossible for me to ignore. I may like cops in general, but I hate drug dealers more.
-Appeal to state’s rights. Repealing federal drug laws would still leave room for individual states to replicate the exact same pejorative system if I really want it. In the mean time California heathens can have their medical pot and accelerate their descent into degeneracy.
-Having a 1-2% prison population return to the workforce. Explain how legalization lowers the price such that an addict can fund their habit via unskilled labor. You could also point out that according to government’s own statistics, for example in 2008 prior to the financial meltdown, 9% of Americans were addicted to drugs, yet the unemployment rate was merely 4.5%, which implies that even if 100% of unemployed people were addicts, that 50% of addicts were gainfully employed. Thus there is tremendous dead weight loss by having literally millions of productive people banished from society.
-Also, the price reduction would greatly reduce the crime rate from the consumption side, since robbery is an insanely high risk occupation, and there is no evidence to think that addicts are less risk-averse than the general population, given opportunities to fully satisfy their habits in peaceful transactions. I may have delusions that purely anti-social crime from deranged individuals will increase. The only thing that might change my mind is pointing out the remarkably consistent addiction rates across enforcement eras and regions. ~10% of human beings are addiction-prone, and the legal system is almost totally impotent to move this number, and lack of trying does not exacerbate it.

So, I probably will remain obtuse and just refuse to acknowledge your arguments, but you can at least make me really uncomfortable and look irrational to objective listeners.

Good luck spreading the word, Mr. Payne!