Political Tolerance

Benjamin Marks wrote The Minarchist Case for Anarchism.  Here's one of my comments...

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There was Buddha talking about the blind men touching different parts of an elephant…and Socrates saying…”…it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know”...and Smith's Invisible Hand...and Bastiat’s Seen vs the Unseen...and Hayeks’ Conceit vs Humility...

They were all basically saying the same thing...all our perspectives are extremely limited.

What we are trying to do here is determine the proper scope of government. Given that our perspectives are extremely limited....it's impossible for any single person to really know what the proper scope of government is.

Does the proper scope of government include forcing people to pay taxes? You can say that it doesn't...but you can only say that for yourself....you can't say that for everybody. Maybe from my limited perspective people need to be nudged to contribute to the common good. Maybe I'm right...maybe I'm wrong.

So I do have an objection to allowing people to choose not to pay taxes. There's just no way I can truly know that forcing people to pay taxes is not within the proper scope of government. But the truth would be revealed by implementing pragmatarianism.

There are smarter people than myself who say that the government is not necessary...and there are smarter people than myself who say that it is necessary. It seems that I am wiser than they are to this small extent, that I'm saying that I don't know whether it is or isn't necessary. And this is why pragmatarianism is a cut above the rest.

Banned From Bleeding Heart Libertarians

Where to start?  Let's try and get the obvious out of the way first.  A while back I created a thread on the Ron Paul Forums asking for people's thoughts on whether another member (whose views I did not agree with) should have been banned...Should ProIndividual Have Been Banned?

One of the members had this to say on the subject...

Site owners can ban whomever they want for whatever reason they want. They have the right to do it. Nobody else has a right to be here. What are good reasons for banning people? I don't know, that's up to the site owners to decide based on what they're trying to accomplish. I'm in no position to second-guess it. - erowe1

The first three sentences should go without saying.  A website is a person's property and they can limit access to it for whatever arbitrary/legitimate reasons they want.  But should this fact restrict our freedom to challenge those in positions of authority?  Wouldn't it be strange if a forum dedicated to Ron Paul had an explicit rule about not challenging those in positions of authority?

Recently a member of the same forum shared this video of a fellow by the name of John Bush.  In this video he protests having been wrongfully banned from the Austin City Council....



Do you agree with what he is saying?  Should it matter?  Personally I do not agree with most of what he is saying...but I strongly support his right to question those in positions of authority.  To misquote Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Again, I get that a city council is public property while a website is private property.  But how/why/when authority is exercised over others on private property can offer a unique and valuable opportunity to understand how/why/when authority is exercised over others on public property.

With that in mind...here are the goals of this post...

1. Promote the BleedingHeartLibertarians.com website/concept
2. Encourage people to make the effort to understand fundamental economic concepts
3. Encourage people who do understand fundamental economic concepts to make the effort to meet people half way.  
4. Promote tax choice
5. Promote Vermin Supreme for president 
6. Encourage people to question when somebody is banned
7. Encourage a broader definition of censorship

It might seem like I'm trying to accomplish too much here...but it's all tightly tied together.  For example...I can't promote the Bleeding Heart Libertarians (BHL) website without warning you that chances are really good that you're not going to make heads or tails of most of their blog entries.  This isn't because you're stupid...it's simply because their blog entries are written by PhDs who generally only have to worry about communicating their ideas to other PhDs in the same field.

One of the guest contributors to the BHL website, Peter Boettke, recently wrote a blog entry on the relationship between economics and philosophy.  In one of my comments I stressed that all the contributors to the BHL website should really consider making an effort to meet people in other fields half way.  Unfortunately, you won't be able to read my comment because the owner of the BHL website, Matt Zwolinski, deleted every single one of my comments from his website (again, this is his prerogative).  But...you can still read a reply to my comment...

Dittos. This blog entry, and particularly the comments, has basically made my head hurt and left me bewildered.  Oh, well. I guess this one is just inside baseball and I should leave it to the pros. - Rod Engelsman

If Peter Boettke and Rod Engelsman don't make an honest and genuine effort to meet each other half way then they both lose.

If you do happen to understand all the concepts discussed on the BHL website then power to you.  If not, then look the concepts up on Wikipedia.  If that doesn't help then by all means please post a comment that lets the BHL contributors know exactly which aspects you're struggling with.  You can signal that you made an effort to meet them half way by encouraging them to improve the Wikipedia articles that failed to help clarify the concepts in question.  They really shouldn't have a problem doing so given that Wikipedia itself was inspired by Hayek's concept of partial knowledge.  If you're concerned with people judging you for asking a "stupid" question then just post your comment anonymously.

So why in the world am I promoting a website that I was just banned from?  The answer can be found in the name of the website...Bleeding Heart Libertarians.  The goal of the website is to address the common perception that libertarians do not have hearts.  Or perhaps the goal of the website is to help libertarians understand the value in having a heart?  Or perhaps the goal of the website is to help liberals understand the economic arguments for libertarianism?  Or perhaps the goal of the website is to combine moral and economic arguments into one powerful argument?

Whatever its true goal is...the BHL website is notable for recognizing that a problem does exist somewhere in this general area.  For example, here's what Vermin Supreme had to say about libertarians...

But I also believe that in order for that to happen we also have to take the responsibility for ourselves. We have to take responsibility for others. We have to offer mutual aid and support and care to our fellow citizens. It's those two things. The libertarians, you know, are just about abolishing the government and letting shit fall where it may. But I believe that's a mistake. I believe that we can dismantle the government gradually, if the citizens take up more of the slack. It's all a certain Republican idea you know...taking the government down. But they offer no alternative to helping people other than charity. I mean...civics, citizenship...Americans don't know what it means to be a citizen any more. 

If you haven't already done so then please vote for Vermin Supreme on Americans Elect.  Citizens taking up the slack is what tax choice (pragmatarianism) is all about.  If any citizens didn't want to take up the slack then they would still have the option to just give their taxes to congress.  The challenge is that to effectively evaluate the idea of tax choice you really need to have a decent grasp of a few basic economic concepts.

The problem is...trying to share these basic economic concepts is exactly what led to my banishment from the BHL website.  The last straw for Matt Zwolinski occurred on this blog entry of his...What We Can Learn From Drowning Children.  In this instance...not only did he delete my comments from the page but he also deleted his replies to my comments.  Fortunately, before he did so I managed to copy and paste our entire discussion over to my own blog...Fallibilism vs Fairness.

Again again...Zwolinski certainly has the right to delete whatever he wants from his website for whatever reasons...completely irrespective of whether his reasons are good, bad or ugly.  As I indicated in my Self-Ownership Survey...people should have the right to shoot themselves in the foot.

If I hadn't saved our discussion though...then none of you would have been able to read it.  So could Zwolinski's effort to delete our discussion count as censorship?  The way I see it...you are perfectly capable of choosing for yourself which comments you read and which comments you ignore.  The internet has made us all extremely proficient in filtering out trash.  But one person's trash is another person's treasure.  Do you really want somebody else deciding for you what counts as trash/treasure?  Personally, I'm leaning towards expanding the definition of censorship to include whenever somebody restricts your ability to decide for yourself whether something is trash/treasure.  This broader definition of censorship would allow us to argue that the government engages in censorship by blocking tax choice.

Hopefully I've made it clear that Zwolinski certainly had the right to delete my comments from his website.  Yet...hopefully it's also clear that it's my right to question his motivations for doing so.  Here's how I perceive his motivations...

On the Debate Politics Forum I created this thread...Why Is Your Partner Cheating On You?  My point wasn't to talk about cheating...yet a few people really felt the need to discuss my misunderstanding of how cheating really works.

Xerographica: SmokeAndMirrors, ok, here's the deal. I'll admit that I don't understand how cheating works and you'll admit that you don't understand how the invisible hand works. Deal?
SmokeAndMirrors: Nope. I understand the "invisible hand" concept perfectly well. I just have no reason to address it because your argument unraveled before I ever got there.  Like Goshin, I have now ceased to be interested.

A) SmokeAndMirrors was perfectly willing to discuss cheating.  B) She said she understood how the invisible hand works.  C) She "conveniently" ceased to be interested in further discussion when it came time to demonstrate her understanding of how the invisible hand works.

Zwolinski's behavior was nearly identical to that of SmokeAndMirrors...

A) Zwolinski was perfectly willing to discuss business discrimination and foreign intervention with me.  B)  He said he was "familiar" with the economic concepts that I had frequently mentioned.  C) He "conveniently" banned me from his BHL website rather than respond to any of my economic arguments.

Basically...we all failed.  They failed to acknowledge their perfectly reasonable ignorance and I failed to encourage them to meet me half way.  It wasn't a total loss though because these documented failures can provide others with the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.

That's the thing.  We all make mistakes...and we all only have limited resources...and we all have access to different information...and we all have different values.  Therefore, we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket.  In other words... Scarcity + Fallibilism = Hedge Our Bets = Tax Choice.  This was the idea that I failed to convey to Zwolinski in our discussion on fallibilism vs fairness.

It just so happens though that I'm currently reading an excellent book on Reason and Persuasion.  This book, which makes Plato's ideas much more accessible, was written by John Holbo.  John Holbo is a contributor to the Crooked Timber Liberal website which is where he posted an entry on Selling Votes.  The comment that I shared on his entry led to the two of us having a long discussion on selling votes.  His willingness to discuss revealing preferences is partly what motivated me to purchase his book.  None of this would have occurred though if I had been banned from the Crooked Timber Liberal website.

The kicker is that I was technically banned from the Crooked Timber Liberal website.  Nearly two months prior to commenting on Holbo's entry, I had posted a comment on Chris Bertram's entry on Renouncing the facts in the name of method (Mankiw channels Lukacs).  Bertram replaced my comment with this message...

[Crooked Timber comments threads are an opportunity to engage in conversation, not the granting of a soapbox for you to promote your private obsessions. Please go away. CB]

You can read my original comment here...Crooked Timber Liberals - Monopolizing the Facts.  Recently I discovered that now I am both technically and actually banned from the Crooked Timber website.

Chris Bertram, who is a liberal, and Matt Zwolinski, who is a libertarian, both saw my comments as trash.  That's why they saw value in eliminating my perspective from their websites.  What they couldn't see though were all the possible future discussions that they had blocked.      

This ties into Bastiat's concept of the seen vs the unseen as well as Hayek's concept of conceit vs humility.  All our perspectives are valuable but extremely limited.  This means that it's easy to focus on what we can see but extremely difficult to focus on what we can't see.  It's easy for Zwolinski and Bertram to see the value of their own perspectives but it's extremely difficult for them to see the value of my perspective.  If it was easy for people to focus on what they couldn't see then they would have embraced tax choice a long time ago. As it is, political tolerance is blocked and/or ignored by men of the system...

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. - Adam Smith

For the longest time we've debated what the government should do.  The solution is simply for the government to do what we pay it to do...no more and no less.  I may not agree with how you spend your taxes...but I will strongly support your right to do so.  If I do want you to spend your taxes on the things that I treasure...then I will rely solely on the persuasive power of the available evidence/facts.  As Milton Friedman strongly emphasized, "If we can't persuade the public that it's desirable to do these things, then we have no right to impose them even if we had the power to do it."

Fallibilism vs Fairness

Here's my comment on Matt Zwolinski's entry on What We Can Learn from Drowning Children.  The subsequent discussion between Zwolinski and myself prompted Zwolinski to ban me from the Bleeding Heart Libertarian website.

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Xerographica

You didn't even skim the surface of the problem.   The problem isn't just that there is a child drowning in a pool...the problem is that there is also a baby that a parent left in the car with the windows rolled up during summer.  The problem doesn't end there.  The problem is also that you only have $1 to spend correcting the problem.  Does the problem end here?  Of course not.  You also have the option to spend that dollar on a procreation licencing program.  If you think the problem ends here then you'd be wrong.

We're dealing with n+1 problems multiplied by n+1 solutions.  YOU see a drowning child so you think everybody should have a moral obligation to do something about that drowning child.  Do what though?  Should people spend their limited time/money trying to save that one child or spend their limited time/money trying to prevent future children from drowning?  Or should they spend their limited time/money trying to solve the problems that THEY see?

That's the thing...you don't realize how truly limited your perspective is.   You don't see all the other problems that other people have access to and you don't see all the other possible solutions that other people have considered.  That's why you failed to understand the point of this comment of mine.

If you want me to spend my $1 on trying to fix your problem then you need to convince me that your problem is more important than my problem.  Not only that but you need to convince me that your proposed solution to your problem will actually solve the problem.  Why should you have to persuade me?  Because in the process of doing so you might learn that my problem is more important than your problem and/or my solution is more effective than your solution.

Having studied International Development Studies at UCLA I can promise you that a ridiculous amount of your money was wasted on failed solutions to problems that you weren't even aware of.  From my limited perspective the only tried and true method of lifting people in other countries out of poverty was when we sent them our jobs.  American unions have unintentionally done more to help people in developing countries than any intentional effort by government.  This was the point of my blog entry on the Dialectic of Unintended Consequences.

Well...this is probably the gazillionth time I've brought up Hayek's partial knowledge and Bastiat's opportunity cost...yet your posts still haven't put 2 + 2 together.  That's ok though...because maybe I'm wrong.  So...even though it's frustrating when you continue to ignore these basic but important concepts...the possibility that I might be wrong encourages me to embrace tolerance.  If you're willing to entertain the possibility that perhaps you might be wrong then check out the Wikipedia entry on tax choice.  It has links to Hayek's partial knowledge and Bastiat's opportunity cost.

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Zwolinski

You didn't even skim the surface of the problem.   The problem isn't just that there is a child drowning in a pool...the problem is that there is also a baby that a parent left in the car with the windows rolled up during summer.  The problem doesn't end there.  The problem is also that you only have $1 to spend correcting the problem.

No, that's not the problem. That's a problem you just made up. You're welcome to create your own hypotheticals. But in the one I presented, you're faced with a drowning child and the question is whether you have an obligation to rescue him or not.

If you're willing to entertain the possibility that perhaps you might be wrong then check out the Wikipedia entry on tax choice.  It has links to Hayek's partial knowledge and Bastiat's opportunity cost.

You do realize that I'm familiar with Hayek and Bastiat, right? So perhaps if I'm ignoring your ad nauseum appeals to their ideas, the explanation has to do with something other than my ignorance or close-mindedness?

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Xerographica

Economics is the study of scarcity.  I just made that problem up?  Fallibilism is the understanding that everybody makes mistakes.  I just made that problem up as well?

Why would you want to separate morality from reality?  That's the very problem that we need to deal with in the first place.  What we need is for voters to understand the value of allowing every single person to directly bear the costs of every moral and proper thing that they want the government to TRY and do.

It's fine if you think the government should be responsible for TRYING to save drowning kids.  But it's not fine if you don't understand the value of putting your own, individual taxes where your heart is.  Why isn't it fine?  Because it's one thing to make a mistake with your limited resources but it's another thing for you to make a mistake with my limited resources.  Scarcity+fallibilism = hedge our bets.  This is the same conceit vs humility concept you ignored last time.

So no, you're not at all familiar with Bastiat or Hayek if you think there's any value in pretending that there aren't price tags attached to every single good...moral or otherwise...that people want.  That means that, unless I'm mistaken, you're only making the problem worse.   If you do think I'm mistaken then for goodness sake just point out the error in  my logic.

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Zwolinski

Economics is the study of scarcity. I just made that problem up? Fallibilism is the understanding that everybody makes mistakes. I just made that problem up as well?

No. That's not what I said. The problem I said you made up was this:

The problem isn't just that there is a child drowning in a pool...the problem is that there is also a baby that a parent left in the car with the windows rolled up during summer. The problem doesn't end there. The problem is also that you only have $1 to spend correcting the problem. Does the problem end here? Of course not. You also have the option to spend that dollar on a procreation licencing program.

Like I said, you're free to make up whatever hypotheticals you want. But this one doesn't have anything to do with the hypothetical I presented. In that hypothetical, you have a choice between rescuing the child or not. Getting a baby out of a locked car or sending money to a parental licensing program isn't an option. So bringing them up is just dodging the issue.

Why would you want to separate morality from reality?

I have no idea what this means or why you think I'm trying to do it.

So no, you're not at all familiar with Bastiat or Hayek if you think there's any value in pretending that there aren't price tags attached to every single good.

For someone who talks so much about the value of humility, you display shockingly little of it.

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Xerographica

My hypothetical situation addressed morality, scarcity and fallibilism.  Your hypothetical situation only addressed morality.  That's why I asked you why you wanted to separate morality from reality.

Reality = morality + scarcity + fallibilism + + +

Yet...you have no idea what I meant when I asked you why you wanted to separate reality from morality.  You read my hypothetical situation but thought that I was just attempting to dodge the issue of morality by highlighting other extremely important issues that we HAVE to consider....scarcity and fallibilism.

So let me break my hypothetical situation down bit by bit and show you exactly where the scarcity and fallibilism are located.

Scarcity - In my hypothetical situation you only had $1.  This reflects that in real life you have limited resources.  Having limited resources forces you to prioritize how you spend your limited resources.    Do you spend that $1 on TRYING to rescue the drowning child or on TRYING to rescue the child in a car?  Having multiple options forces you to make hard decisions with your limited resources.

There is an opportunity cost to every thing you want in life.  If you spend that $1 on TRYING to save the drowning child then you forgo the opportunity to spend that $1 on TRYING to save the child in the car.  This is where partial knowledge comes into play.  Maybe you don't know how to swim.  Maybe the car is locked.  Your partial knowledge and opportunity cost decisions are unique to you.

Scarce resources are efficiently allocated when everyone makes opportunity cost decisions.  These decisions naturally incorporate people's  unique/partial knowledge.  This is how the invisible hand works.

Fallibilism - I keep typing TRYING in all caps to emphasize that there's no guarantee that A) your effort will be successful or B) your choice was the best possible use of your limited resources.  Maybe it would be a mistake to require that people obtain licences if they want to procreate.  Maybe it would be a mistake not to.

Reality - The problem with our current political system is that voting only deals with morality...much in the same way as your hypothetical situation.

For instance the private consequences of fulfilling "her duty" towards the poor will emerge with certainty if a rich woman votes for higher tax redistribution favoring the poor.  She can "consume" the "warm glow of fulfilling her duty" while her vote itself will be insignificant for whether or not she will indeed have to pay higher taxes. - Hartmut Kliemt, The Encyclopedia of Public Choice

If you want to help the poor...then  you need to put your own, individual, hard-earned taxes where your heart is.  This is the only way we can help ensure that scarce resources are efficiently allocated.  You need to decide what other valuable things that you are personally willing to forgo in order to help the poor...

Nevertheless, the classic solution to the problem of underprovision of public goods has been government funding - through compulsory taxation - and government production of the good or service in question. Although this may substantially alleviate the problem of numerous free-riders that refuse to pay for the benefits they receive, it should be noted that the policy process does not provide any very plausible method for determining what the optimal or best level of provision of a public good actually is. When it is impossible to observe what individuals are willing to give up in order to get the public good, how can policymakers access how urgently they really want more or less of it, given the other possible uses of their money? There is a whole economic literature dealing with the willingness-to-pay methods and contingent valuation techniques to try and divine such preference in the absence of a market price doing so, but even the most optimistic proponets of such devices tend to concede that public goods will still most likley be underprovided or overprovided under government stewardship. - Patricia Kennett, Governance, globalization and public policy

This is the opportunity cost concept..."When it is impossible to observe what individuals are willing to give up in order to get the public good, how can policymakers access how urgently they really want more or less of it, given the other possible uses of their money?"

This is why taxpayers should be allowed to choose which government organizations receive their individual taxes.  We need them to consider the opportunity costs of their tax allocation decisions.  We need all their partial knowledge to help determine what the public sector should produce.  Morality...and bleeding hearts are wonderful...but only when combined with a firm understanding of scarcity and fallibilism.  If we don't factor scarcity and fallibilism into the equation then we're divorcing morality from reality.  This is the equivalent of shooting ourselves in the feet.  Fairness is not worth failure.

Regarding humility...really?  I display shockingly little of it?  Look at my comments on  Kevin Vaillier's entries on contractualism.  I have no problem admitting when I don't understand a concept.  We would have resolved this issue long ago if you displayed the same willingness to admit when you don't understand a concept.  You're a philosophy guy.... no one expects you to understand economic concepts as well as you understand philosophical concepts. Yet you completely ignore me when I try and bring these essential economic concepts to your attention.  Maybe because you think you're familiar enough with them...but your posts sure indicate otherwise.

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Zwolinski

Go back and read this thread again, starting with my original post.Your original reply accused me of missing the point. But on closer examination it turns out that what that means is that I didn't discuss the point that you wanted to talk about.

And this is how it always is with you on this blog. You're a true believer. You've got your one idea about how to change the world, and the only thing you're interested in is convincing other people of its truth, usually with a healthy dose of links to your own blog. You can't approach a conversation with an openness to learning something new, to talking about something besides your own pet issue.

And this makes me tired. And I think it makes other people on this blog tired. Do you ever wonder why people aren't more responsive to pragmatarianism than they are? Do you wonder why people don't engage with your comments more than they do? Is it possible, in your mind, that perhaps the fault is not entirely with them?

At any rate, I'm tired of this. You've got your truth, and I wish you the best of luck with it. But please, preach it somewhere else.

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Xerographica


Read your post again.  Your point was that libertarians should support government efforts to help people in need.  How was my question to you not valid?  Why do you want to separate morality from reality?  All you had to say was..."here are my arguments for why we should only focus on the moral issues..."

You say that I'm not open to learning something new...but what did you try and share with me that I wasn't open to?  Can you list any concepts that I rejected or ignored?  Can you show me a single discussion between us where this occurred?

No, I don't wonder why more people don't engage with my comments.  Look at how you engaged with my comments.  You never once responded to a single economic argument that I made.  You couldn't respond because...obviously you lack an understanding of the economic concepts that I tried to share with you.

Let's take a walk down memory lane together...

Exhibit A - we discussed whether business owners should be allowed to discriminate
Exhibit B - we discussed if foreign intervention was ever justified
Exhibit B1 - this is the continuation of our discussion on foreign intervention
Exhibit C - I brought up my concern regarding the issue of conceit vs humility but your response was...

Believe it or not, not every book deals with your pet issue. Not every blog post on this site deals with it. And yet, sometimes, you can still learn something from them.

Exhibit D - you made a joke about pragmatarianism and I ran with it but no discussion followed

And that's it.  That's the extent of our interactions on your blog.  You were perfectly willing to discuss discrimination and foreign intervention with me but you never once discussed any economic issues with me.

So what do you do?  You block me from your blog.  But by blocking me from your blog you separate morality from reality even more!

Lupis42's Critique of Pragmatarianism

Lupis42 offered the following really great critique on my entry...A Taxpayer Division of Labor

I've been reading a bunch of your stuff over the last couple of days, because while I wanted to like it, I keep coming back to a series of fundamental problems: 

1st - Complexity. Imagine for a moment that, in a moment of sanity, Congress passes this measure for the 2012 tax year on. Because of the way congressional accounting currently works, allocating your tax dollars would be immeasurably difficult. For example, if a farmer allocates his money to farm subsidies, effectively lowering the taxes he should have paid in, does he get a refund check? What about all those people who, through deductions and credits, would pay effectively no income tax - do they need to allocate the income tax they pay to those credits then receive it back at the end of the year? Also, how granular can they get? Can they pick and chose (for example) which military projects get backed?

At anytime throughout the year people would pay their taxes directly to the various government organizations (GOs) of their choice.  They would receive a receipt and the GO would automatically send a receipt to the IRS.  The IRS would just make sure that everybody had paid the proper amount of taxes for the previous year.

It's pretty straightforward that if the government is just wasting your taxes...then everybody would want a refund.  Kind of along the same vein...if you're a pacifist and the government is spending your money on war then...chances are good that you'd want a refund.  Now...I'm not quite sure what happens to the refund concept when people are directly responsible for funding GOs that they value.  Do we see people asking for refunds from non-profit organizations?  Would an environmentalist ask for a refund from the EPA?  Why directly allocate your taxes in the first place if you're just going to want a refund?  If somebody wanted a refund then wouldn't they just give their taxes to the IRS as normal?

The granularity issue would be between the GOs and their supporters.  Well...perhaps it is primarily an issue with the military.  My mother was very much against the war...but as I was her only child...she definitely would have wanted to allocate her taxes...and then some...to try and ensure that my unit had adequate funding to purchase kevlar plates and the such.  In this case, the military would have received funding that it wouldn't have otherwise received.  So I guess we can imagine that the families of soldiers would actively try to ensure that the units that their loved ones were in had adequate funding.

For the people who don't have family members in the military, yet still value national defense, would they be inclined to allocate taxes to the Marines rather than the Army?  Or would they just allocate their taxes to the DoD?  This is an issue that the DoD would have to try and figure out...how it could maximize revenue without compromising its effectiveness.

The military projects issue is an interesting one.  I remember liberals criticizing the government for doing absolutely nothing to stop the genocide in Darfur.  But what if we had a non-profit peace keeping force that was capable of stopping genocide and/or ethnic cleansing?  Kind of like the A-Team but more substantial.  In other words...it would have a heart, brains...and muscle.  An army of liberals.  Personally, I could see myself donating to such an organization.  What would happen if more and more people donated their money to this non-profit while less and less people allocated their taxes to the DoD?

2nd - Inequality. Right now, around 50% of the populace pays income tax, and the top 10% pays more than 40% of the incoming revenue. Economics will encourage them to divert all of it to programs that, in one way or another, directly benefit their firms (i.e. Raytheons CEO will direct money to military programs that involve Raytheon projects, Solyndra's CEO will send his money to the line item "loan to Solyndra", etc.) 

If self-interest promotes the general interest in the private sector...then why wouldn't self-interest promote the general interest in the public sector?  Why do corporations engage in philanthropy?  Is it philanthropy if a company that sells products to the Red Cross makes a donation to the Red Cross?  Does doing so guarantee that the Red Cross will continue to purchase products from that same company in the future?

Here's a passage from my very first poli-sci textbook...A Delicate Balance by Paul Light...

Roughly one out of every six Americans currently works for a private firm that receives federal contracts. Roughly two-thirds of those contracts came from the Department of Defense, which accounted for over $120 billion in 1997, and roughly two-thirds of those defense dollars went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin (airplanes), McDonnel Douglas (airplanes), Northrup Grumann (airplanes), General Motors (tanks and trucks), and Ratheon (weapons systems). 

The textbook was published in 1999...so...feel free to come up with updated stats if you feel they are pertinent.  The point is...who would complain if Lockheed Martin or McDonnel Douglas or Northrup Grumann or General Motors or Ratheon allocated their taxes to the DoD?  Surely none of their employees would complain.  Surely none of the people who valued national defense would complain...well...unless they believed that those corporations were somehow overcharging the DoD.

How would it help the environmentalists to complain that the DoD was "overfunded"?  How would criticizing the DoD help people understand the value and importance of the EPA?  The same concept applies to people who value public education, public healthcare, infrastructure, etc.

What about tax repatriation holidays?  If it would be economically sound for corporations to allocate their taxes to the GOs that they directly benefit from...then what incentives would they have to hide their profits overseas?

3rd - Choice. Whoever (Congresscritters, I assume) is responsible for determining what line items are available for taxpayer choice, and how they are worded will have a huge amount of power. Previously, the way a Congresscritter got a pork project funded was to agree to support another Congresscritter's project. Now all they have to do is write good copy.

Right now you have 0% control over how your taxes are spent.  We'll always disagree with how other people spend their taxes...but at the end of the day we'll have to recognize that other people will disagree with how we spend our taxes.  This is the essence of political tolerance.  Clearly though you can't be the only one to define something as a "public good".  Sure..I could make the argument that it's a "public good" for me to take a vacation to Madagascar...but the positive externalities are negligible.  For the most part I've said that voters would determine the functions of government and taxpayers would determine which functions to fund.

4th - Law Enforcement. Theoretically, the public can now defund unacceptable forms of law enforcement (e.g. the war on drugs), but this does nothing for the actual criminality of the laws on the books. This will lead to highly selective enforcement, which is even worse than consistent enforcement because it allows corrupt, bigoted, or agenda driven targeting of people. Even more problematically, if the taxpayers were to defund prisons while funding enforcement, for example, it would be impossible for even fair-minded, honest, diligent enforcement officers to actually apply the law. If some programs are made contingent on 'end-to-end' funding, then we're back at problem 3, but with more of a vengeance.

When I was pulled over for my speeding ticket...(see my post on the Opportunity Costs of Public Transportation) I asked the officer if it was a coincidence that I always drive the same speed in my old Toyota Tundra...and have had cops right behind me several times...but I end up getting a ticket the one time I borrowed my friend's Mercedes.  Heh...like the cop would admit that he pulled me over because I was driving a Mercedes.  I also asked him why he didn't give everybody who was driving over the speed limit a ticket.  He literally passed people who were breaking the law to give me a ticket.  Here in Los Angeles nearly everybody drives over 65 mph on the freeway.

If people want to pass a law...then they should have to put their money where their mouths are.  It's not enough for people to say that something should be illegal...they need to understand that if they want something to be illegal...then they will be the ones responsible for ensuring that the law is enforced.  As I mentioned in my post...it's a sign of maturity to accept responsibility for one's decisions.  If people aren't mature enough to accept responsibility for the laws that they voted for...then it's not a bad thing if those laws are not properly enforced.

This of course ties into the opportunity cost concept.  If you want people to purchase your product...then it's your responsibility to convince them to forgo the other products that they value.  If you want other people to pay for your law to be enforced...then you should have to convince them to forgo the other public goods that they value.  This is how we ensure the best possible use of scarce resources.

What you're saying in essence is that...the current method of dealing with crime is the best method of dealing with crime.  How could anybody truly know that?  What you're doing is blocking heterogeneous approaches to crime.  Personally, I believe that an ounce of prevention is worth two of cure.  My grandfather was always fond of saying that idle minds are the devil's workshop.  Or something like that.  If I only have a limited amount of money to spend on the problem of crime...which is certainly the case...then I'd spend it on sponsoring activities that offer at-risk youth with more choices besides joining a gang.  Is this the best approach?  Again, I can't know that.  What I do know is that the only way we can truly discover the best approach is if we allow people to support multiple approaches.

Is there a demand to solve the problem of crime?  Yes.  Should organizations have to compete for the  resources to solve this problem?  Yes.

The rest aren't a per se objection to Pragmatarianism wholesale, because they could be applied to our current systems too, but they are relevant when considering it as an alternative to Libertarianism. 

5th - Rate Setting. There's still no good feedback mechanism on what the size of government should be, just it's role. Fundamentally, your objection to Liberals and Libertarians is that each claims to know the optimal size of government, which you want to let the market decide, but unless you propose to allow taxpayers to allocate up to 100% of their taxes to their own tax rebates, Pragmatarianism offers no alternative but to elect either Liberals or Libertarians to set the tax rates.

If I'm an environmentalist...and I want people to allocate more of their taxes to the EPA...does raising the tax rate mean that non-environmentalists will somehow become environmentalists?  Probably not...it just means that I end up paying more of my own money to the EPA.  If I want other people to allocate more of their taxes to the EPA then I have to convince them of the value of the EPA.

6th - Rights. There's nothing in here that addresses the ability of, say, congress interfere in other ways, e.g. criminilaizing activities that have no non-consenting victim (drug use, gambling, prostitution, home-brewing, prayer, free speech, etc. 

True.  Coming from libertarianism...I have my own views regarding rights...and those views won't change if a pragmatarian system was implemented.  Pragmatarianism is all about KISS....Keep it Simple Stupid.  By keeping it completely nonpartisan...it helps to focus the debate.

Ultimately, I like the general idea and it makes a lot of sense in conjunction with a smaller, more limited government, but I have a hard time seeing it work without a much more Libertarian state than we have now.

As a web programmer I spend a lot of time looking for bugs in the code.  It's really frustrating when something should work...but it's just not working.  I'm always like...hmmm...why isn't this working?   To find the bug in the code I have to test each portion of the code separately.  This allows me to narrow down the search.

If you take a look on my page on libertarianism you'll see I created a timeline of prominent libertarians' perspectives on the scope of government.  All those guys were/are brilliant...so why aren't their arguments working?

Pragmatarianism is a method of debugging libertarianism.  It removes the debate over the tax rate and it removes the debate over whether something is a genuine "public good" or not.  The only thing remaining is whether congress can allocate public goods more efficiently than taxpayers can.  It is my firm opinion that this is where the bug is located.

Can resources truly be efficiently allocated by proxy?  Well...parents purchase things for their kids.  That's one or two adults representing the interests of one or two kids.  Well...what about Christmas?  Santa Claus is responsible for giving gifts to all the kids of the world...right?  Well...what about Jesus?  Jesus died for all of our sins...right?  Well...what about congress?  Can 538 congresspeople truly represent the public interests of 300,000,000 people?  Well...as I argued in my post on the divine disparity...it's certainly progress in comparison to having one king represent the public interests of all his subjects.

Kids want to believe in Santa Claus?  Fine...no problem.  People want to believe in God?  Again...no problem.  People want to believe in congress?  Sure...no problem...as long as they respect my beliefs and allow me to directly allocate my taxes.

In other words...the bug in the political system is intolerance.  Why haven't more people come to the same conclusion?  As I argued in my post on the The Devil's Advocate for Public Goods...we think we are all "civilized" aka "all grown up" but we're really not...we're always in the process of growing up.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - 1 Corinthians 13:11

Tradition, thou art for suckling children,
Thou art the enlivening milk for babes;
But no meat for men is in thee.
Then --
But, alas, we all are babes. - Stephen Crane

It might be a mistake to implement pragmatarianism...and it might be a mistake not to implement pragmatarianism...but I'm pretty sure it's a mistake not to seriously consider the idea.  So... kudos for seriously considering the idea!

Other People's Values

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die. - Roy Batty, Bladerunner

Nobody wants to have their moments lost in time like tears in rain.  That's why we should always make back up copies of our photos...and discussions?

Here's a discussion that I'm making a back up copy of...just in case.  It's a discussion that I had with Linda Beale, the tax expert liberal professor.  The discussion, which took place on Beale's entry on Repatriation Holiday Lobbying -- Money Speaks, came to mind when Seth decided to play devil's advocate over at his blog...Two Ways of Saying the Same Thing.  His argument was that liberals would not be happy spending their own money..."most of government will be at the whim of the wealthy unless we somehow collectively allocate the wealthy’s taxes for them."

The logical problem with this type of argument is that it is a hasty generalization.  We all engage in hasty generalizations to some extent...but liberals would be up in arms if you generalized welfare recipients as being lazy...yet liberals see no problem generalizing the wealthy as being selfish and evil.

But would liberals reevaluate their generalization if all the billionaires gave 90% of their wealth to non-profit organizations?  Or would liberals still consider the wealthy to be selfish because nobody was given the opportunity to "vote" on which public goods the billionaires spent their money on?

The question is...how accurately do votes convey value?  How accurately do votes convey all the moments we've experienced in our lifetimes?  Don't get me wrong...we need democracy to settle certain social conflicts (ie whether marijuana should be legal)...but when it comes to the efficient allocation of public goods...nothing beats incorporating people's true values by forcing them to consider the opportunity costs of their tax allocation decisions.

We are all just blind men touching different parts of a elephant.  We all have access to a limited amount of truth.  What truth do we have access to?  We all have access to our own unique individual values...which reflect all the unique moments that we've experienced in our lifetimes.  You can't generalize or average values and hope to discover the actual scope of government.  Reality is not the average of moments experienced.  The only result of trying to impose your values onto other people will be a situation exactly akin to blind men arguing over the scope of government.

How can we end this gridlock?  How can finally resolve this battle of values?  All it takes is to recognize, respect...or at least tolerate other people's values...even if they are diametrically opposed to our own.

Here's the bottom line for the discussion between Linda Beale and myself...

Why would I assume that your experiences and values are any less valuable than my own? If I'm not going to make that assumption about you...then I'm certainly not going to make that assumption about taxpayers as a whole.

That's what I wrote to Beale early on in the discussion.  And here's what she wrote at the end of the discussion...

sure, values are ultimately at stake in the decisions that are made by government and by people. But that's not the discussion we've been having. We've been talking about facts like feasibility of mechanisms, empirical evidence about public and private sector activities, etc. 

*****************************************************

"The conservative world view vs. the liberal world view has been the source of political disputes for many millennia."

You should've quite while only moderately behind.

The modern conservative ideology, as espoused by the contemporary American far right, is between a half and one and a half centuries old (depending on how you count and what policy ares you look at). Modern liberalism is maybe half a century old in its current form, with precursors going back two and a half centuries or so. Social democracy is around one and a quarter century old. These are all comparatively young as ideologies go.

Now, even if you had been right about the age of the bullshit you espouse, it would still not have been a valid argument. People practised bleeding cures for millennia. People thought the Sun went around the Earth for millennia.

"It isn't as simple as saying one view is right and the other is wrong."

If you had said "I have mine, and screw the rest," then we would have had a policy disagreement, and people may disagree on this without being provably wrong. But when you say "less regulation benefits everybody," then you are making an objectively false statement. When you say "balanced budgets enhance growth," then you are objectively in error. When you say "the US government is broke," then you're lying (the US federal government has been definitionally solvent since it pulled out of Bretton Woods - that was the main reason it pulled out). When you say that lower taxes create jobs, then you're objectively wrong.

I don't see any reason to respect bullshit, or compromise on matters of fact. "For successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Feynman

"The argument that smaller government (not zero government) is better for society as a whole is a subjective one"

But that is not the argument you made. "Better for society," depends on your subjective assessment of the value of the people government protects from the predations of oligarchs, and on your subjective valuation of economic stability relative to the power and prestige of banksters. What you claimed was that deregulation is "better for everyone." Which is quite clearly bullshit for all commonly accepted definitions of "improvement" and "everyone."

"Progressives tend to have more faith in government bureaucrats and conservatives tend to have more faith in the private sector."

The private sector cannot satisfactorily provide for - healthcare, unemployment insurance, pensions, disability insurance, education, infrastructure, macroeconomic stability, etc. That's just simple empirical reality. You may argue that these areas are unimportant, or that they are less importance than your right to not pay taxes. But you cannot, if you wish to interact with the reality-based community, argue that the private sector does them better than the public.

Macroeconomic stability, in particular, is just flat out impossible for the private sector to provide, since it requires an investor of last resort who is definitionally solvent. The public sector will always, no matter how corrupt, inefficient and incompetent, do that better than the private sector, because the private sector cannot do it at all.

That you have "faith" in the private sector is neither here nor there. Economic policy should not be a faith-based initiative.

- Jake

Posted by: JakeS | October 05, 2011 at 01:41 AM
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Jake, Peter is certainly more right than you are when it comes to the age of these fundamental concepts.

From around 55 BC..."Gaius gracchus proposed a grain law. The people were delighted with it because it provided an abundance of food without work. The good men, however, fought against it because they thought the masses would be attracted away from hard work and toward idleness, and they saw the state treasury would be exhausted."

According to the charity laws of Judaism...the highest form of giving is to help the recipient become self-reliant.

I like the part where you said "simple empirical reality". That's really great!!! You're definitely the kind of person that I'm certain will completely embrace pragmatarianism.

All pragmatarianism does is allow taxpayers to directly allocate their individual taxes among the various government organizations at anytime throughout the year.

Of course the allocation decisions of taxpayers will reflect your "simple empirical reality". How could they not? Why in the world would taxpayers allocate their taxes according to some ridiculous faith-based fantasy? Taxpayers all want the most bang for their buck...not surreal antiquated obfuscation.

Taxpayers are in the perfect position to substantiate your claim. Actually...they are the only ones that can substantiate your claim. Their cumulative opportunity-cost decisions will reveal to everybody the reality that you've been trying to share all along.

Isn't pragmatarianism the best? I'm sure you'll fully support it. Now you'll have the perfect opportunity to let your actions speak louder than your words...you'll be able to put your money where your mouth is!

Posted by: Xerographica | October 05, 2011 at 06:09 AM
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Xerographica

such allocation schemes sound halfway plausible on paper but are utterly unworkable. How would you be able to fund long-term cancer research through NIH if you didn't know how many dollars you would have from year to year? The same thing applies to all long term planning. One big problem that we have right now is that too much is short-term--due to Congress's response to moneyed lobbying. We need more long-term thinking, not less.

The taxpayer allocation scheme is problematic for another reason. It assumes informed taxpayers. The biggest lesson one can derive from voting results from populations that have huge majorities in favor of INCREASED rights to unionization, INCREASED taxes on the rich/progressivity of taxation, and INCREASED protection of the environment is that people don't understand the sometimes complex interrelationships of agencies and regulations and businesses and particular votes cast by lawmakers. Of course, that is why we have a representative government to set policies--to allow those representatives to become more expert than the people themselves. But we need a certain threshold of education to ensure that voters keep politicians in line--if those experts are captured by Big Business they will allow the oligarchs to dictate the policy in their favor. We have been moving in that direction since Reagan's election and are now moving at an accelerated clip due to the consolidation of power in the ranks of the uberrich and their corporations.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 05, 2011 at 02:08 PM
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Linda, how unworkable would it be if donors to PETA and donors to the NRA had to pool their donations together and elect representatives to decide how to split the money between the two organizations?

It shouldn't be too hard to imagine the results...it would be the same thing as you and Peter arguing over whose experiences and values are more valuable.

My mother endured a very long and terribly agonizing death from throat cancer. I basically watched her slowly starve to death because gnawing hunger was less painful than trying to swallow. What more information do I need?

It's fine that you want to reduce military spending but having served in Afghanistan for a year I would gladly help fund our efforts over there to support the same basic freedoms that so many Americans take for granted. What more information do I need?

Having graduated from UCLA with a degree in International Development Studies...I certainly do not take public education for granted. What more information do I need?

Why would I assume that your experiences and values are any less valuable than my own? If I'm not going to make that assumption about you...then I'm certainly not going to make that assumption about taxpayers as a whole.

The amount of public goods information that congress has access to is minuscule in comparison to the amount of public goods information that taxpayers as a whole have access to.

Posted by: Xerographica | October 05, 2011 at 03:03 PM
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Xerographica.
Your response is an illustration of the problem. You use anecdote and individual preferences on a small number of items to suggest you would fund cancer research (I assume), and the military--specifically apparently the war in Afghanistan and therefore you think it would be relatively easy to have direct democracy decisionmaking on government expenditures. To what extent? How much to each? How would you determine what is reasonable? Which budgets would you review, which development projects, which future forecasts? Why would you not support basic physics research or the performing arts? What if basic physics research was ultimately important to complex cancer research? Is it because you don't know enough about them or because you are anti-them that you don't support the things that you don't choose to support?

How would cancer research take place if it is funded for several years by three people at $100 each and another year by 2 million at $1000 each, when it needs long-term commitments for lab spaces, researchers (and research assistants), and all that research entails?

You are talking in pipe dreams that might at best work for relatively small cooperatives of people with fairly close values and objectives, but would be utter chaos for any modern society with its hundreds of millions of denizens and almost uncountable number of problems needing to be addressed and prioritized from global warming to food-borne infections. That is of course one of the reasons that programs tend to go on auto-pilot, except for those on which considerable attention is focused. But there is some value in that approach--if enough attention gets focused, the program will be reviewed more deeply. Else it should probably go along at base-budget funding

A statement such as yours that "the amount of public goods information that Congress has access to is miniscule compared to the amount that taxpayers as a whole have access to" reveals a lack of understanding of process. Taxpayers as a whole actually do not have as much access as congress. Everyone has everything that is in the public domain, though that "potential access" is much much larger than actual access potential. The point of committees is to have expert staffers (as well as the congressional research service, the JCT, the CBO and similar groups) to develop studies to answer questions that congressional reps in the course of assessing the right course. The problem, of course, that I raise in my post is the concern about the degree of lobbying by special interests that warps that review. But look at the misinformation that most taxpayers have about everything from 9/11, civil rights, economics, taxation to war. A huge proportion of Americans that are not in the top 20% think they are in the top 20% of the income distribution. A huge majority of Americans thinks that income in America is distributed almost evenly, with a little bit more going to the top than to the bottom. That couldn't be further from the truth--which is that the very top garners significantly more than anybody else. Those facts are "out there" but people are either too ignorant to understand them, or too fixed on a particular dogmatic position to be able to distinguish fact from fiction. And of course there is an awful lot of money being spent to mislead Americans on these issues in order to get them to vote against interest. It would be even worse with "direct democracy" voting on what the government would spend money on (even assuming away the other huge problems, like the question of how you do long-term planning with short term volatile funding).

YOur response to Jake reveals considerable naivete about how decisionmaking can work in dynamic group settings--20 people sitting in a room and agreeing to develop a plan by consensus is not the same as 300 million living together in a country where all want clean water, clean air, jobs, food, shelter, a decent life, protection from crime, protection from natural disasters, etc. but have 300 million opinions about what it takes to accomplish that and mostly wrong information about how it is being accomplished (or not) today.

I am involved in my law school's budget advisory committee and it requires me to delve into considerable detail, just for our small budget of under $15 million. Imagine considering what is worthy, and why, and how much when there are so many things on which it can be spent. That is why Congress has worked out a system of committees, with those who represent us developing expertise. It worked pretty well up until about 1980 when the right-wing machine became so adept at obstructionism that most of the decisions now are made reflecting the minority's views.

Anyway, enough said. You appear to be on a libertarian hobbyhorse of remaking the institutional structure along the lines of the anarcho-libertarian concept that taxation is theft. That view treats the status quo property distribution as some kind of god-given natural state, and then treats the state as an usurper taking that away through taxation. Nuts. The state is there before or at least simultaneously with the markets, and thus what any of us "has" is partly predetermined by what the state offers and subtracts. You might want to read the "Myth of Ownership" for some backgrounding on these issues.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 05, 2011 at 06:36 PM
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Linda, never mentioned anything about taxes being theft so not quite sure where you got the impression that I'm an anarcho-libertarian. Perhaps you noticed on your blog traffic statistics where I linked to this entry from Kent's blog?

If that's the case then you should try and read through my comments on his entry a bit more carefully. Kent is an anarcho-capitalist...he believes that the private sector can produce everything better than the public sector can. So I tailored my arguments accordingly.

If Kent had been a socialist then I would have tried the exact opposite approach. If you don't believe me take a look at my relatively short entry on the joy of writing checks to the government.

See, I'm a new breed...I'm a pragmatarian. I take my cue from Deng Xiaoping...that guy was so cool. He went around saying that he didn't care if a cat was black or white...what mattered was whether it caught mice.

I'm not dogmatically attached to any particular ideology like you, Jake, Kent and Peter are. I could care less whether an organization is public or private...all I care about is results.

All pragmatarianism says is that taxpayers, like you, will, given a choice, look at results and allocate their taxes accordingly. For example, it doesn't matter to most taxpayers whether the public or private sector comes up with a cure for cancer. But the public will certainly benefit by increased competition between the two sectors.

"How would cancer research take place if it is funded for several years by three people at $100 each and another year by 2 million at $1000 each"

This kind of funding fluctuation occurs because the government leadership is replaced every few years by the opposite faction...but it certainly wouldn't happen with a pragmatarian system. Funding would be relatively steady because demand for cancer research is relatively constant.

Obviously, just because I allocated my taxes to a GO in no way implies that I would have a say how they spent the money. Just because somebody donates to PETA in no way implies that they get to run PETA. So it will be completely up to the organization leadership to decide whether physics research is relevant to cancer research.

Committees are perfectly fine. I'm not saying that we should get rid of any committees. If taxpayers are happy with how congress is spending their money then they would have the option to allocate 100% of their taxes to congress.

Given that you mentioned obstructionism...it would seem logical that you would appreciate the ability to bypass any obstructions and put your taxes directly into the organizations that need it the most.

If we had a pragmatarian system then the whole national healthcare debate would be a moot point. The amount of funding that national healthcare received would determine the percentage of the population that would qualify for coverage.

The top 1% of taxpayers pay for 40% of total taxes while the bottom 99% of taxpayers pay for 60% of total taxes. So...what? There are no public goods that the rich can exclusively benefit from. And not sure if it would be of any benefit trying to generalize how the rich would allocate their taxes.

Yeah, there's certainly a lot of misinformation out there. The thing is...there's a strong correlation between education and income. People who are better educated tend to make more money and pay more taxes. These people, like you, have the necessary critical thinking skills to effectively separate fact from fiction.

Plus, to find any relevant facts they'll just need to visit a GO's website. Each GO website will have a fundraising progress bar and some relevant information demonstrating merit and effectiveness.

Just like the website Charity Navigator analyses the financial health and effectiveness of various non-profit organizations so too will there be several independent organizations set up to do the same thing for GOs. Or maybe Charity Navigator will just expand to include GOs as well.

Posted by: Xerographica | October 05, 2011 at 08:46 PM
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X--
I'm not going to reargue your arguments. I've addressed them and you haven't really responded. Saying that better educated people make more money and pay more in taxes so will make better decisions in this allotment process is about as naive as the rest. This is not a matter of education but a matter of the inability of each and every taxpayer to be sufficiently informed about all the issues and interrelationships to allot his or her tax dollars in any way that would make sense or for any resulting aggregate allotments to make any sense.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 05, 2011 at 09:27 PM
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Linda, up until relatively recently quite a few people applied your same logic to the allocation of private goods. Here are some of the countries that still have planned economies...Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, and Myanmar.

It seems pretty straightforward that markets are incredibly more efficient at allocating private goods.

There is only one difference between public and private goods. With public goods people can free-ride off the contributions that others make to public goods...which decreases the financial incentive for companies to provide public goods.

This problem can be corrected simply by forcing people to pay taxes. Once people are forced to pay taxes then the market can be used to decide how to efficiently allocate public goods.

Again...
1. Planners fail at efficiently allocating private goods.
2. Public goods are not significantly different than private goods.
3. Therefore, planners fail at efficiently allocating public goods.

I'm not making any judgments regarding the tax rate or which goods should be considered public or private. All I'm saying is that markets have long since been proven to be better at efficiently allocating goods.

What's naive is you thinking that a relatively small group of planners could ever allocate public resources as efficiently as 150 million taxpayers could. It demonstrates that you are completely clueless as to how private goods are allocated. Thank goodness that you do not need to know how the invisible hand works for it to work.

Unfortunately, it seems pretty obvious that you need to know how the invisible hand works in order to support pragmatarianism.

Posted by: Xerographica | October 06, 2011 at 04:14 AM
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X
there you go again. Equating discussion of private sector, money-making, "risk it but maybe win it" activities with activities in which the government provides needed intervention because the private sector won't/can't do it, and the question of how to make the decisions about which of those areas to invest resources.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 06, 2011 at 08:33 AM
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X (cont'd)
Public goods are clearly quite different from private goods--if you can't see that, our discussion is useless.

Markets have NOT "long since been proven" adept at the kind of decisionmaking we are discussing. That is anti-empirical thinking. As I have said, there is no such thing as a "market" without government. The concept of "government free markets" is an absurdity.

The kind of arguments you engage in are unsupportable by the facts. But you just continue to assert your assumptions as though they were facts.

Moreover, the "invisible hand" is one of the most overused and wrongly used metaphors in economic discussion--and used in ways that Adam smith himself would find unsuitable, since he thought that there was a genuine problem when the propertied upper class overtook decisionmaking.

Nuff said.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 06, 2011 at 08:37 AM
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Linda, you aren't going to get any argument from me that the government provides needed intervention because the private sector won't/can't do it. Again, I'm a pragmatarian...not a libertarian.

The problem is that the government has no idea how to prioritize its interventions.

"When it is impossible to observe what individuals are willing to give up in order to get the public good, how can policymakers access how urgently they really want more or less of it, given the other possible uses of their money?" - Patricia Kennett

Pragmatarianism forces taxpayers to consider the opportunity costs of their allocation decisions. This would allow the interventions of government to accurately reflect the values of taxpayers.

Taxpayers can say that they want this and that and some other thing but their allocation decisions will speak louder than their words.

Posted by: Xerographica | October 06, 2011 at 09:19 AM
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X
No, your "pragmatarianism" does not give the goverment an idea how to prioritize its interventions, nor does it "force" anyone to consider opportunity costs. There is nothing that can require taxpayers to make considered judgements, anymore than there is anything to require voters to do so.

You haven't addressed obvious flaws in an idea that has enormous transaction costs and transition costs to get off the ground, is likely to lead to even more dominance by the wealthy in the decisionmaking apparaturs (those with more money pay more taxes--though not enough--and have more control of how that tax money is used, so will likely use it to benefit themselves) or the many other obstacles I have mentioned.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 06, 2011 at 10:21 AM
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Linda, obviously there are enough voters that want marijuana to be illegal. But how much of the other public goods that they value (defense, infrastructure, border security, etc.) would they be willing to forgo in order to help finance the war against drugs? That is the question that millions of taxpayers would be forced to consider when deciding how to allocate their taxes.

The amount of money that the drug war received would determine how much the government intervened in this area.

Obviously, if somebody is in the ridiculously small minority of people that only care about one public good then they won't be forced to consider the opportunity costs of their allocation decisions. But the rest of us will be forced to make hard choices that we are not currently forced to make.

What's interesting to consider is that, when taxpayers are forced to be directly responsible for funding the public goods that they value...what percentage of taxpayers will be happy to pay more than their fair share of taxes?

What are the transaction costs?

Yes, the wealthy will "purchase" more public goods just like they can purchase more private goods. The difference is that...unlike with private goods...we would all benefit when they "purchase" public goods. Public goods are, by their very definition, non-excludable.

There are no serious obstacles to overcome because this system already works for the non-profit sector. The only difference will be that people will be forced to allocate a percentage of their income (as determined by the tax rate) among the various public organizations.

One "obstacle" that is sometimes mentioned is the cost of fundraising. But with good fundraising practices it is standard for non-profits to receive $5 for every $1 they spend on fundraising...which is a ridiculously high return on investment.

Look, this probably won't happen in our lifetime but it's as a progressive concept as they come. Just like we can look back and realize how was absurd for one king to control all the taxes...so too will people eventually look back and realize how absurd it was for 535 people to control all the taxes.

Just like there were plenty of people who thought that the king had some kind of "divine" wisdom so too are there plenty of people who think that just because congresspeople are elected it imparts some sort of special wisdom when it comes to deciding how taxes should be allocated. It shouldn't take more than an hour of watching C-Span to realize that this is far from the case.

If you're genuinely interested in finding out if this concept would work then just propose it to your friends and ask them to predict which public goods would be underfunded. Compile a list of their responses and see if you don't notice a pattern emerging. At the very minimum it's an interesting intellectual exercise.

Posted by: Xerographica | October 06, 2011 at 04:19 PM
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Jake--re organizational decisionmaking versus individual decisionmaking--yes, clearly the difficulty individuals have in assessing information and making decisions in real time is a key aspect of the problems with X-type "solutions" to tax policy. Of course, even organizational decisionmaking can face some of these same problems, with the usual result then being a tendency to favor the status quo. There are other types of organizational decision-making problems, such as the ones the US now faces with the obstructionism of the right, which is willing to sacrifice the organization in order to satisfy dogmatic, ideological objectives.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 08, 2011 at 04:18 PM
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X--no, there would be no reasonable way for individuals to make decisions about prioritizing the myriad functions of government, because their individual decisions would be compromised or reinforced by others' decisions. And worse, those with the most would carry the most weight (which those with the least would be all to aware of from the outset).

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 08, 2011 at 04:37 PM
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If you think the government has a myriad of functions...then how many functions do you think the private sector has? If the market truly couldn't handle efficiently allocating the relatively small percentage of public functions...then it certainly would have long ago failed at efficiently allocating all of the private functions.

The primary failure of the market is that because of the free-rider problem there is little financial incentive to produce public goods. The primary failure of the government is that planners only have access to a microscopic percentage of the information available to society as a whole.

The solution is simple...donations to government organizations should be 100% tax deductible.

What's interesting is that even though you're a liberal and Peter's a conservative...both of you agree that a market system wouldn't be able to handle efficiently allocating the relatively small percentage of public goods.

Posted by: Xerographica | October 13, 2011 at 07:37 AM
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X

(1) It isn't just the number of functions, but also the type.
(2) The private sector clearly fails at allocating monies appropriately, even among areas that we consider most appropriately handled by the private sector. To take just one example, that's why the US car companies quite innovating with the 'easy money' of newly opened markets in South America (only remedying the problem in connection with the financial crisis) and why CEOs make much more than they should based on their value-added to the enterprise, while workers make less than their value-added to the enterprise (etc.)
(3) The private sector simply, inherently, can't handle appropriately inherently government functions like forcing itself to take account of "externalities".
(4) You are wrong on primary failures but you are even more wrong on your socalled pragmatarianism solution--i've exposed the numerous flaws in your logic on several posts. I won't do it again here but other readers should look at the comments for exchanges between X and me on these issues.
(5) Pappas' contributions to the comments at ataxingmatter are revealing because he sometimes acknowledges what the facts show but then goes on to espouse his "beliefs" in conservative ideology anyway.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 13, 2011 at 01:39 PM
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Linda, people's values are "wrong" when they pay CEOs the big bucks but congress's values are "right" when they bail out the auto industry? Yet congress's values are "wrong" when they block national healthcare?

Let me guess...my values are wrong while your's are right? That's why I started off this discussion with my personal anecdotes...to help you consider the possibility of other people's values having value even if they are not the same as your own.

How is it that I can respect your values while you cannot respect my own?

There's nothing wrong with me valuing the EPA more than I value bailing out the auto-industry. There's nothing wrong with you valuing public healthcare more than you value national defense.

Our values as a whole are the only thing that can objectively and "correctly" determine the allocation of public resources. Votes do not accurately reflect values. Forcing taxpayers to consider the opportunity costs of their individual taxes is the only way we can ensure that limited public resources are used as efficiently as possible.

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.

Posted by: Xerographica | October 13, 2011 at 05:44 PM
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X
You're playing the old 'bait and switch' trick. We aren't having a values discussion. We're having a facts discussion. Your solution doesn't work, for the various reasons I've outlined. Your responses don't address most of the flaws, or continue to assume away the exposed flaws.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 13, 2011 at 06:37 PM
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Linda, no bait and switch here...it's always been about values. How could the topic of the allocation of public resources be about anything but? The information that congress will never have access to is how much of one public good you would be willing to forgo for another public good.

This concept is known as opportunity cost...it's the only way to accurately determine values...and it's the only way to ensure that limited public resources are allocated as efficiently as possible.

You don't seem to be a fan of obstructionism...yet you definitely don't approve of allowing me to directly support the government organizations that I value. I'm not quite sure how that's any different than hyperpartisan obstructionism. You seem to be only happy when my dollars support your values.

Posted by: Xerographica | October 13, 2011 at 07:51 PM
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X
sure, values are ultimately at stake in the decisions that are made by government and by people. But that's not the discussion we've been having. We've been talking about facts like feasibility of mechanisms, empirical evidence about public and private sector activities, etc.

Posted by: Linda Beale | October 13, 2011 at 11:05 PM

Crooked Timber Liberals

Here is my response* to the liberals over at the Crooked Timber blog congratulating themselves for successfully attaining a small present good...

...for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil. - Frederic Bastiat, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen

You liberals always fight for small present goods and then blame others for the great evils that we always have to deal with way down the road...when the "car ends up in the ditch". Is it good that people get paid higher wages? Yes...of course! The problem is that setting wages/benefits above market value will always eventually lead to inefficient allocation of labor. Is it a bad thing when labor is inefficiently allocated? Yes...of course!

Bastiat shared this basic economic truth in 1848 and liberals still haven't gotten around to reading his essay. The fatal conceit of liberals is that they think that a small group of planners can have enough information to make informed economic decisions. We all have some information but no planners have access to enough information to make informed economic decisions for the entire country. This is the basic economic truth that Hayek wrote about in his essay on partial knowledge.

We are all just blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. We all have bits of truth derived from our very limited perspectives. So how do we see the big picture truth? Certainly we shouldn't average everybody's perspectives...you don't average bits of truth. The blind men would never have been able to "see" the elephant if they had averaged their perspectives. We can only see big picture truth by adding everybody's truth together.

Wait! Don't you liberals write me off as some crazy Austrian economist groupie just yet! Because, how crazy could I be if I appreciate your basic truth that people would free-ride off the contributions that others make to the common good? Well...I guess I could still be pretty crazy...but...just how many Austrian economists acknowledge your basic liberal truth?

When we take the liberal bit of truth and add it to the libertarian bit of truth...what do we end up with? Pragmatarianism. We all want public funds to be efficiently allocated. We all want our taxes to be put to the best possible use. Therefore, we should allow each and every taxpayer to directly allocate their taxes. This would provide them with the opportunity to add their pieces of the puzzle to the picture. When each and every taxpayer maximizes the benefit they derive from their tax allocation decisions...then the benefit to society as a whole will be maximized.

Am I a troll? Naw, what kind of troll advocates political tolerance? Pragmatarianism is, if nothing else, a system that maximizes political tolerance. You allocate your taxes to the functions of government that you think are ethical and I'll allocate my taxes to the functions of government that I think are ethical. You don't think war is ethical? So be it! You don't think the war against drugs is ethical? Neither do I! Voters would determine the functions of government and taxpayers would determine which functions to fund.

According to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr..."to have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man." I'm not asking that you doubt your first principles. I'm not asking that you wisely acknowledge your ignorance like Socrates did, " ...it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know". I'm not asking that you even consider the possibility that somebody might have access to truth that falls outside your limited perspective. What I'm simply asking is that you be tolerant of other people's first principles. If doubting one's first principles is the mark of a civilized man...then what is it a mark of to merely tolerate other people's first principles?

*My comment is still "awaiting moderation".  A couple other comments were posted after mine so I guess the moderator took issue with my comment.  I wonder how many other comments they took issue with besides mine?  After I submitted my comment a person wrote..."So, other than being wrong about basically everything, the conservatives here are doing just fine."  Well...

Deontological Ethics vs Pragmatic Ethics

Whether it's political or religious in nature...there's not much you can do with dogma.  Generally I try and steer clear of it but recently I got a bit tricked...twice no less!  The back to back instances involved a revolutionary communist and a natural rights libertarian.  What tricked me was that the communist in several of his blog entries referred to himself as "pragmatic" while the libertarian acknowledged some type of "fairness" principle.

Even though the communist and the libertarian are at nearly opposite ends of the political spectrum...their conclusions on pragmatarianism were strikingly similar.  The communist concluded that I was full of BS and the libertarian concluded that I was incoherent.

When two relatively intelligent people with widely different political views come to the same conclusion...then it's reasonable cause for doubt.  Doubt is nothing new for me though as it's been a fairly constant companion ever since I transitioned to advocating, rather than just considering, pragmatarianism.  That's ok though because, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr..."to have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man."

The concept of "doubt" is quite interesting.  As I mentioned in my post on the divine disparity...Adam and Eve were kicked from the Garden of Eden because the serpent introduced Eve to her very first doubt...which she then passed on to Adam.  In my post I also mentioned the story of Abraham...who didn't seem to express any doubt when he was about to sacrifice his son Issac.  Then of course there was doubting Thomas.

Jesus himself had this to say about doubt...

Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.  Mathew 21:21

Buddha, on the other hand, said this...

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.

Tightly clinging to absolute morals or universal rules is the realm of deontological ethics.  Conversely,  pragmatic ethics takes a larger perspective on morals, rules and laws.  It requires trying to stand outside of your own perspective.

Many of the concepts that we consider "absurd" today were considered "absolute" 500 years ago...isn't it possible that many of the concepts that we consider "absolute" today will be considered "absurd" in 500 years?

In my post on absurdity spotting I shared Herbert Spencer's awesome broad sweeping perspective where he offers numerous examples of the absurd functions that have been fulfilled by various governments at different times.  In a later post on awesomeness spotting I shared a few examples of awesome innovations to public healthcare and education.

Pragmatarianism does not require that you doubt your first principles or see an issue from multiple perspectives...it just requires that you respect and tolerate people's freedom to allocate their individual taxes to the government functions that they deem to be ethical/awesome/necessary.  In other words...pragmatarianism is an expression of political tolerance.

To misquote Voltaire..."I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."  The pragmatarian would say..."I disapprove of how you allocate your taxes, but I will defend to the death your right to do so."  Well...whether a pragmatarian would actually become militant would depend on their first principles.

Personally, I was a minimal state libertarian my entire life until I genuinely considered the free-rider problem.  If I acknowledged that the free-rider problem would result in insufficient funding for national defense...then why wouldn't the free-rider problem apply to all the other public goods that I wanted to kick over to the private sector?

When confronted with this same dilemma most libertarians beat a hasty retreat back to the safety of their universal and absolute ethical principles.  My ethical principles were based on J.S. Mill's Harm Principle...which basically conveys the idea that the freedom to swing my first ends where your nose begins.  It's considerably more flexible than stricter libertarian axioms...so I was left on shaky ground with no sources to refer to in order to help stabilize my ideological foundations.

The shaky ground proved to be quite fertile though...it allowed a hypothetical scenario that I'd considered long ago to germinate and grow into pragmatarianism.  Perhaps doubting takes us a step closer to enlightenment.

Incidentally, a member of the Libertarian Party on Facebook recently shared a link to Jeffrey Miron's blog entry on Poverty and Libertarianism.  Much to my surprise Miron acknowledged that the free-rider problem wouldn't only apply to national defense.  That was the very first instance that I had ever run across of a libertarian making that acknowledgment.

Most of us are familiar with the story of the blind men and the elephant.  Right now we are all like blind men arguing over the scope of government.  In order to accurately discern what the scope of government should actually be...each and every taxpayer should be allowed to add their unique perspective to the puzzle.  This would simply involve giving taxpayers the freedom to spend their individual taxes on the government functions that they believe to be truly necessary.

So what do you think?  Am I incoherent and full of BS?  Perhaps...but Socrates and Hayek would have certainly agreed that it's wiser to err on the side of underestimating how much any of us truly knows.

The problem is thus in no way solved if we can show that all the facts, if they were known to a single mind (as we hypothetically assume them to be given to the observing economist), would uniquely determine the solution; instead we must show how a solution is produced by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge. To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world. - Friedrich August Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society

[Update Dec 2012] Here are a few relevant passages that I've since run across...

The psychologist was not only an authority to whom one owes obedience, but a representative of Science and of one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the United States.  Considering that science is widely regarded as the highest value in contemporary industrial society, it is very difficult for the average person to believe that what science commands could be wrong or immoral.  If the Lord had not told Abraham not to kill his son, Abraham would have done it, like millions of parents who practiced child sacrifice in history.  For the believer neither God nor his modern equivalent, Science, can command anything that is wrong. - Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe. In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the phenomena—of registering the shadows on the screen—of which we in this generation can form no idea. The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that for ever recedes. - James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

It is easy to believe; doubting is more difficult. Experience and knowledge and thinking are necessary before we can doubt and question intelligently.  Tell a child that Santa Claus comes down the chimney or a savage that thunder is the anger of the gods and the child and the savage will accept your statements until they acquire sufficient knowledge to cause them to demur.  Millions in India passionately believe that the waters of the Ganges are holy, that snakes are deities in disguise, that it is as wrong to kill a cow as it is to kill a person - and, as for eating roast beef…that is no more to be thought of than cannibalism.  They accept these absurdities, not because they have been proved, but because the suggestion has been deeply embedded in their minds, and they have not the intelligence, the knowledge, the experience, necessary to question them.
We smile…the poor benighted creatures!  Yet you and I, if we examine the facts closely, will discover that the majority of our opinions, our most cherished beliefs, our creeds, the principles of conduct on which many of us base our very lives, are the result of suggestion, not reasoning…
Prejudiced, biased, and reiterated assertions, not logic, have formulated our beliefs. - Dale Carnegie, Public Speaking for Success

Our creed is that the science of government is an experimental science, and that, like all other experimental sciences, it is generally in a state of progression. No man is so obstinate an admirer of the old times as to deny that medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry, engineering, navigation, are better understood now than in any former age. We conceive that it is the same with political science. Like those physical sciences which we have mentioned, it has always been working itself clearer and clearer, and depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when the most powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time when the most enlightened and virtuous statesman thought it the first duty of a government to persecute heretics, to found monasteries, to make war on Saracens. But time advances; facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus the great progress goes on, till schoolboys laugh at the jargon which imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the illiberality and intolerance of Sir Thomas More. - Thomas Macaulay