The Liberty Scam [from http://www.slate.com/id/2297019/]
Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism,
gave up on the movement he inspired.
By Stephen Metcalf / Updated Monday, June 20, 2011, at 7:06 AM ET
Recently, I overheard a fellow Amtraker back off a conversation on
politics. "You know, it's because I'm a libertarian," he said,
sounding like a vegetarian politely declining offal. Later that
afternoon, in the otherwise quite groovy loft I sometimes crash at in
SoHo, where one might once have expected, say, Of Grammatology or at
least a back issue of Elle Decor, there sat not one but two copies of
something called The Libertarian Reader. "Libertarianism" places
one—so believes the libertarian—not on the political spectrum but
slightly above it, and this accounts for its appeal to both the
tricorne fringe and owners of premium real estate. Liberty's current
bedfellows include Paul Ryan (his staffers are assigned Atlas
Shrugged), Glenn Beck (he flogged The Road to Serfdom onto the
best-seller list), Slate's Jack Shafer, South Park, the founder of
Whole Foods, this nudnik, P.J. O'Rourke, now David Mamet, and to the
extent she cares for anything beyond her own naked self-interest—oh,
wait, that is libertarianism—Sarah Palin.
With libertarianism everywhere, it's hard to remember that as recently
as the 1970s, it was nowhere to be found. Once the creed of smart set
rogues, H.L. Mencken among them, libertarianism all but disappeared
after the Second World War. What happened? The single most
comprehensive, centrally planned, coordinated governmental action in
history—that's what happened. In addition to defeating fascism, the
Second World War acted as a magnificent sieve, through which almost no
one, libertarians included, passed unchanged. (To pick one example:
Lionel Robbins, the most prominent anti-Keynesian before the war,
served as director of the economic division of the British War
Cabinet; after the War, Robbins presided over the massive expansion of
the British higher education system.) By the '50s, with Western Europe
and America free, prosperous, happy, and heavily taxed, libertarianism
had lost its roguish charm. It was the Weltanschauung of itinerant
cranks: Ronald Reagan warming up the Moose Lodge; Ayn Rand mesmerizing
her Saturday night sycophants; the Reader's Digest economist touting
an Austrian pedigree.
Libertarians will blanch at lumping their revered Vons—Mises and
Hayek—in with the nutters and the shills. But between them, Von Hayek
and Von Mises never seem to have held a single academic appointment
that didn't involve a corporate sponsor. Even the renowned law and
economics movement at the University of Chicago was, in its inception,
heavily subsidized by business interests. ("Radical movements in
capitalist societies," as Milton Friedman patiently explained, "have
typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals.") Within
academia, the philosophy of free markets in extremis was rarely
embraced freely—i.e., by someone not on the dole of a wealthy
benefactor. It cannot be stressed enough: In the decades after the
war, a kind of levee separated polite discourse from free-market
economics. The attitude is well-captured by John Maynard Keynes, who
wrote in a review of Hayek's Prices and Production: "An extraordinary
example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can
end up in Bedlam."*
And then came Robert Nozick.
To my knowledge, in writing Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his
breathtaking defense of libertarianism, Nozick never accepted a dime
other than from his employer, the philosophy department at Harvard
University. (Unless it was from the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, the "minimally structured academic
institution bordering on individualist anarchy" as Nozick put it,
where he wrote the book's early chapters.) In fact, Nozick was the
disinterested intellectual that laissez-faire had been searching for
since Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act of 1933. Nozick
started out a classic of the type: a Brooklyn kid, one generation off
the shtetl, toting a dog-eared Plato. But along the way to a full
Harvard professorship, attained at the age of 30, he'd lost the
socialist ardors of his upbringing. "For a while I thought: 'Well, the
arguments are right, capitalism is the best system, but only bad
people would think so,' " he once told a journalist. "Then, at some
point, my mind and my heart were in unison."
The Times Literary Supplement ranks Anarchy, published in 1974, as one
of the "100 Most Influential Books Since the War," and that, I think,
is underselling it. To this day, left intellectuals remember where
they were when they first heard Nozick's arguments against not just
socialism but wealth redistribution of any kind. "It is no
exaggeration to say," the Telegraph wrote, after Nozick died in 2002,
"that Nozick, more than anyone else, embodied the new libertarian
zeitgeist which, after generations of statist welfarism from
Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, ushered in the
era of Reagan and Bush, pere et fils." Prior to Anarchy, "liberty" was
a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions and progressive
taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts and the
B.F. Goodriches. After Anarchy, "liberty" was a concept as worthy of
academic dignity as the categorical imperative.
As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further
than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out
a normative claim (that liberty is thefundamental value of values, and
should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient
method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to
pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand
in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not,
as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more
precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking
nhours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution
necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services
to those lawns which need him most?"
To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes
at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most
distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most
cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto
himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness
of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons
is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian
principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not
be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their
consent. Individuals are inviolable."
I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke,
the polite Fabian consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession:
Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton
Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the
Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts,
culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops,
nobody knows.
True, a recondite book by an obscure professor wouldn't have made any
difference if it hadn't caught the drift of public feeling. But also
true: Public feeling might have remained begrudging, demagogic,
sub-intellectual if the public's courage hadn't been shored up (or its
conscience bought off, depending on your point of view) by
intellectuals like Nozick. Take Margaret Thatcher's infamous
provocation—"There's no such thing as society"—with its implication
that human beings are nothing more than brutishly competitive atoms.
Now listen to its original formulation, in Anarchy: "But there is no
social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own
good. There are only individual people, different individual people,
with their own individual lives." The tone is different—it's Kantian,
not Hobbesian—and so is the moral emphasis: Society is unreal not
because individuals are brutish but because they are dignified.
With the solemn invocation of individual lives, the liberal humanist
ought to push away from the table, take a deep breath, and ask whether
any of this remarkable assault is true. Can it really be that
eliminating the income tax shows maximum moral respect for others? I
thought a fraction of a rich man's fortune is to the rich man only
money but to a starving man is freedom. Am I a moral idiot? It is
impossible without writing a book (and many have) to do Anarchy
justice. Nonetheless, one argument from its pages is considered its
most central, most famous, most bewitching. This is the so-called
"Wilt Chamberlain" argument, and pausing to pick it apart, we can
begin to see why Nozick's defense of libertarianism, as Nozick himself
came to believe, collapsed.
2.
When I think with my own brain and look with my own eyes, it's obvious
to me that some combination of civil rights, democratic institutions,
educational capital, social trust, consumer choice, and economic
opportunity make me free. This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick
is arguing that economic rights are the only rights, and that insofar
as there are political rights, they are nothing more than a framework
in support of private property and freedom of contract. When I study
American history, I can see why America, thanks to a dense bundle of
historical accidents, is a kind of Lockean paradise, uniquely suited
to holding up liberty as its paramount value. This is not what Nozick
is arguing. Nozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to
put forward any other value is to submit individuals to coercion.
How does so supple a mind end up committed to so seemingly brittle a
belief system? The leap of faith here is, no surprise, in the
construal of liberty itself, which unlike other values (says the
libertarian) makes no restricting or normative claims on anybody;
liberty is instead like oxygen—invisible, pervasive, enabling. Every
other value, meanwhile, represents someone else's deranged
will-to-power by which, under the guise of high-mindedness or
disinterest, he would "pattern" all of society to his own liking.
"Almost every suggested principle of … justice is patterned," Nozick
says, by way of setting up the Chamberlain argument. "To each
according to his moral merit, or needs, or marginal product, or how
hard he tries …" By way of showing us how an unpatterned, or
libertarian, society is more just than any patterned one, Nozick asks
the reader to consult her own preference, and choose a society
patterned in any way she sees fit—Marxist, bell-curve meritocracy—you
pick. Now call that pattern D1. Then, Nozick writes:
"Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a
great gate attraction. (Also suppose contracts run only for a year,
with players being free agents.) He signs the following sort of
contract with a team: In each home game twenty-five cents from the
price of each ticket of admission goes to him. (We ignore the question
of whether he is "gouging" the owners, letting them look out for
themselves.) … Let us suppose that in one season one million persons
attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain ends up with $250,000, a
much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone
else has. Is he entitled to his income? Is this new distribution D2
unjust?"
Nozick assumes our dream society is in some respect egalitarian; that
to prevent Wilt from grossly out-earning his fellow citizens, the
system we've imagined in D1 will curtail Chamberlain's right to the
whole fruit of his own labor. To the liberal humanist, Nozick is
saying: You don't take your finest hero, Kant, seriously, because if
you did, you would never sacrifice Wilt's autonomy to the social
planner's designs. To the socialist, he is saying: You don't take your
own finest hero, Marx, seriously, because if you did, you would never
expropriate his surplus value (via taxation) as blithely as the
capitalist. And to his own fellow Harvard professors, he is saying:
You don't take your own finest hero—yourself—seriously, because if you
did, why would you ever curtail the prerogative of a superstar?
For all its intriguing parts, Anarchy can be thought of as one long
Excuse me? in response to one Harvard colleague in particular, the
political philosopher John Rawls. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argued
that our talents are not really our own, because they are not morally
intrinsic to us. Rawls asked us to imagine that we know nothing about
our life advantages—that how gifted, smart, attractive, charismatic we
are, as well as the socio-economic status of our parents, lie behind a
veil of ignorance. He then asked us to design an insurance policy
against poor accidents of birth. That insurance policy would be
"justice," in the form of a society that was fair even from the
perspective of its least well-off citizen—who, after all, passing
through the veil of ignorance, might turn out to be us.
To this, Nozick replies: All that intellectual pomp, arrayed to
convince me that my talents are not mine? But my talents aren't like
fire and disease. They aren't fatalities I insure against. Quite the
opposite: My talents constitute the substance of who I am, and I am
right to bank on them. Having cornered us with Kant, with Marx, and,
most of all, with our own vanity, Nozick concludes, "No end-state
principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous
interference with people's lives," confident that "interference" is
sufficiently morally offensive to carry the day.
Here the liberal humanist needs to relax, take a second breath, and
realize that, while clever, the Wilt Chamberlain argument is maybe a
little too clever—i.e., what seems on first blush to be a simple case
of freedom from interference is in fact a kind of connivance. Anarchy
not only purports to be a defense of capitalism, but a proud defense
of capitalism. And yet if Anarchywould defend capitalism unashamedly,
why does its most famous argument include almost none of the defining
features of capitalism—i.e., no risk capital, no capital markets, no
financier? Why does it feature a basketball player and not, say, a
captain of industry, a CEO, a visionary entrepreneur? The example as
Nozick sets it out includes a gifted athlete (Wilt Chamberlain),
paying customers (those with a dollar to see Wilt play)—and yet, other
than a passing reference to the team's "owners," no capitalist!
In Nozick's example, we know what portion of every ticket (25 cents)
represents the monetary equivalent of every paying customer's desire
to see not the game itself but Wilt Chamberlain play in it. Bearing in
mind that all thought experiments beg our indulgence without requiring
our stupidity, notice that, in order to abstract out this allegiance
from allegiance to the team, to the sport, etc., and give it a dollar
figure, Nozick has assigned what amounts to a market price to Wilt's
talents while also suggesting the price was achieved by negotiation
between Wilt and the owner. Now, here we must pause, and note that
"price" is not an incidental feature of a libertarian belief system—it
is what obviates the need, beyond enforcing the basic rule of law, for
government. To a libertarian, price is, in effect, the conscience of
society finding its highest expression in every swipe of the debit
card. Just as the thought experiment, "If there were purple cows on
the moon, they would certainly be purple" tells us nothing about the
moon, cows, or the color purple, assuming a world in which labor and
management arrive at gentleman's agreements—and in which those
agreements capture the precise value, down to the penny, of labor's
marginal product—tells us very little about justice.
Put another way, Nozick is cornering us into answering a ridiculously
loaded question: If every person were a capitalist, and every
capitalist a human capitalist, and every human capitalist was
compensated in exact proportion to the pleasure he or she provided
others, would a world without progressive taxation be just? To arrive
at this question, Nozick vanishes most of the known features of
capitalism (capital, owners, means of production, labor, collective
bargaining) while maximizing one feature of capitalism—its ability to
funnel money to the uniquely talented. In the example, "liberty" is
all but cognate with a system that efficiently compensates the
superstar.
The connivance is thus hidden in plain sight. "Wilt Chamberlain" is an
African-American whose talents are unique, scarce, perspicuous
(points, rebounds, assists), and in high demand. We feel powerfully
the man should be paid, and not to do so—to expect a black athlete to
perform for (largely) white audiences without adequate
compensation—raises the specter of the plantation. But being a star
athlete isn't the only way to make money. In addition to earning a
wage, one can garnish a wage, collect a fee, levy a toll, cash in a
dividend, take a kickback, collect a monopoly rent, hit the
superfecta, inherit Tara, insider trade, or stumble on Texas tea. For
each way of conceiving wealth, there is at least one way of moralizing
its distribution. The Wilt Chamberlain example is designed to corner
us—quite cynically, in my view—into moralizing all of them as if they
were recompense for a unique talent that gives pleasure; and to tax
each of them, and regulate each of them, according to the same
principle of radical noninterference suggested by a black ballplayer
finally getting his due.
3.
To my critique of the Chamberlain example, a libertarian might
respond: Given frictionless markets, rational self-maximizers, and
perfect information, the market price for Wilt's services could not
stay separable from the market price to see Wilt play. (Visionary
entrepreneurs would create start-up leagues, competing leagues would
bid up prices for the best players.) In a free-market paradise,
capital will flow to talent, until rewards commensurate perfectly with
utility. Maybe; and maybe in a socialist paradise, no one will catch
the common cold. The essence of any utopianism is: Conjure an ideal
that makes an impossible demand on reality, then announce that, until
the demand is met in full, your ideal can't be fairly evaluated.
Attribute any incidental successes to the halfway meeting of the
demand, any failure to the halfway still to go.
How could a thinker as brilliant as Nozick stay a party to this? The
answer is: He didn't. "The libertarian position I once propounded,"
Nozick wrote in an essay published in the late '80s, "now seems to me
seriously inadequate." In Anarchy democracy was nowhere to be found;
Nozick now believed that democratic institutions "express and
symbolize … our equal human dignity, our autonomy and powers of
self-direction." In Anarchy, the best government was the least
government, a value-neutral enforcer of contracts; now, Nozick
concluded, "There are some things we choose to do together through
government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the
fact that we do them together in this official fashion ..."
We're faced then with two intriguing mysteries. Why did the Nozick of
1975 confuse capital with human capital? And why did Nozick by 1989
feel the need to disavow the Nozick of 1975? The key, I think, is
recognizing the two mysteries as twin expressions of a single, primal,
human fallibility: the need to attribute success to one's own moral
substance, failure to sheer misfortune. The effectiveness of the Wilt
Chamberlain example, after all, is best measured by how readily you
identify with Wilt Chamberlain.Anarchy is nothing if not a
tour-de-force, an advertisement not just for libertarianism but for
the sinuous intelligence required to put over so peculiar a thought
experiment. In the early '70s, Nozick—and this is audible in the
writing—clearly identified with Wilt: He believed his talents could
only be flattered by a free market in high value-add labor. By the
late '80s, in a world gone gaga for Gordon Gekko and Esprit, he was no
longer quite so sure.
Even in 1975, it took a pretty narrow view of history to think all
capital is human capital, and that philosophy professors, even the
especially bright ones, would thrive in the free market. But there was
a historical reason for Nozick's belief: the magnificent sieve.
Harvard's enrollment prior to World War II was 3,300; after the war,
it was 5,300, 4,000 of whom were veterans. The GI Bill was on its way
to investing more in education grants, business loans, and home loans
than all previous New Deal programs combined. By 1954, with the Cold
War in full swing, the U.S. government was spending 20 times what it
had spent on research before the war. "Some universities," C. Wright
Mills could write in the mid-'50s, "are financial branches of the
military establishment." In the postwar decades, the American
university grew in enrollment, budget and prestige, thanks to a
substantial transfer of wealth from the private economy, under the
rubric of "military Keynesianism." As a tentacle of the
military-industrial octopus, academia finally lost its last remnant of
colonial gentility.
At the same time the university boomed, marginal tax rates for high
earners stood as high as 90 percent. This collapsed the so-called
L-curve, the graphic depiction of wealth distribution in the United
States. The L-curve lay at its flattest in 1970, just as Nozick was
sitting down to write Anarchy. In 1970, there were nearly 500,000
employed academics, and their relative income stood at an all-time
high. To the extent anyone could believe mental talent, human capital,
and capital were indistinguishable, it was thanks to the greatest
market distortion in the history of industrial capitalism; and because
for 40 years, thanks to this distortion, talent had not been forced to
compete with the old "captains of industry," with the financiers and
the CEOs.
Buccaneering entrepreneurs, boom-and-bust markets, risk capital—these
conveniently disappeared from Nozick's argument because they'd all but
disappeared from capitalism. In a world in which J.P. Morgan and
Cornelius Vanderbilt have been rendered obsolete, reduced to
historical curios, to a funny old-style man, imprisoned in gilt
frames, the professionals—the scientists, engineers, professors,
lawyers and doctors—correspondingly rise in both power and esteem. And
in a world in which the professions are gatekept by universities,
which in turn select students based on their measured intelligence,
the idea that talent is mental talent, and mental talent is, not only
capital, but the only capital, becomes easier and easier for a
humanities professor to put across. Hence the terminal irony of
Anarchy: Its author's audible smugness in favor of libertarianism was
underwritten by a most un-libertarian arrangement—i.e., the postwar
social compact of high marginal taxation and massive transfers of
private wealth in the name of the very "public good" Nozick decried as
nonexistent.
And the screw takes one last turn: By allowing for the enormous rise
in (relative) income and prestige of the upper white collar
professions, Keynesianism created the very blind spot by which
professionals turned against Keynesianism. Charging high fees as
defended by their cartels, cartels defended in turn by universities,
universities in turn made powerful by the military state, many
upper-white-collar professionals convinced themselves their
pre-eminence was not an accident of history or the product of
negotiated protections from the marketplace but the result of their
own unique mental talents fetching high prices in a free market for
labor. Just this cocktail of vanity and delusion helped Nozick edge
out Rawls in the marketplace of ideas, making Anarchy a surprise
best-seller, it helped make Ronald Reagan president five years later.
So it was the public good that killed off the public good.
Since 1970, the guild power of lawyers, doctors, engineers, and, yes,
philosophy professors has nothing but attenuated. To take only the
most pitiful example, medical doctors have evolved over this period
from fee-for-service professionals totally in control of their own
workplace to salaried body mechanics subject to the relentless
cost-cutting mandate of a corporate employer. They've gone from being
Marcus Welby—a living monument to public service through private
practice—to being, as one comprehensive study put it, harried "middle
management." Who can argue with a straight face that a doctor in 2011
has more liberty than his counterpart in 1970? What any good liberal
Democrat with an ounce of vestigial self-respect would have said to
Nozick in 1970—"Sure, Bob, but we both know what your liberty means.
It means power will once again mean money, and money will be at
liberty to flow to the top"—in fact happened. The irony is that as
capital once again concentrates as nothing more than capital (i.e., as
the immense skim of the financiers), the Nozickian illusion (that
capital is human capital and human capital is the only capital) gets
harder and harder to sustain.
Sustained it is, though. Just as Nozick would have us tax every dollar
as if it were earned by a seven-foot demigod, apologists for
laissez-faire would have us treat all outsize compensation as if it
were earned by a tech revolutionary or the value-investing equivalent
of Mozart (as opposed to, say, this guy, this guy, this guy, or this
guy). It turns out the Wilt Chamberlain example is all but unkillable;
only it might better be called the Steve Jobs example, or the Warren
Buffett* example. The idea that supernormal compensation is fit reward
for supernormal talent is the ideological superglue of neoliberalism,
holding firm since the 1980s. It's no wonder that in the aftermath of
the housing bust, with the glue showing signs of decay—with Madoff and
"Government Sachs" displacing Jobs and Buffett in the
headlines—"liberty" made its comeback. When the facts go against you,
resort to "values." When values go against you, resort to the mother
of all values. When the mother of all values swoons, reach deep into
the public purse with one hand, and with the other beat the public
senseless with your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged.
4.
Calling yourself a libertarian is another way of saying you believe
power should be held continuously answerable to the individual's
capacity for creativity and free choice. By that standard, Thomas
Jefferson, John Ruskin, George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, Noam Chomsky,
Michel Foucault, and even John Maynard Keynes are libertarians.
(Orwell: "The real division is not between conservatives and
revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." Keynes:
"But above all, individualism … is the best safeguard of personal
liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly
widens the field for the exercise of personal choice.") Every thinking
person is to some degree a libertarian, and it is this part of all of
us that is bullied or manipulated when liberty is invoked to silence
our doubts about the free market. The ploy is to take libertarianism
as Orwell meant it and confuse it with libertarianism as Hayek meant
it; to take a faith in the individual as an irreducible unit of moral
worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation.
Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a
free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent
framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty
that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to
health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and
placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care,
employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive
reality, and not a vacuous formality? When Hayek insists welfare is
the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation
iscoercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned
discussion about public goods from ever taking place. "According to
them, any intervention of the state in economic life," a prominent
conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, "would
be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely
collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included." Thus we are
hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us
most alone.
Thanks in no small part to that silence, we have passed through the
looking glass. Large-scale, speculative risk, undertaken by already
grossly overcompensated bankers, is nowofficially part of the
framework, in the form of too-big-to-fail guarantees made, implicitly
and explicitly, by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the "libertarian"
right moves to take the risks of unemployment, disease, and, yes,
accidents of birth, and devolve them entirely onto the responsibility
of the individual. It is not just sad; it is repugnant.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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