Those of us who want our call records to be private are being forced to reveal them to the government. We can’t keep them private even if we want to. What is wrong with the government spying on us in this way? … Read More
Rand Paul Taking Libertarians Mainstream Possible Because Ron Paul’s Gone, Politico Misguidedly Claims
Politico ran
a piece yesterday that argued that libertarians were ascendant
in the Republican Party because of the receding importance of
social issues and the growing importance of fiscal ones in the eyes
of the electorate, and that libertarian Republicans had a chance to
“rebrand their governing philosophy” with Ron Paul’s “ride into the
sunset”. Yet even the article itself seems to present evidence to
the contrary:
Perhaps the biggest opening for libertarians comes in
foreign policy, where the traditionally muscular GOP doctrine is
undergoing a sea change. Fritz Wenzel, who has polled for both
Pauls, said the electorate has little appetite for international
adventurism in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“There will not ever be a single Republican Party ideology,” he
said. “That said, there’s no question that the libertarian spirit
of the Republican Party is growing in influence. That’s because
[voters] feel there is a greater threat to freedom – to their
individual freedoms and the freedoms of future generations.”
“They’re coming back to core values, and a lot of these core values
are reflective of what has come in the modern era to be libertarian
values – an emphasis on freedom, security and privacy,” he
added.
This crew believes demographics will work to their advantage. They
see a generation coming of age that was too young to fully
experience the Sept. 11 attacks yet saw the effects of a major
recession and two wars.
The libertarian message of self-reliance resonates with younger
voters,” said another Republican strategist who has worked with the
libertarian forces. “Ron Paul tapped into that.”
Ron Paul, of course, was for years not only the most prominent,
but one of an exceedingly few number of anti-war voices on the
right. He was one of only six Republicans in the House to vote
against the Iraq War; by 2006 nearly
two-thirds of Americans opposed the war. Brian Doherty has
written about the
next generation of Ron Paul-inspired Republicans in
Congress.
Ron Paul’s departure from Congress arguably leaves more air in
the room for other libertarian candidates to galvanize voters, but
the post-Ron Paul evolution of libertarian Republicans is hardly a
“rebranding” away from the messages Ron Paul espoused but a
wholesale adoption of them. As Doherty chronicled in his book
Ron Paul’s rEVOLution, Paul hasn’t changed his tune since
first entering politics in the 70s. Libertarian ideas have become
mainstream in the GOP partially/largely because of the success of
Paul’s last two presidential campaigns in bringing
those ideas into the mainstream. There wouldn’t be a Rand Paul
to bring libertarians into the mainstream if there wasn’t a Ron
Paul to build momentum for ideas that are increasingly relevant to
the
political and
economic situation we find ourselves in. … Read More
Mediaite Scribe: Libertarian Are Not Nuts, Except in Bill Maher’s Head
Over
at Mediaite, Andrew Kirell responds to Bill Maher’s recent
broadside against libertarians on his eponymous HBO show. A while
back, Maher said,
Libertarians have to stop ruining libertarianism! Or at least do
a better job of explaining the difference between today’s
libertarian and just being a selfish prick.
Read and
watch the whole bit here. Maher has called himself
libertarian in the past and his preferences on many issues
line up with those of most libertarians. In a
previous post, I suggested that whether you think Maher is
accurate or not about the contemporary libertarian scene, it’s
worth figuring out why liberals and conservatives – who often agree
with much in the libertarian set of concerns – have such skewed
opinions of the broader movement toward what Reason characterizes
as “Free Minds and Free Markets.”
Kirell does a comprehensive job of fisking Maher’s complaint
while acknowledging that yes, there are some nuts in the larger
pie. He points out that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), one of Maher’s
main targets, is not libertarian and that libertarians at Reason
and elsewhere have panned his support for war, Medicare expansion,
and TARP, and have dissed his budgets for increasing spending.
Kirell ends with this extended tour of the current libertarian
movement that should especially give liberal critics pause when
they try to equate libertarianism with contempt for the wretched of
the earth:
You can’t truly have a conversation about today’s libertarian
movement without mentioning ;Reason….Led by [Nick]
Gillespie (once
a guest of Maher’s) and ;Matt
Welch, the largest libertarian publication regularly
churns out devastating critiques of ;police ;abuse,
exposes the ;horrific
injustices ;from the ;War
on Drugs, and repeatedly criticizes the foreign
policy ;blunders ;ofboth
Republicans and Democrats.
You also can’t neglect the Institute for Justice, a non-profit
law firm that fights on behalf of small business owners in
impoverished communities who dare take on the behemoth local
bureaucracies designed to keep them from pursuing their dreams.
They even once battled Maher’s nemesis ;Donald
Trump ;when he tried to use the government to
strong-arm an old woman into selling her home.
There are also writers like
the ;Atlantic‘s ;Conor
Friedersdorf ;and civil
libertarian ;Glenn
Greenwald, both of whom cared about drone strikes long
before the issue became a general talking point among the
anti-Obama right; and long before Maher himself came around to his
belated opposition to the warfare state.
Over at the Huffington Post, libertarian ;Radley
Balko ;does more to fight the militarization of
American police than any progressive writer on the same beat. His
reporting pretty much single-handedly got a ;victim
of the drug war off death row. Maher’s contribution to the
fight against prohibition? Having ;Zach
Galifianakis ;smoke a “joint” on set.
Meanwhile, Fox News personalities ;John
Stossel ;(disclosure: my former boss)
and ;Judge
Andrew Napolitano ;routinely ;eschew ;the
conservative media narrative and fight for a ;variety of
causes ;for which Maher also advocates.
There’s also the indispensable Cato Institute, a libertarian
think-tank that regularly bucks both parties while receiving praise
from progressives like ;Ezra
Klein. While conservative organizations like Heritage
Foundation and American Enterprise Institute regularly change
positions depending on who is in power (ahem,
RomneyCare/ObamaCare?), Cato remains a principled advocate for
reduced government in the boardroom ;and ;the
bedroom.
Read the whole thing here.
Earlier this year, Reason TV interviewed Kirell and his Mediaite
colleague Noah Rothman about their site. Watch that below.
In Memoriam: Roger Ebert
The
late Roger Ebert’s writing would have left a mark if he had never
gone on television in his life, but it was his TV show with Gene
Siskel that made him a celebrity. You wouldn’t have expected that
from their
first show together: two writers droning on, not always sure
where exactly they should be looking, with no excitement beyond the
possibility that Siskel’s ‘stache will start eating his face. But
it wasn’t long before they perfected the bickering-brothers dynamic
that made their show more entertaining than at least 60% of the
movies they reviewed. Instead of suppressing their offscreen
rivalry, which is on display in various outtakes
floating around the Web, they channeled it into arguments about
movies; and made those arguments meaningful by actually giving a
damn about the pictures they were rating. They also had a healthy
sense of self-aware humor about their personas, as their inevitably
entertaining ;guest spots on
Letterman and other shows proved. The act could be
imitated but it could never be equaled, as countless other programs
– including, eventually, Ebert & Roeper — would
learn.
But if the TV show ensured that Roger Ebert was
famous while he was alive, it’s his writing for newspapers and the
Web that should ensure he’ll be remembered long after he’s dead.
For one thing, he was an exceptionally stylist. I might disagree
strenuously with Ebert’s opinion about a movie; I might bristle at
a factual flub or two about the plot; but I was almost always awed
at his prose, which was thoughtful, graceful, funny, and
accessible. He didn’t just write about movies: He had been a
sportswriter early on, and an interview he did for his college
paper with the left-libertarian author Paul Goodman was good enough
to get reprinted in
one of Goodman’s books. (He invoked Goodman in at least one of
his reviews too — a thumbs-up
take on Paul Schrader’s underappreciated Blue Collar
– and there was a time when I had hopes that underneath it all
Ebert was some sort of anarchist. Alas, when he unleashed his
political-pundit side late in life he turned out to be a
standard-issue liberal.) In the last few years he wrote many
wonderful memoirs for his website, and then a much-admired
autobiography. But of course it was his movie writing that
defined him, and it was here that he made his other great
contribution to American culture.
Ebert, you see, didn’t care about those old
highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow distinctions that occupied so many
debates about criticism in the middle of the 20th century. If you
were interested in learning about cinema as a high art, he could be
your gateway to the greats, writing capably about Bergman and
Welles and Kurosawa and other filmmaking giants. (I’m pretty sure I
first heard of Fassbinder in a Roger Ebert essay. Or, at least,
that essay was the first time I wanted to run out and rent a
Fassbinder movie right away.) On the other hand, if you wanted
to know if the latest spy flick was exciting or if the new Mel
Brooks movie was likely to make you laugh, Ebert was perfectly
capable of waxing enthusiastic about those kinds of films too. It’s
not that he liked everything, you understand. (Check out his
evisceration of Priest.) It’s that he was
capable of liking everything, or at least everything that
was done well. Even when he joined in the chorus denouncing the
slasher genre in the ’80s, ;– he had to confess that yes, he
was the guy who gave three and a half stars to
Last House on the Left.
And that
leads us to what may be my all-time favorite Roger Ebert review: a
joyful little essay about the pleasures to be found in even the
most indefensibly trashy pictures. The subject is a
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it release called Rapa Nui. I’ve
never seen it, and I don’t think I even would have heard of it if I
hadn’t read Ebert’s review. He gives it just two stars, and much of
the piece consists of a litany of everything ridiculous about the
picture. But then he says this at the end:
Concern for my reputation prevents me from recommending
this movie. I wish I had more nerve. I wish I could simply write,
“Look, of course it’s one of the worst movies ever made. But it has
hilarious dialogue, a weirdo action climax, a bizarre explanation
for the faces of Easter Island, and dozens if not hundreds of
wonderful bare breasts.” I am however a responsible film critic and
must conclude that “Rapa Nui” is a bad film. If you want to see it
anyway, of course, that’s strictly your concern. I think I may
check it out again myself.
My head can’t bring itself to believe in an afterlife. But my
heart hopes that Ebert gets another chance to see it. … Read More
What Internet Sales Tax and Gay Marriage Have in Common
Utah’s legislature recently
considering a bill to implement an online sales tax, which failed ;earlier
this month. Proponents, including brick and mortar stores, lobbied
for the bill to “level the playing field” by requiring online
sellers to collect the same sales tax stores in the real world do.
Author Connor Boyack makes the libertarian case
against internet sales taxes and government marriage:
Retail stores are required by the state to become tax
collectors, and online stores with no physical presence in the
state are not. Should the state then increase its size, reach, and
tax base in the name of fairness?
Absolutely not. Equality before and non-discrimination by the law
is important, to be sure. But increasing the size and scope of the
state is not the proper method to fulfill that objective. As is
usually the case, the opposite is true; reducing and ultimately
removing the other barrier is best. Because sales taxes are an
illegitimate imposition into a private commercial transaction,
political pressure should be applied to repeal that mandate from
existing establishments, rather than shackling those that are
currently exempt.
The same situation exists in the debate over same-sex marriage.
Proponents of altering marriage law in the states and at the
federal level claim that prohibitions against gay marriage are
unfair and discriminatory. They claim that equality before the law
demands that their relationships likewise be licensed and
sanctioned by the state.
As with sales taxes, the state should not be enlarged in pursuit of
equality in marriage licensure. Because ;the government has no
business being involved in marriage, the discrimination inherent in
existing marriage law is best remedied by removing it altogether,
or at least reducing the inequality by removing tax credits, estate
planning benefits, and other incentives currently restricted to
heterosexual couples whose unions are licensed by the
state.
Read the rest of the piece
here. … Read More
How Debt Ruins Systems
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a former trader and hedge fund manager,
a bestselling author, and a groundbreaking theorist on risk and
resilience.
A finance professor at New York University and a research
scholar at Oxford, Taleb drew wide attention after the 2007
publication of ;The
Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which
warned that our institutions and risk models are not designed to
account for rare and catastrophic events. Among other things, the
book presciently cautioned that oversized and unaccountable banks
using flawed investment models could trigger a financial crisis. He
also warned that the government-sanctioned housing finance
agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were sitting on a “barrel of
dynamite.” One year after ;The Black Swan ;was
published, Taleb’s predictions came to pass. ;
Taleb doesn’t identify as a libertarian, but he often sounds
like one. He ;supported Ron Paul ;in the 2012 presidential
election and has cited the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek as
an influence. He has called ;New York Times ;columnist
Thomas Friedman “vile and harmful,” and he coined the phrase
“Stiglitz Syndrome” after Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz, referring to the phenomenon of public intellectuals being
held utterly unaccountable for their bad predictions. The
economists Paul Krugman and Paul Samuelson are among Taleb’s other
Nobelist bêtes noire.
Taleb’s new book, ;Antifragile:
Things that Gain with Disorder, argues that in order to
create robust institutions we must allow them to build resilience
through adversity. The essence of capitalism, he argues, is
encouraging failure, not rewarding success.
Reason TV Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb in
January for a wide-ranging discussion about debt, technology, the
banking system, capitalism, and why he’ll never take writing advice
from “some academic at Cambridge who sold 2,200 copies.” Video of
this interview can be seen at reason.com.
reason: What is antifragility and why is it so
important?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Antifragility is
something that likes volatility and likes variation, likes turmoil,
likes stress—up to a point. The opposite would be robust.
Robust is like a rock. It doesn’t care. Diamond is perfectly
robust. What is antifragile gains from disorder and may even need
disorder for fuel. ;
reason: You talk about it in terms of
materials, but antifragility applies more to systems or living
organisms, right?
Taleb: Exactly. What people fail to
understand—and this is what libertarians tend to pick up rather
quickly—is that even when you read Adam Smith, you have this
illusion that the economy functions like a machine. But it’s not
like a washing machine. A washing machine needs maintenance. It’s
more like a cat than a washing machine. A human body needs some
stressors. And everything organic and complex communicates with the
environment via stressors.
reason: Is it kind of a fractal system?
Taleb: Exactly. It’s fractal because you have
layers. Like the restaurant business. It’s composed of restaurants.
And for the restaurant business to be robust—or perhaps
antifragile—you need every single restaurant to be fragile. It’s
the opposite of Nietzsche’s “What doesn’t kill me makes me
stronger.” What kills me makes others stronger.
(Interview continues below video.)
reason: Because they learn?
Taleb: They learn from your mistakes. You have
evolutionary forces where the individuals sacrifice for the
collective. It works within your biological system. You’re composed
of cells. If you harm some cells, your overall health will
improve. ;
reason: Most people would say when you have a
system and if there’s a contagion in it, if there’s a cancer in it,
if there’s some kind of stressor that starts taking over, it’s
going to spread to the whole system. This is what we hear about the
banking system, the financial crisis. You’re arguing that a robust
or an antifragile system is capable of seeing this part of the
system being cancered and learning from it.
Taleb: To cite the great Yogi Berra, a good
antifragile system is a system in which all mistakes are good
mistakes. And the bad system is one, again to paraphrase Yogi
Berra, where you tend to make the wrong mistakes. Let’s compare the
banking system to, say, transportation. Every plane crash makes the
next plane crash less likely and our transportation safer. Now,
with the banking system, [a failure] leads to increased probability
of failure of an entire system. That’s a bad system.
reason: What’s the best way to stop that so
you’re not allowing the problem to replicate throughout the
system?
Taleb: What fragilizes an overall system? Three
things: One, centralization. Decentralization spreads mistakes,
makes smaller mistakes. Decentralization is where we converge with
libertarians. A second one is low debt. The third is skin in the
game. ;
reason: Paul Krugman, one of your great friends
or nemeses, just recently wrote that these trillion-dollar deficits
don’t matter. ;
Taleb: All these economists, let’s put it this
way: Risk is not their thing. ;
Debt leads to fragility. We’ve discovered since the Babylonians
that debt has systemic consequences whereas equity doesn’t. Let’s
say that you have two brothers. One of them borrowed and they both
had predictions about the future—forecasts. One brother borrows.
The other issues equity. The one who borrows will go bust if he
makes a mistake. The one who issues equity will fluctuate but will
be able to survive a forecast error. ;
reason: But is it also true that the brother
with equity can never really have that big payday?
Taleb: For him! But overall the system is well
distributed. There’s an accounting equality. Debt traditionally has
blown up systems and has been very good for governments to wage
war. I’m not against credit. I’m against leverage. ;
reason: So you give me a loan and I say I’m
going to pay you back and that gives me the ability to get
something in the short run that will help me produce more in the
long run. That’s OK? ;
Taleb: Banking started [like this]: You’re
going to Aleppo, Syria, and Florence and you’re going to send me
some silk. You trust me, and my correspondent in Aleppo would pay
you the minute I get my silk—that kind of transaction. That’s
called letter of credit, where you have debt conditional on some
commercial transaction being completed. And it also allows people
to finance some inventory, provided the buyer is a committed buyer.
That kind of facilitation of commerce is how it all started—the
letter of credit—and it developed very well.
Before that we had debt in society and it led to blowups in
Babylon, and then they had to have debt jubilees. Then of course
the Hebrews also had debt jubilees. And of course, they say neither
a borrower nor a lender be. The Romans didn’t like debt. The Greeks
didn’t like debt, except for a few intellectuals. Intellectuals for
some reason, like Mr. Krugman, like debt.
Later on debt came back to Europe with the Reformation and it
was mostly to finance wars. The industrial revolution was not
financed by debt. California was not financed by debt; it was
financed by equity. So debt is not necessary. You can use it for
emergencies. Catholic societies—Aquinas was against debt and his
statements were stronger than the Islamic fatwa against debt.
We have learned through history that debt in the form of
leverage can blow things up. Debt fragilizes. Now what we have had
in this economy is a growth of debt mostly financed indirectly by
governments. Because if you blow up, we’re going to be behind
you.
reason: So this is the problem of too big to
fail, which went from being a worry to being inscribed in official
policy?
Taleb: Exactly. When you’re a banker and you
have the upside but no downside, what are you going to do? Create
the maximum number of loans that don’t blow up often, and collect
your bonuses. ;
You’re paying for his downside. This, to me, is not capitalism.
It is a misunderstanding of basic rules. Skin in the game started
with Hammurabi, led later on to eye-for-eye, and led to the Golden
Rule.
reason: You talk about decentralization. One of
the most fascinating things in the global economy in the last 50
years—you could argue over the past 1,000 years—is that in many
ways it’s becoming more and more decentralized. Certain types of
knowledge are more decentralized than ever before. Economies
compete in a way that they didn’t before; countries can no longer
force investors to keep their money in a particular currency, in a
particular geographic location. Even as we’re facing a global
crisis, is globalization generally a good thing?
Taleb: It is if you know how to handle it—if
you let firms fail.
There is something called the island effect. In nature,
an island will have a higher number of species per square meter
than a continent; it’s actually proportional to the square of the
area. We’ve lost the island effect. Now you have Google dominating
the whole planet. It’s not a problem. The thing is that if we stop
letting these firms fail when they become ill, they can get large
enough to dominate government. Now, computer firms I’m not worried
about.
reason: Why aren’t you worried about computer
firms? ;
Taleb: Because it’s a competitive environment.
Google is a product of a competitive environment.
reason: So we can see the end of Google on the
horizon.
Taleb: We can see the end of Google, and it
doesn’t make a difference. It makes no difference for you and I. If
Google fails tomorrow, there will be something else, don’t worry.
The government won’t save them. And I don’t think they’ll fail, for
that reason: They know the government won’t save them. But you can
have some centralization/concentration. That’s not the
problem. ;
The problem we have had in almost all Western countries is that
nominally they say they are decentralizing, but effectively they’ve
[given] more and more power to the central government. You want
decisions to be spread out. Government debt is a result of
centralization, and typically the cause of more centralization.
It’s a very bad circle.
reason: I suspect one of the reasons you are as
popular as you are is that in the United States it’s rare for an
intellectual, particularly one who is good at math, to also have
any sense that history has something to teach us. You decided at an
early age you were interested in becoming a philosopher. Talk about
that and how that linked into the work you’re doing.
Taleb: I wanted to be a philosopher from the
beginning, but there was civil war in Lebanon. I left. I came back
from France and I realized I had too many books to read. And I
loved reading but I hated to be given books to read because if
you’re bored with it you lose the option. I like the optionality of
switching to finding your own path rather than being in a
straitjacket of university. ;
Then I realized that I had better study something more
technical. I continued two lives, one technical and one
nontechnical. The technical led to options trading. And the option
trading led to a doctorate related to probability theory applied to
options, and in some obscure stuff. ;
reason: What is your goal as a public
figure?
Taleb: I don’t want to be a public figure.
After Black Swan, for the first six months, nine months,
one year, I was thinking it was nice to go to Davos. And then I
didn’t like it, so I came back home and became a private
figure.
reason: Why didn’t you like it?
Taleb: Too many empty suits. And also, what’s
my profession? It’s to write books. I only write articles to
explain some of the ideas of the books. I do technical papers and
books. And everything else I do is because a publisher wants me to
write op-eds. ;
reason: Let me put it differently: What are you
hoping that your ideas add to the public understanding of how a
good society would work better, and what kinds of mistake to
avoid?
Taleb: It has already led to beautiful results.
With [U.K. Prime Minister] David Cameron, when I was contacted by
him and his administration, to go before, to help—I told him,
“Listen, I’m not a public intellectual, but we can talk about my
ideas through my books. I’m not going to write articles, and we’re
going to have a conversation.” It led to being demonized by
sections of the British public—who cares?—and as well as here. But
it had an effect.
I say people can pick up these ideas very quickly. My point is
to have a systematic approach to making decisions under incomplete
information and under incomplete understanding of things, and build
a society that doesn’t blow up if someone makes a mistake, which is
the same thing. Society seems to think I have unique attributes.
I’m not the first person to think of these matters. It’s just that
I’ve devoted my life to furthering the cause
intellectually. ;
reason: When you think about the future are you
optimistic? Are you pessimistic? Or is that the wrong way to
approach it?
Taleb: It’s the wrong way to view it. My view
of the future is you don’t have to be right, you have to have a
dominant strategy to act as if you were pessimistic. I don’t want
the pilot of the plane to be optimistic. But I want the flight
attendants to be extremely optimistic. So it’s functional. I don’t
believe in beliefs. ;
reason: You talk about how pilots who are too
comfortable with their knowledge—they’re bad pilots, the ones who
make the errors. ;
Taleb: Exactly. You have to have paranoid
pilots, stressed all the time. So technology, it weakens; the
[Federal Aviation Administration] figured out it makes flights less
safe. ;
But again I take a stance against knowledge. Knowledge isn’t
what runs society. Knowledge is largely a narrative that comes
after we do facts. There is so much we narrate and so much that we
do without the complete theory of things. This is my central
idea. ;
reason: Talk a bit more about capitalism. A lot
of people think that what’s great about capitalism is that it
creates incentives that lead to success. Actually capitalism in
your view is about decentralization, about creating disincentives
and failing early. ;
Taleb: Since Hammurabi we’ve had civilized
society, people living together. We’re only able to do that when
people are accountable for their mistakes.
reason: Where are the signal incidents of
decentralization that’s leading to better outcomes, broadly
speaking? Where do you see that either in the United States or in
the West or in particular pockets and subcultures?
Taleb: Take Switzerland as a culture, where
nobody can name the president easily but they can name the
president of France. This is a good society because you have a lot
of volatility—but at the local level, the lower level, micro level,
translating to macro level stability. So Switzerland is a
well-decentralized system.
The problem is size. As size gets larger you have some gains of
economies of scale, whatever it is. But you have some losses in
governance, in a lot of other things. ;
reason: The more homogenous you become the
easier it is to be wiped out. ;
Taleb: To make big mistakes and to be wiped
out; this is the island effect at work. What we have had in this
country is the progressive rise of central government.
Particularly, deficits are the work of central government.
[Scottish philosopher David] Hume figured it out. He said: Small
states and city-states, they love commerce. And large governments
love war. And that’s what justifies large government—war. There is
no justification for large government other than war. And they’re
not good at it.
reason: You say that you’re not a libertarian,
but a lot of this overlaps with what’s considered libertarianism.
So why aren’t you a libertarian? ;
Taleb: I’m a risk-based person. My
libertarianism would be not demotic libertarianism—the
philosophical libertarianism that freedom comes as a first good—so
much as I want errors to be multiplied. ;
reason: So it’s a kind of John Stuart Mill. You
like the idea of experiments in living.
Taleb: Exactly. Errors need to be multiplied.
That’s it. I’m more of a left-wing conservative, if you
want. ;
reason: Ayn Rand called libertarians right-wing
hippies.
Taleb: There you go. So left-wing
conservatives—that would map exactly. In a way, I’m
conservationist. I want to not break things that have been around
for a long time, things that have their own logic. [Successes] come
from tinkering, not from some radical transformation of things.
reason: It’s curious that you are so popular in
the business market, because business books will end each chapter
with bullets points about what this chapter was about.
Taleb: The minute I’m bored writing I stop.
Particularly with The Black Swan, [the idea was to] make
sure that no content of any section can be discovered without
surprising the reader somewhere. Textbooks bore you. Critics hate
it because they want to skim books. People who read will not hate
it. I’m an empiricist. If I sell 3 million copies of a book writing
in some way, I’m not going to be lectured about style. Of course
the critics come in and they tell you it’s a mess. The Black
Swan sold more probably in a day than they sold in a
lifetime.
reason: But you’re not going to say that the
market is always right, and that 50 million Elvis fans can’t be
wrong?
Taleb: No. My point is that someone who just
arrived in a limo does not take lectures on finance from someone
who just took the subway. That’s the idea. You can take ideas,
maybe, but you don’t take instructions about how to write a book.
So if you want to write a book, either take instructions from the
Harry Potter lady or take instructions from Seneca, who
survived 2,000 years. But definitely not from some academic at
Cambridge who sold 2,200 copies.
My idea of living is taking risks for causes. The more I do, the
more I feel good about myself. ;
Do Libertarians Really “Want a World Without Moral Judgments”?
On March 15 in The New York Times,
liberal journalist and author Richard Reeves
wrote an op-ed about the new plan in New York City to dramatize
the many negative effects of teen pregnancy on girls who give birth
before graduating high school and outside of a stable two-parent
unit. Billboards and other advertisements around the city, for
instance, point out that unwed teen mothers are twice as likely to
not finish high school as girls who don’t give birth before
graduating.
With many smart qualifications, Reeves makes a case for shaming
regarding teen pregnancy and other behaviors, and he does it from a
liberal POV:
A society purged of shame might sound good in theory. But it
would be terrible in practice. We need a sense of shame to live
well together. For those with liberal instincts, this is
necessarily hard. But it is also necessary.
My issue is less with Reeves’ views on public shaming per se and
more on an aside he makes about libertarians:
Libertarians might want a world without moral judgments, in
which teen pregnancy carries no stigma at all. And paternalists
might want the state to enshrine judgments in law — perhaps by
raising the age of sexual consent or mandating contraception. True
liberals, though, believe we can hold one another to moral account
without coercion. We must not shy away from shame.
I submit to you that few statements are more wrong than saying
“libertarians might want a world without moral judgments.” From my
vantage point, one of the things to which libertarianism is
dedicated is the proliferation of moral judgments by
freeing people up to the greatest degree possible to create their
own ways of being in the world. To conflate the live and let live
ethos at the heart of the classical liberal and libertarian project
with an essentially nihilistic dismissal of pluralism and tolerance
is a gigantic error. It’s like saying that because religious
dissenters want to abolish a single state church that they are
anti-god.
As the anthropologist Grant McCracken argued in a 1998 Reason
story called “The
Politics of Plenitude,” our world is characterized by a
“quickening speciation” of social types and sub-cultures, a
liberating reality that is typically mistaken for the end of the
world and the end of all morality. McCracken notes that plenitude
particularly aggrieves conservatives, because they mistake an urge
to escape “a morality” for an attempt to abolish
“all morality.” He explains:
The right acts as if the many groups thrown off by plenitude
harbor an anarchic tendency, that people have become gays,
feminists, or Deadheads in order to escape morality. This is not
the logic of plenitude. These people have reinvented themselves
merely to escape ;a ;morality, not all
morality. New communities set to work immediately in the creation
of new moralities. Chaos does not ensue; convention, even
orthodoxy, returns. Liminality is the slingshot that allows new
groups to free themselves from the gravitational field of the old
moralities they must escape. But liminality is almost never the
condition that prevails once this liberation has been
accomplished.
Reeves is no conservative. He’s a devotee of John
Stuart Mill and, I rush to add, has said many positive things about
Reason over
the years. ;But his characterization of libertarians
as uninterested in moral judgments proceeds from a very
conservative – and very profound – misunderstanding of what I think
we are all about. This sort of thinking typically emanates from the
right – how many of us have had conversations with conservatives
who equate ending drug prohibition with a case not simply for
occasional use of currently illegal drugs but for an absolute
embrace of never-ending intoxication and stupefaction? – but
apparently it harbors a home on the left as well. (Go
here to read part of a debate I had with Jonah Goldberg a
decade ago on the same basic topic).
Shame is certainly not the first thing that most
libertarians I know reach for in high-minded policy discussions or
less serious conversations. On the narrow question of reducing teen
pregnancy – which has in any case ;reached
historic lows over the past decades – it’s far from clear the
role the sort of public shaming enivisioned by New York authorities
will play compared to, say, frank discussions of the harshly
reduced opportunities faced by young mothers. Certainly, it may
make certain policymakers and politicians feel good, but that is
hardly any ground by which to analyze the efficacy of a given
policy (to his credit, Reeves calls for a cost-benefit analysis
himself).
But it’s time to start swatting away random accusations of
libertarians as nihilists simply because we don’t sign on to every
given moralistic agenda that is proposed or enacted in the name of
the greater good. No less a buttoned-down character than Friedrich
Hayek once wrote that “to live and work successfully with others
requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires
an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on
issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue
different ends.” The libertarian commitment to true pluralism and
tolerance is not easy to maintain, but it remains exactly the sort
of gesture that allows for differing moralities to flourish and,
one hopes, new and better ways of living to emerge.
Reeves’ official
website is here. … Read More
