Suppose there was a political ideology that promised to liberate the working masses from the evils of alienation and exploitation, and deliver them instead unto a social order characterized by superabundant material wealth and both social and political equality.  But every single time some society tries to put this ideology into practice, the result is almost precisely the opposite of what is promised.  Instead of superabundance and freedom, the working masses are subject to grinding poverty and tyrannical oppression.

Would this be a good reason to reject the ideology?  My guess is that most libertarians think it would be, at least in the specific case of communism.  After all, it’s not just that we can find one or two counterexamples to the ideology’s promises.  It’s that

Every example is a counterexample – there are no cases in which the ideology’s promises hold true.
We have good sociological, economic, and political explanations of why the ideology generates the results it actually does when put into practice, and why it fails to deliver on its promises.

So here’s my question.  If this kind of reasoning is a good argument against communism as a political ideology, is it also a good argument against anarchism?

It is, after all, exceedingly difficult to find a good example of a successful anarchist society.  Yes, I know about Medieval Iceland.  And about the surprising relative success of a stateless Somalia.  And I agree with my anarchist friends that people tend to underestimate the ability of individuals to form peaceful, voluntary solutions to a variety of social problems.

But still, it’s a striking fact that virtually every living person on the planet falls under the authority of some state.  And that every historical instance of a stateless society has evolved (degenerated?) into a state-governed one.  Moreover, it seems like (as in the case of communism) we have good theoretical reasons for expecting precisely this result.  Anarchist societies face a well-known difficulty in overcoming the collective action problems inherent in defending themselves against external aggression and predation.  From this perspective, it would hardly be surprising if we found that stateless societies tend to be conquered by state-governed ones.  And this, of course, is precisely what we find.  Whatever else can be said about them, anarchist societies are, as an empirical matter, clearly unstable.  So how much does this count against anarchism as a normative political theory?

Can a similar argument be run against minimal state libertarianism?  This is another bird examples of which are notoriously hard to come by.  Either they don’t exist at all, or they tend to evolve (degenerate?) into (at best) a more moderate kind of classical liberal regime or (at worst) into a corporatist monstrosity in which the powers of the state are captured and expanded by powerful economic interests.  And don’t we have good theoretical reasons for expecting precisely this result, too?

HT Erik Kain, whose own skeptical musings on anarchism got me thinking about this problem again.

Update: Several commentators have made an argument that I find puzzling.  The argument is that because the theory of anarcho-capitalism is relatively new, we can’t really say that anarchism has been tried yet, and so therefore cannot say that any anarchist experiments have failed.  I find this puzzling because much of want anarcho-capitalist theories contribute is <i>descriptive</I> in nature.  They tell us that people are better able to provide for their needs through specialization and voluntary exchange, for instance, than we might otherwise be inclined to think, and that as a result services usually thought to be the exclusive function of government like defense and lawmaking, can actually be performed on the market.  But if descriptive claims like this are true, weren’t they also true before the theory of anarcho-capitalism was developed (just like diseases were always spread by germs even before the germ theory of disease)?  And so if people in stateless societies were in fact unable to provide for their needs (including the need of collective defense against predatory states), doesn’t this undermine the anarchist theory, whether it happened before or after the development and articulation of that theory?

Will Wilkinson has an article in The New Republic that’s ostensibly about what’s wrong with Ron Paul. But I don’t think that’s what it’s really about. Call me a Straussian if you must; what Will really wanted to write about, on my reading, is why taxation is not theft. He got such an article into TNR by cleverly wrapping it in a timely political article about a specific politician. So, since I am an unpaid blogger and have no editor to please, let’s talk about it openly. Is taxation theft?

Property rights are not absolute

Most libertarians who make the taxation-is-theft argument consider themselves property-rights absolutists. Property rights, however, are not and could not plausibly be absolute. Suppose I own a parcel of land. What would an absolute property right to that land entail? Would I have a right to prevent people from sending stray photons onto my property as they drove by at night? How about from flying across my property on a hoverboard or sailing over it in a hot air balloon? Is there some “correct” height to which my “absolute” property right extends? Infinitely high? How long is the outline of my property? Have you read Mandelbrot?

What property rights are in a positive sense are Schelling points. They are bundles of rights that people expect each other to defend. The content of the rights—the particular sticks in the bundle—depend in a very real way on economic efficiency. It would not be efficient for me to have the right to exclude stray photons from my property. Lo and behold, I do not and cannot assert that right. This limitation on property rights has nothing to do with state intervention. It is not as if, in the state of nature, we asserted property rights that included excluding stray photons, and now the law says stray photons must be allowed, so we allow them. Property rights existed before anything like the modern state existed, and they were never absolute. Nor should they be.

Property rights enforcement is coercive

Will writes,

But, of course, a system of property is itself a system of coercion. If I cannot waltz into your home, raid your fridge, and make myself a hoagie, it is because you might shoot at me or call the cops to drag me off at gunpoint. If you’re like me, you think the enforcement of property rights through the use of violence, or the treat [sic] thereof, is justified. But it does need to be justified.

Now, I dabble in pacifism from time to time—sometimes I wonder if enforcement of property rights is really justified—but I’ve never been able to…err…pull the trigger. There is no doubt in my mind that property rights enforcement is coercive and that ought to be justified. Will offers about as good a justification as I’ve heard, that property rights are an ingredient to a more important end of peaceful cooperation and flourishing.

Centralized coercion v. decentralized coercion

Given that we have a system of property, is it better for the source of the enforcement to be centralized or decentralized? To me, this is a no-brainer with a big if. If decentralized enforcement is stable, then it is clearly preferable. The reason is that centralized coercion results in expansions and abuses of power. It’s not like there’s a choice on the menu of “centralized property rights enforcement with zero abuse of power.” You have to take the bad with the good. My preference, conditional on stability, is decentralized coercion.

Is decentralized enforcement stable? This is an active line of research for me, and my best answer so far is “sometimes.” There are a lot of people in armchairs who argue that of course decentralized enforcement is unstable. I find them rather unimaginative and non-rigorous.

Philosophical anarchism

A couple days ago, reading something else that Will wrote made me wonder if Will affirms philosophical anarchism. I asked, and he was noncommittal. I think it is an important issue. Not only do I believe that philosophical anarchism is true, I think that when you remember to push the philosophical anarchism button before thinking about politics it raises your IQ by a standard deviation or more. We all need all the help we can get.

Will writes:

And there are other legitimate public goods beyond the police protection of property rights. The need to finance the provision of these goods can justifiably limit our property rights, just as a system of property can justifiably limit our right to free movement. The use of official coercion to collect necessary taxes is no more or less problematic than the use of official coercion to enforce claims to legitimate property.

Since I have primed you to think in terms of philosophical anarchism, you should be asking the same question that I am: what makes some coercion official? Is it because the coercion is used to provide public goods? If that is the case, then I am justified if I take money from Will and spend it on public goods. Anyone is. When I reflect that a number of institutions—including street gangs—supply public goods, it makes me skeptical that this alone constitutes a good grounds for taxation.

Furthermore, public goods constitute a vanishingly small fraction of government spending. Will risks painting himself into the following corner: the 10 percent (generously) of taxation that is used to finance public goods is not theft, and the remaining 90 percent is. When you consider, for instance, that a substantial portion of US revenue is spent killing innocent people living in the wrong countries, you start to wonder if taxation is really about public goods or if it is about power.

The real problem with taxation

I’ve ceded a number of Will’s points already: that property rights are not absolute, that property rights enforcement is coercive, and that coercion is sometimes justified. Nevertheless, on a moral level, taxation continues to make me very uncomfortable. Let me try to sketch out precisely why.

Let’s call an action justified if, all things considered, it is the best action to have taken. Let’s call an action satisfying if we can go further and say that we are glad that it happened. It should be obvious that an action can be justified but not satisfying.

Take statements of the form: I wanted person X to do action Y, so I made X do Y. Y can be a number of things: give me candy, have an abortion, not have an abortion, eat vegetables, stop picking on the other kids, not trespass on my property, stop gunning down innocent victims, pay for Timmy’s leukemia treatment.

The action of making X do Y is sometimes justified (depending on what Y is and the circumstances and, sometimes, on who X is), but it should never be satisfying. If an intruder came into my house and threatened my family, I might (might!) be justified in shooting and killing the intruder. But if I were satisfied that I got to justifiably shoot and kill someone, it would represent serious moral deficiency.

I feel that way about all coercion; it should never be satisfying, even when it is justified. Yet when I observe real-world taxation, I see a lot of satisfaction. People seem glad, for instance, that taxation is progressive. It’s not just a resigned, “Well, this is the most justified level of progressivity.” People are satisfied that those who they want to pay taxes are doing it.

To be clear, I am not accusing Will of being glad when other pay taxes. Nevertheless, I find the whole politics-taxation nexus so deeply morally corrosive. It trains people to think not only that might makes right, but that coercive outcomes are outcomes to celebrate. They’re not.

Bleeding-Heart Libertarians might find a great deal of potential interest in the upcoming month’s issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. I mention this partly for selfish (or at least self-promotional) reasons; one of the articles there — The Many Monopolies — is an article of mine. But if I’m glad that my article is in this month’s issue, it’s in no small part because I’m so honored to be sharing an issue with Kevin Carson’s remarkable cover story on Taylorism, Progressivism, and Rule by Experts, Sheldon Richman’s left-libertarian case against neoliberalism and the IMF, and book reviews by (BHL contributor) Gary Chartier and Carl Watner (a pioneer voluntaryist and a scholar of nonviolent resistance and the 19th century radical individualists). Tolle, lege.

My article on The Many Monopolies is closely related to the distinction I explored last week in “Libertarian Anticapitalism,” along with a bit of a puzzle about the libertarian tradition. Throughout the 20th century,1 American free marketeers overwhelmingly saw themselves, described themselves, and were described by others as defenders of “capitalism.” Now, I spent some time last week talking about one of the conceptual issues involved in that claim — whether “capitalism” is supposed to mean a free market, or an interventionist  pro-business political economy; or whether it’s supposed to refer to a social order in which economic affairs are dominated by a very particular complex of structures, motives and patterns of activity, in particular the wage-labor system or profit-dominated relationships. As I briefly mentioned at the time, 20th century libertarians, at least those who called themselves “pro-capitalist,” typically claimed to mean nothing more than the free market, pure and simple, by the term. But then they proceeded to identify free markets with corporate structures, wage-labor relationships, etc. that were capitalistic in one of the concrete senses — in order to defend actually-existing inequalities of wealth, common real-world business practices, workplace hierarchy, etc., as being (they claimed) the natural outcomes of private property and voluntary market exchange. Their picture of a free market, then, was capitalistic not only in the first sense but also in the third and fourth: something which would look, more or less, like business as usual, but even more so: bigger, stronger, faster, and no longer held back by government from pushing the corporate business model to the hilt.

In this respect, the 20th century libertarian infatuation with “capitalism” was almost a complete reversal from the traditional attitude of American libertarians. During the 19th century the compromising libertarians considered themselves “liberals,” and defined their priorities mainly in terms of the fight against mercantile privilege. Radical libertarians — individualist anarchists and mutualists,  like Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Voltairine de Cleyre, Victor Yarros, Ezra and Angela Heywood, Gertrude Kelly, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Dyer Lum, et al. — were supporters and participants in the abolition movement, the first-wave feminist movement, and the organized labor movement.2 Tucker was one of the best-known defenders of free markets in late nineteenth-century America, and happily summarized his economic principles, in his classic “State Socialism and Anarchism: how far they agree, and wherein they differ” (1888), as “Absolute Free Trade . . . laissez-faire the universal rule.” And yet, in the same essay, he (like most of the individualist Anarchists) also repeatedly described his views as a form of “Anarchistic Socialism.” The combination could hardly be more unexpected, or more jarring, to the 20th century libertarian eye — how could laissez-faire, laissez-passer be the political program of an avowed “Socialist?” But we must remember that “Socialism” is as contested a term as “Capitalism;” and, remembering that, we must ask ourself what “socialism” could mean for a radical, free-market individualist like Tucker? Certainly not government control of industry, or political management of the means of production. Rather, what Tucker meant by “socialism” was workers’ control over the conditions of their own labor.3 This control, he argued, was denied, not by market processes or honestly-gained property, but rather by an interlocking set of political privileges to large-scale, incumbent capitalists — the Four Monopolies, and the artificial inequalities of wealth and bargaining power those monopolies fostered. For Tucker, then, libertarianism was not a defense of business interests, but an attack on economic privilege, by kicking away the political privileges that propped it up, and dismantling monopolies by exposing them to competition from below.

Given this divergence between the 19th century libertarians and the 20th, one natural question to ask is which of them libertarians should take as our model in the 21st century. (Or should we put them both aside, and try something new?) But before the question can be fairly considered, we need to do some detail work, recovering and fleshing out an understanding of what the 19th century individualists’ position was. So in my article I explore Tucker’s Four Monopolies analysis of capitalism (meaning “capitalism” in the sense of the wage-labor system), and how the analysis might be applied to the economic statist quo that we see around us.

The crises laid at the feet of laissez faire are the crises of markets that are nothing if not fettered. When critics confront us with corporate malfeasance, structural poverty, or socioeconomic marginalization, we should be clear that market principles do not require defending big business at all costs, and that much of what our critics condemn results from government regulation and legal privileges. As a model for analyzing the political edge of corporate power and defending markets from the bottom up, we twenty-first-century libertarians might look to our nineteenth-century roots—to the insights of the American individualists, especially their most talented exponent, Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939), editor of the free-market anarchist journal Liberty.

Conventional textbook treatments portray the American Gilded Age as one of relentless exploitation and economic laissez faire. But Tucker argued that the stereotypical features of capitalism in his day were products not of the market form, but of markets deformed by political privileges. Tucker did not use this terminology, but for the sake of analysis we might delineate four patterns of deformation that especially concerned him: captive markets, ratchet effects, concentration of ownership, and insulation of incumbents.

The analysis, the application of it to the present day, and the outlines of an argument for the analysis and the re-application, ensues.

Enjoy!

 

Footnotes:

The “short 20th century,” that is. What I’m calling the “20th century” libertarian attitude towards capitalism took shape  mainly during the 1930s and 1940s, as radical libertarians like Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov found themselves increasingly associated with the coalition now retroactively described as the “Old Right.” See for example Chodorov’s 1945 “Let’s Try Capitalism.” But before about 1917, the radical free marketeers in America were primarily associated with the Anarchist movement, and both considered themselves, and were considered, as red as Emma Goldman. In this respect the 1900s and 1910s were more or less a part of the late 19th century milieu, with World War I and the Wilson administration as a decisive break-point. ↩
Dyer Lum, for example, was an organizer for the Knights of Labor, the anarchist International Working People’s Association in Chicago, and, late in life, the AFL. Many of the Boston individualists first met through the meetings of the New England Labor Reform League. Andrews, Tucker, Spooner, Josiah Warren and William B. Greene were all members of the First International, before it came to be completely dominated by Marx and his followers. ↩
As Tucker put it, “the bottom claim of Socialism” as he understood it, is “that labor should be put in possession of its own.” Where the State Socialists and Marxists saw “in possession of its own” collectively, as something Labor is supposed to get, with the State or the Worker’s Council acting representatively to administer this collective property (allegedly) on behalf of the whole, Tucker thought of it distributively, with laborers gaining control over their product and its means of production, each for herself, or through such cooperative associations as individual workers might choose to form. Tucker’s view was not idiosyncratic: you can see much the same views expressed, explicitly, in the works of Anarchistic Socialists writing well before Marx’s rise to fame, e.g.  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Ernest Lesigne, Josiah Warren, et al. ↩

For most of the 20th century, American libertarians were mostly seen as — and mostly saw themselves as — defenders of capitalism. Was that an accurate view of 20th century libertarians were about? If accurate, is that a good thing about libertarianism, or a defect that should be amended and avoided?

Well, it depends. Specifically, it depends on what you mean by “capitalism.” Now, I’ve had something to say about this before, and my friend Gary Chartier has broached the subject here at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, but I think the ground might be worth covering again in some more detail. (Partly because it may help as an introduction to where I come from on questions of freed markets, economic privilege, social justice, et cetera; and partly because some of the comments on Gary’s earlier post lead me to believe that a closer approach to the definitional question might help clear up communication.) First, though, let’s take a bit of a detour — to New York City.

About a year ago, the Wall Street Journal‘s Metropolis blog ran an item by Aaron Rutkoff on zoning and advertising in Times Square, called “Good Taste in Times Square? It’s Illegal.” As it turns out, the bright lights and “colorful corporate orgy” of Times Square advertising — as paradigmatic a symbol of American capitalism as you could hope for — is the result, not of unfettered free-market commercialism, but of a detailed set of mandates handed down in New York City’s special zoning ordinance for the “Special Midtown District:”

For those with the stomach to navigate the bureaucratic language, the zoning regulations make for interesting reading. What appears totally haphazard to the untrained tourist’s eye is actually planned down to the last square foot, with copious rules about how much of any surface must be covered in signage.

Own a building on Broadway but detest the flashing lights? Too bad. As the code states:

There shall be a minimum of one #illuminated sign# with a #surface area# of not less than 1,000 square feet for each 50 linear feet, or part thereof, of #street# frontage.

There are instructions for precisely which direction Times Square’s signage must face and extraordinarily detailed diagrams for how the brightness of mandatory illuminated displays shall be measured.

Does your building feature a blinking sign? The rules require that the unlit phase not exceed three seconds. When can the bright lights be switched off? No earlier than 1:00 a.m.

–Adam Rutkoff, “Good Taste in Times Square? It’s Illegal,”
Wall Street Journal Metropolis blog, 12 August 2010

The WSJ decided to sum up their findings by saying:

In a way, the zoning code governing the signs is wonderfully ironic. The bright lights of Times Square, one of the most visible and iconic testaments to the city’s hyper-capitalist verve, are maintained not by Adam Smith’s invisible hand but by little-known government regulations.

–Adam Rutkoff, “Good Taste in Times Square? It’s Illegal,”
Wall Street Journal Metropolis blog, 12 August 2010

Well. Whether or not something comes off as “ironic” depends upon your expectations; and on this point, I guess it may not be surprising that my expectations are not the same as those at the Wall Street Journal. In fact, I would say that a story like that of the Times Square zoning code is not only not especially “ironic;” it’s really paradigmatic — a illustratively typical example of how large-scale, in-your-face commerce typically works in these United States, and how it interacts with the corporate economy throughout the world. That’s why I have often referred to myself (following the example of Kevin Carson) a “free market anticapitalist” — because I believe in a really broad and radical version of property rights and market freedom in economic ownership and exchange, but (unlike, say, the Wall Street Journal) I think that the features conventionally associated with American capitalism — large-scale, top-down firms, the predominance of wage labor, corporate domination of economic and social life, the commercialization of social space etc. — are as often as not the products of state intervention, not of market dynamics. And, further, that a genuinely and consistently freed market would tend to undermine the prevalence and significance of these features in everyday life.

But “free market anticapitalism” is a term that raises eyebrows. Mainly because it doesn’t seem to make any sense. The reason I use it is because of the eyebrows it raises — not because I enjoy confusion or confrontation for its own sake, but because I think that existing ideas about the relationships between markets and capitalism are already confused, and that a superficial overlap in language tends to obscure the confusions that already exist. In particular, the term “capitalism” is used by almost all sides in economic debates as if it were obviously the ideal governing libertarian policy proposals, and is debated over both by nominal pro-”capitalists” and by nominal anti-”capitalists” as if it were perfectly obvious to everyone what it means.

But really the term has a lot of different shades of meaning, which are distinct from each other, and some of which are even mutually exclusive.1 And as often as not it seems that debates about “capitalism” involve more than one of them being employed — sometimes because each person is talking about a different thing when she says “capitalism,” but they think that they are fighting about a common subject. And sometimes because one person will make use of the word “capitalism” in two or more different senses from one argumentative move to the next, without noticing the equivocation. At the expense of oversimplifying a very large and tangled literature,2 there are at least four major definitions that have been attached to the term:

Free Enterprise. This is a relatively new usage (coming mainly from libertarian writing in the 1920s-1940s). “Capitalism” has been used by its defenders just to mean a free market or free enterprise system, i.e., an economic order — any economic order — that emerges from voluntary exchanges of property and labor without government intervention (or any other form of systemic coercion). This is the meaning that is almost surely most familiar to those who spend much time reading libertarian economic writing; it is offered as, more or less, a stipulative definition of the term in Friedman, Mises, et al.
Pro-Business Political Economy. “Capitalism” has also been used, sometimes by its opponents, and sometimes by beneficiaries of the system, to mean a corporatist or pro-business economic policy — that is, to active government support for big businesses through instruments such as government-granted monopolies, subsidies, central banking, tax-funded infrastructure, “development” grants and loans, Kelo-style for-profit eminent domain, bail-outs, etc. Thus, when a progressive like Naomi Klein describes government-hired mercenaries, paramilitary torture squads or multigovernment financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, as examples of the political economy of “disaster capitalism,” capitalism here must mean something other than markets left free of major government intervention. Rather, this is the state intervening, with a very heavy hand, to promote the interests of a particular class of economic players, or promoting a particular form of economic activity, as a matter of policy. This second meaning of capitalism is, of course, mutually exclusive with the first meaning — state-driven corporatism necessarily consists of projects funded by expropriated tax dollars, or regulations enforced from the barrel of a gun, and so to be a “capitalist” in the sense of a free marketeer means being an “anti-capitalist” in the sense of opposing the corporate state, and being “pro-capitalist” in the sense of state “growth” policy means coming out against “capitalism” in the sense of genuinely free markets.
The Wage-Labor System. “Capitalism” has also been used to refer to a specific form of labor market, or a distinctive pattern of conditions facing ordinary working people — one in which the predominant form of economic activity is the production of goods or the performance of services in workplaces that are owned and managed, not by the people doing the work on the line, but by an outside boss. In this third sense, you have capitalism when most workers are working for someone else, in return for a wage, because access to most of the important factors of production is mediated through a business class, with the businessmen and not the workers holding legal titles to the business, the tools and facilities that make the shop run, and the residual profits that accrue to the business.  Workplaces are, as a result, typically organized in hierarchical fashion, with a boss exercising a great deal of discretion over employees, who are generally much more dependent on keeping the job than the boss is on keeping any one worker. (This sense is most commonly seen in Marxian writing, and in older writing from the radical Left — including a great deal of pro-market writing from Anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.)
Profit-Dominated Society. Finally, the term “capitalism” is very often used (outside of the debating circles of libertarian economists, this is in fact probably the modal use of the term) loosely to mean something like the commercialization of everyday life — that is, a condition in which social interactions are very largely mediated through, or reshaped by, overtly commercial motives, and most or all important social and economic institutions are run primarily on a businesslike, for-profit basis.

It’s important to note, then, that while “capitalism” in the first two senses — that of the freed market, and t[…]

Always make sure to read the prefaces and introductions to Nozick’s books. They’re fascinating.

Nozick is smarter than you. If you and he had a live debate about something (anything), he would probably win. (He’d be able to outargue you, even if you were right and he were wrong.) Despite that, Nozick has a surprising amount of humility, at least in his writings. (I don’t know how he was in person.)  He also almost never responded to critics, even though he often could have done so with ease. Nozick would write about something, and then move on to the next topic. His approach to philosophy is different from most other philosophers’.

Like other philosophers, his work has “elaborate arguments, claims rebutted by unlikely counterexamples, surprising theses, puzzles, abstract structural conditions, challenges to find another theory which fits a specified range of cases, startling conclusions, and so on.” (x) Like other philosophers do, he emphasizes cases where his judgments conflict with those of most of his readers, because those cases are the most interesting.

Still, Anarchy, State, and Utopia is not some sort of political tract. It is

a philosophical exploration of issues, many fascinating in their own right, which arise in interconnect reconsider individual rights and the state. The word “exploration” is appropriately chosen. One view about how to write a philosophy book holds that an author should think through all of the details of the view he presents, and its problems, polishing and refining his view presents to the world of finished, complete, and elegant whole. This is not my view. At any rate, I believe that there is also a place and function in ongoing intellectual life for a less complete work, containing unfinished presentations, conjectures, open questions and problems, leagues, site connections, as well as a main line of argument. There is room for words on subjects other than last words. (xii, emphasis mine.)

Nozick is puzzled why other philosophers don’t write the way he does. They write as if they believe themselves to have given the “ absolutely final word on their subject,” though of course they know—and most readily admit in person—than they have not. They write as if they have at last “found the truth and build an impregnable fortress around it,” though of course they know—and most readily admit in person—that they have not. (xii) Yet most philosophers—with the exception of a few cranks—are well aware of the weak spots, uneasy assumptions, loose connections, and failings in their views.

Nozick goes on to say that many times “ philosophical activity feels like pushing and shoving things to fit into some fixed perimeter of specified shape.” (xiii) Philosophers want to construct and defend a viewpoint. But often this means try to squeeze, crush, and manipulate the truth so it will fit the shape of the philosopher’s point of view. Note that Nozick isn’t accusing philosophers of intellectual dishonesty, nor does he think this problem is endemic only to philosophers. As David Schmidtz says in the opening pages of one of his books, theories are like maps. They are like 2-dimensional representations of 3-dimensional domains. All useful theories—like all useful maps—involve some degree of distortion, omission, simplification, and misrepresentation.

Nozick says,

No philosopher says: “ There’s where I started, here’s where I ended up; the major weakness in my work is that it went from there to here; in particular here the most notable distortions, pushings, shovings, maulings, gouging, stretching, and shipping that I committed during the trip; not to mention the things thrown away and ignored, and all those averting his gaze.”

Nozick is unusual in that he does say all these things. Often in the main body of the text, and frequently in the footnotes, Nozick will actively draw your attention to what he considers the weak, uneasy, and difficult points. He’s not out to win—he’s out to do good philosophy. (In a later book, Nozick joked that most other philosophers seem to want to find arguments so compelling, that if a person were to disagree with the conclusion after reading the argument, that person’s head would explode. Nozick calls this model of philosophy “coercive philosophy.”)

Nozick isn’t worried that his work is weaker than others, so that’s not he reason for the caveats:

However, my reason for mentioning these issues here is not that I feel he became more strongly to this work and other philosophical writings. What I see in this book is, I think, correct. This is not my way of taking it back. Rather, I propose to give it all to you: the doubts and worries and uncertainties as well as the beliefs, his convictions, arguments. (xiii- xiv)

He writes this way because he thinks that’s a proper model for philosophy. Make the best case you can for something, but don’t pretend you’ve constructed a stronger edifice than you have. Trust your readers to engage with you in a philosophical way. (Nozick was too trusting, then.)

Most people–including most libertarians–are cartoon ideologues, who have far more confidence in their political beliefs than they evidence and arguments available to them allow, and have far more disdain for others’ beliefs than they should. Nozick, whatever his flaws, was no cartoon ideologue.

I’m going to blog my way through re-reading Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sometimes I will defend it; sometimes I will criticize it. Sometimes I’ll cite secondary literature, but usually I won’t. Here’s the first post.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (hereafter ASU) is divided into three parts. Part I argues that a minimal state is compatible with the strong libertarian rights certain anarcho-capitalist libertarians believe all people have. That is, part I tries to show that a commitment to a very strong view of rights does not lead to anarchism. Part II argues that a more-than-minimal state is not defensible. Part III argues that a minimal state can be inspiring—that it can be a kind of utopia.

Nozick begins ASU with, “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do.” (ix) In the next paragraph, Nozick says that his main conclusions will be that a minimal state can be justified, but a more-than-minimal state cannot. A more-than-minimal state will violate people’s rights. The state may not use coercion to get some citizens to aid others, nor may the state engage in any paternalistic activities. These opening paragraphs are misleading—they cause most readers to misunderstand Nozick’s argument in ASU.

Following Thomas Nagel, many readers complain that Anarchy, State, and Utopia lacks foundations. They complain that Nozick simply assumes—without argument—that people have very strong and extensive rights (including property rights) against coercive interference. Philosophers worry that this makes his argument against the more-than-minimal state too easy. If I have a nearly absolute right to my rightfully acquired property—a right that can be overridden only in order to prevent “catastrophic moral horror”—then of course I cannot be taxed to provide a social minimum or public education.

Nozick’s critics are correct that this argument would be too easy. But that’s the problem. If Nozick really did just assume we have such strong rights, and if his main beef with social democracy or the welfare state really were they violate libertarian rights, then it’s hard to explain why Part II of ASU is so long. If this were Nozick’s central argument or most important criticism of the more-than-minimal state, then Part II should have been only about 3 pages long, rather than 147 pages.

The first two paragraphs of ASU mislead critics. However, the remainder of the book, and especially the last paragraph on p. xi, should have made them realize their mistake. Here’s Nozick summarizing Part II again:

Part II contends that no more extensive state can be justified. I proceed by arguing that a diversity of reasons which purport to justify a more extensive state, don’t. [I criticize Rawls a bunch and develop a rival theory of justice to illustrate some problems with Rawls’s theory.] Other reasons that some might think justify a more extensive state are criticized, including equality, envy, workers’ control, and Marxian theories of exploitation. (xi)

For the most part, in Part II, Nozick does not assume that the libertarian theory of rights is correct. Instead, he works with a simple assumption—an assumption that most liberals, left and right, accept, and so he doesn’t bother argue for. He assumes—just as other liberals do—that all state power has to be justified, and that such power should be presumed illegitimate until a compelling justification has been provided. He then tries to show that the most common attempts to justify power beyond the minimal state fail. He doesn’t argue they fail because they violate libertarian rights. As we’ll see in later blog posts, he has a variety of complaints about these other justifications. Yes, it’s true that Nozick thinks a more-than-minimal state is incompatible with the strong libertarian rights he assumes in Part I. But this does very little work for him in the book.

Part I is addressed to a subset of libertarians. It assumes—without argument—that people have very strong rights against coercive interference. Nozick makes the assumption not on his own behalf, but on behalf of the people he wants to criticize! Anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard believe we have such strong rights and that these rights prohibit any sort of state. Nozick wants to show that at least a minimal state can be justified, even if Rothbard is correct that we have such strong rights. Nozick also wants to argue that a minimal state would arise naturally without violating anyone’s rights.

So, it’s not only legitimate, but good philosophy, for Nozick to assume in part I that everyone has strong libertarian rights. He’s making a classic philosophical move. Rothbard argues for X, and then argues that X implies Y. Nozick assumes X for the sake of argument but then argues that X does not imply Y. (Here X = strong libertarian rights, Y = anarchism.)

Part II is addressed to everyone. It argues that nothing more than a minimal state can be justified. It does this not by assuming we have rights and then showing the more-than-minimal state is incompatible with them, but by trying to show that the arguments for the more-than-minimal state are not well-founded.  Nozick criticizes Marx, Rawls, and others extensively. He also draws out what sees as the undesirable implications of the more than minimal state, arguing that it is incompatible with the liberal ideas espoused by Rawlsians and others.  Since Nozick (when writing ASU) believes that rights are self-alienable, he does, however, explain how a more-than-minimal state could arise without violating libertarian rights. However, this hypothetical history makes the more-than-minimal state look bad.

I’d like to introduce you to a ship of the BHL Line that I call “Free Market Fairness.” As an institutional matter, Free Market Fairness proudly shows the colors of the classical liberal camp. As such, she affirms the powerful set of personal liberties long championed by liberals of every type: freedom of thought, expression, association and more. Against the left liberals, though, she also affirms a wide range of private economic liberties—powerful rights of ownership and of individual freedom of contract—as among the weightiest rights. Like traditional classical liberals, she sees the economic freedoms of capitalism as intimately connected to personal freedom, broadly understood.

But Free Market Fairness is an icebreaker through and through. She has no interest in sitting dock-tied outside the classical liberal camp, locked in the wind-worn conceptual ice, shouting out arguments across the straight about why high liberals should abandon their camp and come over to hers. Free Market Fairness is built to move. In terms of her fundamental justificatory commitments, she steams away from the camps of the traditional classical liberals and the traditional libertarians too.

So Free Market Fairness rejects that idea, often associated with libertarians such as Robert Nozick, that self-ownership is the grounding principle of social life. Similarly, Free Market Fairness rejects the idea that happiness, or efficiency, or economic growth (viewed as an end in itself) should be allowed to serve as the fundamental principle of social life. Instead, Free Market Fairness breaks her way over to the high liberal side. She affirms the same moral ideas of personhood and society affirmed by traditional denizens of that camp. She means to build her own camp there, directly on high liberal ideas.

Free Market Fairness takes a fundamentally deliberative (or, if you like, “democratic”) approach to the questions of social life. Society, in its moral essence, is not something private—like a web of commitments spontaneously spun by self-owning individuals. Citizens are not merely self-interested contractors. Nor are they utility maximizers. They are moral beings committed to living with others on terms that even the weakest among them can accept.

At base, society is a fair system of cooperation among citizens committed to respecting one another as responsible self-authors. Politics is essentially about creating a framework that respects the freedom and dignity of all citizens, regardless of their different innate abilities and family backgrounds. A social framework does this when it is designed to enable all citizens to exercise and develop their “moral powers.” Those powers involve the capacity people have to become responsible authors of their own lives, along with their capacity to recognize their fellow citizens as responsible self-authors too. Webs of private commitments grow as self-authoring invidivuals interact voluntarily within the framework of public morality. But it is that public framework that defines the moral character of Free Market Fairness.

Free Market Fairness affirms the idea, long associated with high liberals, that respect for citizens sometimes requires more than formal equality. A game of Monopoly in which players start with substantially unequal amounts of money would be unfair. The stain of that unfairness would not be lifted merely by the requirement that, once that game had begun, those differently endowed players must all abide by the same set of formal rules. High liberals have long claimed that inequalities in people’s talent endowments and family situations raise issues of public morality. Free Market Fairness agrees: undeserved inequalities can generate moral claims within politics. This does not require that society seek somehow to prevent those inequalities from arising or being expressed in the first place (as in the Kurt Vonnegut story “Harrison Bergeron”). Nor, I hasten to add, need this require that society somehow attempt to equalize the material holdings of all citizens. But this recognition does require a specific institutional response. In a just society, institutions and rules should be crafted so that whatever broad patterns of inequality emerge reflect our commitment to respecting all citizens as valued members of a cooperative whole.

If these ideas sound left liberal or high liberal, it is because they have long been affirmed exclusively by denizens of that side. Free Market Fairness has broken its way across the frozen straight. Arriving at the high liberal camp, it invites the traditional defenders of left liberal institutions to look afresh at the moral ideas beneath their own feet. Are the rickety (erstwhile “progressive”) structures we find there really suitable for that site? On these attractive moral foundations, couldn’t we build something stronger, more enduring and true?

Free Market Fairness invites high liberals to look down and rethink their moral premises. If citizens are truly committed to honoring one another as responsible self-authors, precisely which rights and liberties should be affirmed as basic possessions of all of them? In particular, do we really best respect our fellow citizens as free and equal self-governing agents by restricting their private economic liberties? Perhaps the surest foundation for private economic liberty is not to be found in traditional libertarian or classical liberal ideas of self-ownership or economic efficiency. Perhaps the more enduring foundation for such liberty is to be found in an idea directly beneath the old high liberal camp, in the idea of democratic legitimacy itself.

If we are concerned about fairness, what kind of framework best honors that (now common) concern? For example, is the best way to improve “the position of the least well-off class” to enact government programs designed to transfer wealth (whether within generations or between them)? Might we better express a concern for the least advantaged by creating a society focused not so much on issues concerning the transfer of wealth but on its creation?

Free Market Fairness is a version of bleeding heart libertarianism that seeks to answer those questions. I invite you to think about them too.

The sheer shock and disbelief that I've noticed in some comments sections (here, on other blogs, on facebook) about the category "bleeding-heart libertarians" seems to me partly rooted in a quirky fact about libertarianism in political philosophy.

Rawls' Theory of Justice is was the defining work of anglophone political philosophy of the past half-century.  And it defended a kind of liberalism-- one that accords a priority to liberty, one that rejects state-mandated moralism, paternalism, and perfectionism.  It was also a kind of liberalism that defended a political economy oriented toward the well-being of the worst off.

Rawls' liberalism shares a great deal with classical and market liberalism.  It is genuinely individualistic and  liberal, not social-democratic or socialist, in its moral outlook.  

Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia thus engaged with the remaining difference: where Rawls thought that a political economy had to be justified in terms of its attention to the welfare of the least well-off, Nozick (roughly) thought that it had to respect rights, in a way that precluded the Rawls' attention to distributive patterns.  (Though the two were not necessarily mutually exclusive in a world characterized by past injustice, such as our world.) 

So libertarianism as a doctrine in political philosophy had this distinctive contribution to make: it rejected state activity to increase the material well-being of the poor.  I think by gradual drift, that came to seem like all libertarianism was concerned with.  (And that gelled with some underlying tendencies I mentioned in my last post, as well as with the Randian moralization of the difference between producers and others.)

But in the real world, state action to improve the material lot of the poor is not a very large portion of state action.  This is politically predictable, almost trivially so.  But that means that the focus on libertarianism's apparent philosophical difference with Rawlsian liberalism gives us a very distorted sense of the work libertarians could do politically in the world.  We don't live in a Rawlsian world, separated from Nozick's by the existence of poverty-alleviation programs.  We live in a world characterized by massive state action of all sorts, most of which does nothing to alleviate poverty and a great del of which is actively regressive or harmful to the worst-off.  

Hence, a rhetorical justification for B-HL or liberaltarianism.  Let us not talk as if the set of policies endorsed by Rawls and not by Nozick somehow makes up most of the action of a state we're supposed to be in the business of trying to limit.  

David Stockman's stated goal of targeting budget cuts on "weak claims, not weak clients" was in a sense obviously politically doomed.  But that doesn't alter the imperative to try to do as he said he wanted to do.  And I think a headline commitment-- right in our name, as it were-- to targeting "weak claims, not weak clients" can be helpful there.

Liberaltarianism isn’t something Brink Lindsey and I made up. (The word is something a New Republic editor made up, I think.) The idea of blending the best of libertarianism with the best of modern liberalism has been implicit in the work of a bunch of libertarianish political philosophers/theorists, and a bunch of those guys just started a blog, Bleeding Heart Libertarianism.

Matt Zwolinski describes the new blog as “a forum for academic philosophers who are attracted both to libertarianism and to ideals of social or distributive justice.”

Jason Brennan writes about what he and John Tomasi call “neoclassical liberalism” and how this contrasts with standard libertarianism and the academically-dominant Rawls-inflected view Samuel Freeman calls “high liberalism”.

Andrew J. Cohen, Danny Shapiro, Jacob Levy, and James Stacey Taylor appear to be on board.

Do you hear that? It’s your paradigm shifting!

UPDATE: I didn't realize that this blog was going to be read by so many non-philosophers. It's pretty clear from reactions on some other blogs that many readers aren't familiar with the terms or issues below and thus don't quite understand what I'm talking about. So, thanks for reading, and I'll make sure to re-write an entry on this topic in the future for non-specialists.

In academic philosophy, people tend to use the term ‘libertarian’ in a restrictive way, to refer to people who 1) hold that property rights and other rights are absolute or nearly absolute, 2) who ground their theories of rights and justice on the concept of self-ownership, 3) who reject social justice, and 4) who reject the idea that positive liberty really is liberty, and is a valuable form of liberty which society should project and promote. Libertarians hold that justice requires that we respect property rights, period, even if that means a large percentage of people will starve, lead poor and desperate lives, or have no stake in their society. If that’s libertarianism, count me out.

In a forthcoming paper on current trends in classical liberalism, John Tomasi and I claim that the classical liberalism is being reinvigorated by the emergence of what we call neoclassical liberalism. In this post, I just want to introduce and explain what neoclassical liberalism is. (I won’t defend it, nor will I try to explain just how all the pieces fit together.)



Neoclassical liberals combine a classical liberal commitment to economic liberty with a modern or high liberal commitment to social justice. A political philosophy doesn’t win points by being the most demanding. Still, it’s important to understand that neoclassical liberals are not simply classical liberals who (somewhat begrudgingly) accept some welfarist principles, thus making their theory of justice a little more humane than libertarians', if not quite as humane as high liberals'. Instead, neoclassical liberals go “all in” in accepting strong principles of social justice, but at the same time has a broader, more expansive conception of personal liberty than high liberals do. From the neoclassical liberal point of view, neoclassical liberalism ups the moral ante when compared to high liberalism. High liberalism was supposed to be the culmination of the liberal movement—thus the ‘high’ in ‘high liberalism’–but Tomasi and I claim that neoclassical liberalism is a higher form of liberalism. 

One way to distinguish among kinds of liberalism is by their differing conceptions of economic liberty.  Classical liberals and libertarians affirm what we might call a thick conception of economic liberty; high liberals, a thin conception.

Most liberals agree that some rights and liberties are more basic than others. All liberals include some economic liberties on their list of basic liberties. The purpose of these liberties is (at least in part) to protect citizens’ ability to act as independent decision-makers over a wide range of choices they face in their lives, to facilitate them facing each other as autonomous and equal citizens, and to allow them to develop their moral powers.

However, liberals disagree about the scope, nature, and weight of the liberties they consider basic. High liberals have a thin conception of economic liberty. They think that freedom of occupation and freedom to own personal property are among the basic liberties. In contrast, classical liberals, libertarians, and neoclassical liberals think that the basic liberties also include strong rights to freedom of contract, freedom to own and use productive property, freedom to buy and sell on voluntary terms, and so on. They regard these rights as on par with civil liberties, while high liberals regard them as lesser rights, or in some cases, not rights at all. High liberals tend to interpret the civil liberties broadly. They assume that the civil liberties have a wide scope and are quite weighty. Neoclassical liberals hold that economic liberties have the same weight and wide scope as the civil liberties. (High liberals will want to ask: Why?)

Tomasi claims, in his forthcoming book Free Market Fairness (Princeton University Press, 2012), that high liberals have adopted a platform of “economic exceptionalism”. What he means by this is that high liberals believe that citizens should, by right, have a wide range of freedom of choice in nearly all aspects of their lives, except decisions having to do with property, commerce, labor, money, and trade. High liberals think that citizens be afforded wide latitude in making decisions about property, commerce, labor, money, and trade only if doing so helps to serve social justice or only if such decision-making power is authorized by a democratic assembly. Perhaps in order to make room for social justice, high liberals relegated the economic liberties to a lower status than the political and civil liberties.

Neoclassical liberals reject this platform of economic exceptionalism. They think the economic liberties share the same high status as the other liberties. However, neoclassical liberals also believe that this need not come at the expense of social justice. (High liberals should ask: Why not?)

Another way to distinguish between different kinds of liberalism is by their commitment to social justice. At root, to be committed to social justice is to believe that in order for institutions, practices, and social norms to be just, they must be sufficiently to the benefit of all, including and perhaps even especially the least advantaged. To believe in *social* justice is to hold that the distribution of benefits and burdens in society matters as a matter of justice. To affirm social justice is to affirm that it is not enough that citizens have their formal liberties respected. Instead, in a just society, unless there is exceptional bad luck, citizens will have enjoy substantive liberty. Libertarians (including most left libertarians) and many classical liberals reject social justice; some even think the concept is ineradicably confused. Unlike libertarians and classical liberals, however, neoclassical liberals and high liberals affirm social justice as a substantive criterion by which to judge the basic structure of society and market outcomes.  On the neoclassical liberal view, part of the justification for a society’s basic structure is that it produces conditions where citizens have substantive liberty, and can confront each other as free and equal.  The basic structure of society is evaluable on the kinds of outcomes produced for citizens. (Orthodox libertarians: Why?)

This is just a brief overview of the neoclassical liberal position. It should raise plenty of questions. I’ll be posting on some of these questions in this blog.

 UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I'm fully aware that many people who call themselves libertarians would not fit the characterization of libertarians I gave in the first paragraph. I'm not here much concerned with coming up with the best definition of 'libertarianism'. I'm just pointing out that philosophers tend to use the word 'libertarian' the way I described above, and on that account, I'm not a libertarian.

Bryan Caplan introduces a useful concept. The “libertarian penumbra” is the hodge-podge of beliefs common among libertarians that have little or nothing to do with liberty. Bryan mentions belief in the validity of IQ testing, home-school boosterism, and population-growth optimism. He asks for more examples, including those that make you cringe. In the comments, Scott Sumner offers an excellent cringe list:

1. Crackpot theories of money/macro. A tendency to overlook the problem of demand shocks.
2. Global warming denial. (But skepticism about Gore-type solutions is fine.)
3. Overlooking the importance of having a “civic-minded” culture, such as you observe in Denmark.
4. Distrust of democracy.
5. Overlooking the importance of private non-profit enterprises.
6. Making the perfect be the enemy of the “much better.”
7. Confusing individualism with libertarianism.
8. Seeing history through middle class white male eyes.
9. Too much nostalgia for the past, and for the future. Right now was once the future, and will soon be the past.
10. I can’t think of anything else, but all lists should have ten items.

I want to start a club so Sumner and I can be in it. I’ll add patriotism and an inclination to traffic in bullshit evolutionary psych just-so stories, especially the bullshit just-so stories that rationalize sexist norms. I thought about mentioning blindness to the liberty-limiting aspects of structural discrimination, but this seems more like incoherence in the libertarian core, not non-liberty-related libertarian conventional wisdom.

Bryan Caplan lays down a challenge to liberaltarians:

From what philosophic point of view is “maximizing growth + lots of redistribution + the immigration restrictions lots of domestic redistribution naturally encourage” better than “maximizing growth + no redistribution + free immigration”?  Whether you’re concern for the poor is Rawlsian, utilitarian, or even dogmatically egalitarian, “no redistribution + free immigration” is the way to go.

Here is Adam Ozimek’s response.

I cry foul. I don’t have much patience with ideal theory, but either we’re ideal theorizing or we’re not. If we are, then I’m for “maximizing growth + lots of redistribution + free immigration”. (Actually, to nitpick, the idea is to reduce redistribution as a portion of national income while increasing it in absolute terms through a higher rate of growth.)  I have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is better or worse relative to various ethical standards, and neither does Bryan.*

If we’re doing non-ideal theory and Bryan says that I can’t have free immigration together with lots of redistribution, then I’m going to say he can’t have “no redistribution” without repressive oligarchy or civil war. That’s worse on any standard than the immigration restriction Bryan thinks my formula entails, so I win! Right? Well, who knows? I don’t think this is a fruitful debate, either.

I doubt maximizing growth + optimal tax + optimal social insurance is in our social choice set, but given where we’re starting from–the modern welfare state–it seems to me a useful regulative ideal. In contrast, “no redistribution” seems too remote to be very useful in thinking about incremental policy change. Relatedly, it seems to me that falling short of my formula likely leaves us with a tad more growth, a slightly more efficient tax system, and somewhat better social insurance. Falling short of the “no redistribution” ideal seems likely to leave us with a porous and inefficient safety net that continues to crowd out civil society alternatives to state welfare. This is why, by the way, I think libertarian influence on Republican thinking about social policy often does hurt the poor. Libertarians are politically most constructive when offering “second-best” welfare-state alternatives to the status quo — social security personal accounts, education voucher schemes, etc. — and most destructive when pushing their ideas about “first-best” policy. One way to be a liberaltarian is to just forget about utopian libertarian “first-best” targets and promote “second-best” policies to the top spot. An analogy: hardcore socialists thought social democrats were selling out the revolution by offering half-measures, but it turned out that social democracy is just a hell of a lot better than full-on socialism in terms of liberty, equality, wealth, health, happiness… everything. But I digress.

Anyway, I would like immigration policy to be as liberal as possible, and I’m interested in pushing the bounds of the possible. One of the impediments to a more welcoming immigration policy is the very idea that Bryan here perpetuates: that immigration puts pressure on the welfare state.** But whether or not it does is a further matter of policy. For example, the 1996 welfare reform legislation made illegal immigrants ineligible for most forms of means-tested public assistance. I’ve often written about separating rights of citizenship from residency and labor-market rights. If you restrict participation in the social insurance scheme to citizens, the fiscal threat of immigrants mostly disappears, especially if the citizenship bar is high.

I’m aiming for integrated North American labor markets, a more generous refugee policy, and a much less restrictive work visa system. I think this can work together with a pro-growth social insurance scheme because a limited version of this package does work in much of Europe.

I suspect Bryan and I disagree mostly about the utility of ideal theory.   Bryan, I’m guessing, thinks it makes sense to gin up a menu of highly idealized regime types and then to evaluate them using a combination of status quo social science and moral intuition. I think the output of this kind of process is mostly of anthropological and historical interest. I have short Hayekian horizons. Unforeseeable technological developments and moral/cultural evolution will shape both what will be possible and the normative yardstick we will use to evaluate what becomes possible (i.e., moral intuition and institutional structure are endogenously mutually determining in the process of social change.) So it’s just pointless getting too far ahead of ourselves.

Notes:

* Everything Bryan and I like fails strictly Rawlsian tests. There’s much more to Rawls than the difference principle. I’m defending “welfare-state capitalism,” which Rawls specifically rejects. Also, Rawls says political persecution is the only acceptable reason to emigrate. That’s totally outrageous, but that’s what the man says. [Added: Rawls doesn't quite say that. See my exchange with Matt Lister below. Anyway, what I meant to be pointing out is that Rawls thinks immigration "is eliminated as a serious problem in a realistic utopia," because the principal causes of migration are based in forms of injustice. Rawls thinks talk of immigration doesn't belong in ideal theory.]

** Here’s what Milton Friedman thought about immigration and the welfare state. I think Bryan and I are on the same page about this, but commenters inevitably bring up that one badly abused quotation.