Rawlsekianism? How about Neofusionism? That is along the same lines as neoliberalism.

So the alleged libertarian/liberal think tanks only defend liberal economics and not civil liberties because they’re trying to build coalitions? Am I the only one that thinks that is illogical.

It seems that libertarian/liberal proponents prefer it more for economic freedom than social freedom which would make them more Conservative than Liberal. In my experience I have found proponents of Liberalism “are less interested in liberalism and more interested in promoting the interests of business, bashing unions and promoting capitalism in the developing world”.

What I really took from the essay was:

And while social democrats might want to increase spending in order to provide better services, there are other options. Freeing up markets and curb corporate welfare could also provide more resources for policies like early childhood education, support for low paid workers. And for both groups the bottom line should be better opportunities for the least advantaged.

So the question for me then becomes how do we curb corporate welfare? How do we begin?

Also I would like to thank Don for explaining how the two incongruent philosophies of Liberalism and Conservatism somehow live in fusion. It has always been a contradiction to me. I still think it is but I have a better understanding now.

PF: To say that they can always choose to go elsewhere and have hence chosen for their unfreedom is like saying to the passengers on a ship in the middle of the ocean that they are free to leave anytime they want!

BH: This is a non sequitur. They were free to not get on the ship in the first place before it left port. If they were misled by the ship owner into believing the ship wouldn

At which stage, I believe, Paul and I recommence arguing.

Judicious redistribution is not about righting past wrongs, and all about freeing people. ‘The talented’ don’t become talented without education; and in any case not everyone is talented. In a decent society, gifted people have the freedom to develop talents, and non-gifted people have freedom from toothache. Why else would they support the state that enforces the libertarian’s precious property rights?

I

Paul,

I agree. State regulation is bad because it doesn’t weigh up the costs and benefits of said regulation as thoroughly as a private property owner would. I think I even said that here:

Libertarians are against state regulation, not private regulation.

and here:

It is involuntary regulation that I rail against, not the complexities of modern life.

Your example of university regulations gone haywire is an example of the above. If universities were private property, then the university owner would have an incentive to balance the costs and benefits of regulation more closely. It is little wonder that privately funded US universities are ranked higher than publicly funded Australian ones in terms of the research performed and the education they provide.

these are not the product of politicians thinking them up and consciously deciding upon them, but are more akin to the autonomous decisions thought up by risk-minimising administrations mainly obsessed with minimising real or imagined dangers, rubber stamped by politicians who havent got the time to thinki them through.

Another reason to minimise the state. Bureaucrats will always be risk averse because they face greater consequences from failure than they do reward for success. This is an argument against state regulation, which I agree with.

If someone has nothing to trade then by your logic, that

thanks for the detailed response. Let me give some detailed responses back, but before that make it clear that I make a sharp distinction between freedom and welfare. Hence I do not claim that the brutal, nasty, and short life of a hunter-gatherer was better than life today. I would say it is freer though.
To take some of your points:

- my memory of air travel 20 years ago was one of far greater freedom than now. Much less hassle with luggage, one could arive far closer to departure, one could sleep on the floor, and one could say a lot more. Sure, today’s airtravel is faster and the food is better, but freer? Only if you dont count being a caged rat.

- whether or not the bottom 10% has gotten better depends a lot on your time-frame. In both the examples you mention (15 years and 100 years) you are undoubtedly right. 35 years is trickier because that period includes the big wage reduction of the 70s. Hence what I was saying there does not contradict what you’re saying.

- your depiction of the immense expansion of regulation in academia as resulting from ‘our’ concern with equity and fairness belongs to a fairytale in which deep logic is applied to the implementation of every new rule. Why would you for instance be able to run a simple economic experiment 10 years ago and not today? That was not an express goal of the setting up of ethical committees, but rather I’d say it was the unintended outcome of giving a bunch of people the power the stop things without accountability. Similar reasoning applies to many additional regulations. The view of universities or societies as places where in all reasonableness and concensus new rules appear is just a myth. Society is not that rational and encroaching unfreedom must be actively resisted if it is not to stifle us.

- the property rights thing keeps befuddling me. Take your quote:
“So a system that recognises, respects and enforces property rights by default is one that increases the freedom of property owners, which is the vast majority of us. An issue, which you have picked up on, then arises about non-property owners. This is a discrete issue and irrelevant to the first one except in an evaluatory sense.”

In the context of discussing freedom, there are several things here I take issue with. For one, virtually everyone owns something if only the clothes they wear. To nevertheless say that enforcing property rights increases the freedom of property owners is hence misleading. What you mean is that for each individual piece owned, it gives the owner of that little piece more freedom to enjoy that little piece. Yet at the same time, your freedom to deny all others access is creating an nufreedom for all others, even if those others own something else. To say that the non-property right owners dont matter when discussing freedom is very strange. It strongly smells of not wanting to see that one man’s property is another man’s restriction.
Furthermore, if one sees property rights and initial distributions as unrelated in terms of freedoms, then the logical corrollary of that is to say that if a dictator grabs everything, then for the sake of freedom that person’s new property rights should be respected. Hence you say by implication that the freedom of one person can outweigh the unfreedom of all others. That needs a pretty bizarre weighing scheme.

I was more worried about ordinary people’s freedoms, especially those in the lower income quintile. In that light I did want to take issue with your comment about salaries – in PPI terms these guys have benefited from the last 15 years, as well as from the last 100.

Discrete issues
I also think you should have left the airtravel issue alone – I remember air travel 15 years ago, and it is enormously better now. To the point that I would rather be economy now (in a non-European airline) than business (class) then.

As for the academic side, well I remember trying to defer. I sent them a form by email and they approved it. I extended by two years, by email, and they approved it. They then charged me a late fee for not re-enrolling in time, I reminded them that I had extended my LoA and they retracted the fee. I thought it was pretty painless. Maybe it is just testimony to how much younger I am than all of you.

Similarly, the majority of administrative procedures do seem to me to be getting easier – even Centrelink is not so much of a hassle, most of the time – medicare has gotten easier to deal with. Dealing with public hospitals is almost laughably easy now, as are births and registrations of foreign births. When we needed a passport within the month for our son we went to the nearest embassy and we received it two days later. We were lucky that is was a major embassy but even so it wouldn’t have been much longer.

Tax is largely an exception – it only gets more complicated – but one that I don’t think is too bad. As the Commissioner said last year in a speech, complexity is the price of fairness. I don’t think the current system is perfect and I do think it is too complicated in some areas. But I think it is pretty good, especially comparatively (administratively and substantively).

Before moving on, plagiarism is not commonly concieved of as a limit on free speech. Defamation certainly can be, but an appropriate balance recognises what some people call fundamental human rights. I don’t think many troppodillians argue that property is so archifundamental that it should not be limited by some ability to sue for defamation.

More seriously
On the deeper issue, there is more to the property side than your latest comment gave credit to. After all, as I have (kind of) been saying all along, freedom is partly ‘freedom to act’: the actual value of your property is partly determined by your ‘freedom’ to deal with it. In simple terms land subject to a covenant is worth less than unencumbered land, and freedom to write about approved topics is worth less than freedom to write, full stop.

So a system that recognises, respects and enforces property rights by default is one that increases the freedom of property owners, which is the vast majority of us. An issue, which you have picked up on, then arises about non-property owners. This is a discrete issue and irrelevant to the first one except in an evaluatory sense.

Your second-last comment reads almost like an argument for unregulated private universities. A lot of that admittedly crappy administrivia and bureacracy stems from our (your!) concern to regulate for fairness and equality and all that (see above re tax). In many ways your fantasy world would, in practice, probably be more like these University bureacracies you seem to hate so much, just everywhere.

Of course I agree that regulation often has unintended consequences and costs and should be avoided wherever possible.

Finally:

Hence you can only use the property rights argument if you think the initial allocation reflects freedom

I disagree. I think that the initial allocation and the subsequent mode of (re)allocation are fairly discrete issues. Property rights is an example of something that can input into both, as is equality. But they aren’t necessarily related.

Hayek is simialr to Marx. Interesting on economics but very bad on politics.

I am glad Nick brought up the Joe McCarthy era and the litany of silence by some.

Your comment on rule making scaring people away from academia is true to some extent for me. I recall negotiating with one uni bureaucrat after another about doing extremely minor things that shouldn’t have had to bother anyone – like deferring for a year or whatever. These guys had a battalion of rules made up on the assumption that I was costing them money. I wasn’t costing them a dime to defer. I wasn’t on a scholarship. Had I been on a scholarship, which I wasn’t mainly out of pride there were other rules that would have made life easier for me.

I kept thinking to myself – these people aspire to be the model of thinking persons and they have nothing better to do than make hundreds of rules up that don’t have to be made at all! Partly for that reason I stayed away. The petty mindedness of it was very demoralising.

The outer bound of distance travelled has increased, which says nothing about whether a particular person is able to travel any particular distance. Perhaps “freedom to travel 6000 km” is not such a great way of expressing this.

Your concept of freedom is strange, especially within the framework of property rights that libertarians pose them. Freedom doesn’t mean free access to resources, it means freedom to hold on to and use your property as you see fit. There is a difference between regulation imposed by the state on other people’s property and regulations imposed by the property owner. Libertarians are against state regulation, not private regulation.

So given that airlines dislike having their planes blown up by terrorists, some sort of security screening would occur before you were able to board their aircraft even in the absence of state regulations. The same with fire regulations in buildings.

However, libertarians are not going to fight the fight for you to be on your employer’s premises outside of business hours without their permission or without following their rules. It is their building and you agreed to obey by their rules when you joined the company and entered their building.

The whole concept of property rights is immersed in the idea of voluntary transactions, contracts between individuals and organisations. Thus you trade something of yours for something of theirs, such as free time, labour and agree to certain rules, for wages and other employment benefits. You’ve freely agreed to work for them and they’ve freely agreed to employ and pay you.

As these individual contracts become more complex, more has to be traded for the benefits. So people who complain of being slaves to their jobs are really saying that they are questioning how much they have to give up in order to receive the benefits of work. When people complain about state run schools, but yet replace their car every other year rather than put their children through private education, they are voluntarily putting more value on their choice of car than their children’s education.

Freedom enables voluntary complexity, and complexity gives the veneer of restricting freedom. It is involuntary regulation that I rail against, not the complexities of modern life. Claiming that 3000BC man was more free because their life was less complex than 21st century man is a chimera. Their freedom can be measured using the same criteria of how free they are able to hold on to and use their property without impinging on other’s freedom.

For example, in order to protect 3000BC man’s territory, they would have had to intimidate with violence their neighbour into submission or agreement to leave each other’s territory alone. 21st century man merely takes out some simple precautions such as installing security locks, reasonably safe in the knowledge that his neighbour is not going to move into his house while he is at work. No violence or threats of violence are required directly by him, although he does contract out the forceful protection of his property to the police or security company. So which one is more free to use his home, the caveman that can’t stray too far for fear of his neighbour invading his cave, or 21st century man who can go on holiday across the world and leave his house unattended for months with little fear? The caveman has a simpler life, the 21st century man a more complex one. The 21st century man is more free.

Freedom of personal space at work? Cookoo! You cant even open a window without the fire police fining you, if indeed you are lucky enough to have a window that could even be opened. The same goes for bikes in the office. There are security passes after 6; and nothing personal on the homepage unless may be some isolated places or universities without central IT. All this is in the last 2 years.

Academic freedom to research what you want to research? Ha! Ethical committees in quite a few Australian committees in recent years have begun to stop you from rewarding subjects who play a game well, meaning economic experiments are effectively forbidden because they violate the politically correct notion that icnentives dont matter. Any sensitive question in surveys now has to jump ethical committees, ARC guidelines on the matter, privacy legislation, and often direct political approval. Anything to do with sex, religion, or ethnicity is thus now treated with kids gloves and off-bounds.

Academic freedom to say what you have discovered or have come to believe? You must be joking. The majority of my colleagues walk 10 miles around touchy subjects, such as Aborigines or the relation between sexual urges and work. Privately all kinds of interesting research observations are made, but the fear of being branded a left-wing or a right-wing lunatic has lead to widespread self-censorship. And if you dont believe the pressure to conform to a particular political view is rife, just google ’sorry week’ at UQ.

Academic freedom to choose what and how you lecture perhaps? Dont make me laugh! Whereas in my first stint as lecturer I would have been allowed to set my own exam and fail students who didnt meet a fixed academic standard, I was taken into a bureaucrat’s office 5 years ago and told in no uncertain terms that I was not to fail more than 6% of the student because that would not ‘conform’ with the ‘expected pass distribution’. Since then things have only gotten worse. You now have to start your lectures with a ’safety video’ and, depending on where you are, with an acknowledgement of the traditional owners.

I don

I still disagree but I think that I can engage with that – I will try tomorrow.

The notion that

As an economist I celebrate the greater wealth of many of this worlds poor as loudly as I can and, indeed, never grow tired of saying that the continued economic growth of China and India is the biggest economic event of the last 50 years.
I disagree with you that “the privileges of the upper classes are progressively made available to all.”
The private property of the upper classes are off-bounds to the others and hence the freedom to enjoy their land and houses reflects the unfreedom of others denied access to those things. Indeed, just go to a couple of beaches on the coast to see what mean: more and more of the damned things are only available to people staying at this or that hotel or are completely owned by one person. I dont call that ‘making privileges available to all’. Sure, some things are becoming within reach of more people (though it is good to remind the reader here that the wages of the bottom 10% have hardly risen in the last 35 years in Oz and in US its arguable that the poorest havent become poorer) but greater inequality has meant this expansion is not for everyone and what is gained at one end is eroded at the other end.

Of course an expansion of the opportunity set is in anybody’s book ‘more freedom’. I would however say that air travel was a lot ‘freer’ 15 years ago than it is now and hence I’m not convinced we’ve in reality wittnessed an expansion of freedom in air travel rather than a reduction of it. The degree to which supposed libertarians shrug their shoulders at the regimentation of nearly all aspects of life and simply count the number of goods the rich have access to (and are thus able to deny others access to) as ‘freedom’ is worrisome. If it is not our ability to express, discuss, interact, and do as we please that is counted as freedom then your dictionary has a different entry at the word ‘freedom’ than mine.

I suspect you are forgetting that everything gets cheaper all the time, whilst just about everyone gets richer all the time. So Somali refugees fly to Europe and Australia (whilst some smuggle themselves into containers, still a greater scope of action than their ancestors of a few hundred years let alone thousand). One of the nasty consequences of economic growth is what one might call economic emancipation – the privileges of the upper classes are progressively made available to all.

At a more fundamental level, you are categorically rejecting what I think is about as close to a consensus as this site has – that the positive ability to achieve something far outweighs the negative ability to achieve it undisturbed by government/others.

Situation A) you can’t fly to America
Situation B) you can, but you have to take a plane (and can’t teleport, which is presumably your ‘free’ means of travel) and have to observe the same restrictions you oblige everyone else to observe in your mutual desire to arrive alive. What is worse, it takes nearly a day.

Are you freer in A or B? If you persist in answering A, I am going to post the definition of the word ‘free’.