Democracy is Not Freedom

The Arab Spring is supposed to be a wonderful thing because it is eliminating dictators and installing democracy throughout the Middle East, right? The people get to choose their government! That’s freedom! Right?

Well, is it freedom when majorities vote to install Islamic law with totalitarian reach in the government, as they are doing in many of these “liberated” Middle Eastern nations? How free do you think women in Egypt feel, now that a secular dictatorship has been replaced with a misogynistic Islamic democracy?

With this in mind, I’m going to put forward a radical concept that few in the democratic world have managed to grasp: Democracy is not freedom. Replacing a tyrannical dictator with a tyrannical majority does not free a people. Too many people believe that whatever the majority wants is right. That it’s oppression to deny the majority their will. But when the majority seeks to infringe on the inherent rights of the minority, they cannot possibly be supporting freedom.

Democracy is not the essence of freedom- it is merely a tool that can be useful for protecting freedom. True freedom comes from the principles of liberty, which must be protected for all people from the will of any minority or majority. That means protecting individual sovereignty for all, not just ensuring popular sovereignty. The democratic socialist governmental structures of the European Union as well as the Bolivarian governments of South America suppress the individual sovereignty of the people in favor of expressing the collective will of the majority. The majorities in these countries may feel pretty free because they’re getting everything they want, but the members of the minority who they oppress are having their liberty infringed upon every day.

That is why the United States government was originally founded with a Constitution and Bill of Rights strictly limiting the power of the democratic government to infringe on the liberty of individuals. This government was not meant to be an expression of collective will, but a means of ensuring that no individual could come under monarchical or majoritarian oppression. Yet, in recent generations, we’ve strayed from these principles, allowing charismatic leaders to convince us that they can solve the problems of poverty, of unemployment, of poor education and health care, if only we would give them more power to express the collective will of the people. What they leave out of these platitudes is the clarification that their solutions would express the will of the majority at the expense of the basic liberty of the minority. Yet, we’ve supplanted nearly all of our constitutional principles in favor of the democratic socialist perspectives of Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama.

This envisioning of the government as a mechanism of expressing collective will is wrong. It is an anti-liberty view, as should be clear from the oppressive horrors that voting majorities have brought everywhere from 1930′s Europe to the modern Middle East. The collective will of majorities can be very oppressive, and it is no better when this collective will is used to provide financial security to one group at the expense of another group. These so-called “positive freedoms” come at the expense of the “negative freedoms” (the liberty) that all humans have an inherent right to. The government cannot buy one person a service without stealing property and labor from another person. So please, don’t try to equate democracy with freedom. Unrestrained democracy can be just as oppressive against the liberties of the people as unrestrained hereditary leadership.

For true freedom to come to all citizens of a nation, we must refocus the role of government back on the protection of liberty and individual sovereignty. No democratic form of government should ever be built without a constitutional guarantee to liberty. There just cannot be freedom without it. When individuals are free from forcible forms of organization, they are free to create their own voluntary forms of communal organization that can solve the nation’s problems without the suppression of human rights.

The Separation of Ideology and State

Quite a few people in this country support the separation of Church and State, feeling that religion has no place in defining the role of the State. Yet, many of these same people have no problem forcing their own ideologies and beliefs of any other nature on others through the mechanism of government.

What’s the difference between the different religions and the different political ideologies of our day? Religions are old enough to base their righteousness in the idea of divine right. That’s all. In every other way, the different religions are not fundamentally different different types of belief than those various political factions that lead to our modern squabbles over the economy, over how people should live their lives. As time goes on and the major political parties take turns wielding the power of the State, we allow these ideologies and ways of life that we do not believe in to be imposed on us simply because they come from the will of 51% of the people. Is this right? Is it right for two neighbors to force the third to live as they do? Would you allow the majority religion of the country to force their beliefs on you? It would certainly be democratic, but is it liberty?

So I have a simple question to ask: Why don’t the people of this country drop the blatant contradictions in their beliefs and favor a total separation of Ideology and State? Stop using taxes and the power of the law to force others to live as you choose to live. Stop trying to force everyone in the country to support your favored programs. For liberty’s sake, just leave each other alone. The violent power of government should not be used for every goal you have in life. All it truly needs to be used for is defense against further imposition of violent power.

How can you favor the Separation of Church and state without also accepting the Separation of Ideology and State, unless your motives are duplicitous and hypocritical?

Freedom Correlations, Part 2: The Most Important Form of Freedom

Last time, I examined how economic freedom (as defined by the Heritage Foundation) correlates with state failure (as defined by The Fund for Peace) by plotting each country on a graph of economic freedom score vs. failed state score. I found a strongly negative correlation between economic freedom and state failure, with the best-fit model being a monotonically negative sigmoidal curve. This model predicted that for countries at the extremes of economic freedom, changes in economic freedom have little effect on state failure, whereas countries with economic freedom scores in the middle of the pack compared to the rest of the world change rapidly with changes in economic freedom, gaining 40 points of state failure for every 15 points of economic freedom lost. Furthermore, it was found that with a (economic freedom score, state failure score) value of (76.3, 34.8), the United States is right on the brink of this “Fast Failure Region,” and headed in the the wrong direction, validating the widespread perception of U.S. decline. At this point, I would like to gain greater insight into the policy-based causes of state failure by investigating how each subcategory of economic freedom impacts state failure. This will give us information about which policies have the greatest effect on a country’s prosperity, hopefully presenting a feasible solution to prevent national decline.

For each subcategory of economic freedom, I performed an analysis similar to the one used to produce the graphs shown in Part 1. Definitions of each subcategory are provided in Part 1 of this series. I plotted the country scores for each subcategory from the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom against that country’s score in The Fund For Peace’s State Failure Index. I then searched for the curve of best fit that could be used to model each correlation, while being careful not to over-parameterize the functions. The resulting fits (described by R² value and the sign of the correlation) are summarized in Figure 4. It’s important to note that the correlations are not all described by the same functions.³

Figure 4: The magnitude and direction of correlations of each type of economic freedom with state failure. Freedom subcategories are arranged by increasing magnitude of correlation.

As can be seen from the chart, not all forms of economic freedom show a negative correlation with state failure, and not all forms show much of a correlation at all. For instance, Labor Freedom, which is the freedom for a business to make any voluntary contract it wants with its laborers, shows very little correlation at all with state failure. This would indicate that, contrary to the hopes of all the unions and the fears of all the business leaders out there, labor laws don’t really have any effect on a country’s overall prosperity. Also, providing a little bit of support for the Keynesian worldview, it would seem that the Freedom from Government Spending subcategory actually has some indirect positive relationship with state failure. An exception to the monotonicity of these correlations arises from the observation that State Failure is not actually a function of Fiscal Freedom, but still does have a correlation. Fiscal Freedom, which is the freedom from taxation, is actually dependent on State Failure, rather than the other way around, peaking around a State Failure score of 65, and declining towards the extremes of both national prosperity and national collapse. Perhaps this can be explained through the idea that both tyrannical governments and well-trusted, benevolent governments have the greatest capability to extract taxes from the people, but that’s a topic for another day.

Though not all forms of economic freedom stave off state failure, it’s clear that some categories do have a very strong record of keeping nations prosperous. Investment Freedom, Business Freedom, Financial Freedom, and Trade Freedom all have similarly strong levels of negative correlation with state failure. These four correlations also have similarly shaped models, giving the overall freedom correlation its Boltzmann Sigmoidal fit. It makes sense that these forms of freedom would act so similarly, as these are the forms which are most closely associated with the productive operations of our economy’s businesses. It should come as a major warning to regulation advocates that depriving businesses or the financial sector of their freedom has such a huge impact on the prosperity of a country. The initiation of the Great Depression in 1929 showed us what can go wrong if countries get too manipulative and protectionist with their trade policies, and the 2008 Great Recession showed us what can go wrong if countries get too manipulative with their financial sectors. The correlations here suggest that perhaps these devastating economic incidents weren’t freak accidents, but laws of nature.

But of course, the most significant correlations observed in this study were the State Failure negative correlations with Property Rights (R² = 0.73) and Freedom from Corruption (R² = 0.75) (Figure 5). Perhaps it should be obvious that increasing corruption leads to increasing state failure. That might even be considered a tautology, depending on how you define “corruption.” But therein lies the problem with this analysis: “Corruption” does not have a universally-accepted singular definition. Nobody tries to legislate corruption, and everybody agrees that corruption is bad. Furthermore, it’s probably a good assumption that corruption is probably already illegal in every country in the world. So how can we propose prosperity-promoting policy changes to reduce corruption when nobody can even agree on what it is?

Figure 5: The correlation between Freedom from Corruption score and Failed State score with an asymptotic exponential fit.

It turns out, it’s not important for this analysis how you or I or how any politician defines corruption. What’s important is how the Heritage Foundation defines corruption, because they’re the ones that made this index and assigned these scores. So how does Heritage define corruption? Well, they defer the definition to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). And how does Transparency International define corruption for their index? Well…they don’t. As stated in their FAQ, “There is no meaningful way to assess absolute levels of corruption in countries or territories on the basis of hard empirical data,” so they instead base their index on, “how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be” in population surveys. So Heritage’s definition of corruption is based on everyone’s definition of corruption, which nobody can agree upon. Great, we’re running in circles.

In order to get to the bottom of this quandary, I tried something that Heritage probably should have done when they first started publishing this index: I plotted the corruption scores for countries against the other measures of economic freedom, and found something very interesting. The Freedom from Corruption scores correlate with the Property Rights scores through an exponential relationship with an R² value of 0.92 (Figure 6). Given that the data for these two different measures come from two completely different type of surveys, this correlation is strong enough to suggest that they’re measuring the same thing. In other words, the correlation is definitional. Freedom from Corruption is the protection of Property Rights. The fact that the corruption perceptions data came from population surveys suggests that most people at least subconsciously feel that violations of property rights are corruption, even if they won’t necessarily acknowledge it on either the philosophical or practical levels. The lack of exceptions here is surprising, given that most countries are philosophically very socialist, and that there are even quiet a few shamelessly communist nations in the world. Perhaps this is a case of, “When it happens to me, it’s a crime, but when it happens to you, it’s business.”

Figure 6: The correlation between Property Rights score and Freedom from Corruption score with an exponential fit.

So, now that we know that Heritage (and world populations in general) think of property rights when judging the level of corruption in a country, we know that the most important form of economic freedom for promoting prosperity is indeed property rights. The correlation graph is shown in Figure 7. Though a Boltzmann Sigmoidal fit provides the best match to the data (R² = 0.73), it is only the lower Property Rights region that actually shows a deviation from a linear fit. Hence, a line with a slope of -0.79 can be fit to the data with an R² of 0.72. Averaged over the whole chart, every 10 points lost in the protection of Property Rights leads to an 8 point increase in in State Failure. This trajectory is extremely reliable given how empty the chart is in the bottom-left and top-right quadrants. The most extreme outlier with low State Failure even with low Property Rights is Argentina (20, 46.5), which seems to have narrowly dodged the bullet of state failure even with some of the worst protection of property rights in the world. The most extreme outlier in the other direction, with high State Failure even with reasonably high protection of Property Rights is Israel (70, 82.2), for reasons which are probably obvious. New Zealand (95, 25.6) is the bottom-right-most point, achieving very low State Failure with the absolute highest protection of Property Rights. The United States (85, 34.8) falls very close to the best-fit line, and could probably get down to a failure score of 25.8 just by protecting property rights as well as New Zealand.  That would bring us down to Canada’s or New Zealand’s low level of State Failure, even without any new social programs. In fact, it appears that no matter how many social programs a country puts in place, it can’t save them from failure if they do not protect property rights. It’s clearly property rights, not social services, that make a country generally prosperous.

Figure 7: The correlation between Property Rights score and Failed State score with a Boltzmann sigmoidal fit.

I also plotted the countries’ Property Rights scores against each subcategory of State Failure to determine the mechanism by which a country collapses after diminishing the right to private property (Figure 8).⁴ Property rights apparently have a negative correlation with every component of state failure, emphasizing their importance. There is absolutely no silver lining to the degradation of private property rights. Still, there are some mechanisms of state failure which are more directly related to a failure to protect property rights than others. The correlation with State Legitimacy (R² = 0.75) is extremely strong, suggesting that giving the government the power to deprive citizens of their property rights immediately leads to power struggles, cronyism, black markets, electoral manipulation, and protests of the whole mess. The Security Apparatus (R² = 0.66) also suffers severely from the loss of property rights, creating rebellion, militant groups, gang violence, and riots. Without private property rights, other Human Rights (R² = 0.62) also reliably suffer, leading to the loss of press freedom and other civil liberties, while increasing the incarceration and execution rates. Contrary to Marxist belief, private property rights are actually very good at inoculating a country against the entrenched aristocracy of Factionalized Elites (R² = 0.62) and the income inequality of Uneven Development (R² = 0.58). No matter how much money the government dumps into infrastructure, if that money is obtained by violating the private property rights of the people, then even Public Services (R² = 0.59) will suffer. Ultimately, Poverty and Economic Decline (R² = 0.51) is the result of any effort to replace private property rights with any philosophy deemed “more important.”

Figure 8: The magnitude and direction of correlations of Property Rights score with each type of State Failure. Failure types are arranged by increasing magnitude of correlation.

Collectivist philosophies survive on the belief that private property rights cause income inequality, poverty, bribery, and entrenchment of an elite class. However, these data sets show that the beliefs of socialists, Marxists, and communists are simply incorrect. The world very clearly does not work the way they believe it does. In fact, private property rights protect a nation from the economic and political ills that create squalor, stagnation, and sectionalism. And contrary to the beliefs of Liberals, it is impossible to protect the civil liberties of a nation without maintaining strong private property rights. Economic freedom is absolutely crucial to the protection of personal freedom. No country in the world has managed to lift its people out of poverty and socioeconomic turmoil without protecting private property rights. So, if you truly care about the prosperity of the people, and the lifting of the underclasses out of poverty, then beware of socialist politicians who advocate taking the property away from certain demonized groups as a means of bringing prosperity to the honest working people. They advocate the impossible. As they diminish the property rights of the people in general, they will drive their country towards failure, using the resulting socioeconomic collapse as further fuel for their cause. In reality, no matter how many scapegoats they identify, these socialists and communists and so-called “liberals” are the source of the pain that they rail against, even if they are very good at redirecting the perception of cause. They are their own demons. Any nation which falls into a popular mindset of “we just need more socialism and it will fix everything,” will trap itself in a perpetual spiral of self-destruction. The data presented here proves this.

As Americans used to know, the only true way to lift “your poor, your tired, your huddled masses” from squalor is through liberty. Protect the private property rights of the people, and give them the freedom to innovate, and they will find their own ways to survive with a prosperity that no central authority could have ever imagined. This is how Libertarianism aspires to help the people.

This analysis will be continued in Part 3.

Footnotes
3. The correlations of State Failure with Business Freedom, Financial Freedom, Investment Freedom, Monetary Freedom, Property Rights, and Trade Freedom  were modeled with Boltzmann sigmoidal fits trending monotonically in the negative direction. The correlation with Freedom from Corruption was modeled with an asymptotic exponential decay function. The correlations with Labor Freedom and Freedom from Government Spending were modeled with linear fits, with negative and positive slopes, respectively. The correlation with Fiscal Freedom was modeled with an extremes peak function to account for the non-monotonic nature of this relationship.
4. The correlations of Property Rights with Demographics, External Intervention, Factionalized Elites, Group Grievances, Human Flight, Poverty and Decline, Public Services, Refugees, Security Apparatus, State Legitimacy, and Uneven Development were modeled with Boltzmann sigmoidal fits trending monotonically in the negative direction. Not all of these models showed the full range of the sigmoidal shape within the range of the charts, but the sigmoidal model was still necessary to capture the fluctuations in the monotonic trends in the data.

Barack Obama, the Communist

Certainly, everyone has someone to thank for helping them get to where they are. As Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” However, we still give Newton credit for his work. Certainly, others laid the foundation that Newton built off of, but he still pushed mathematics and physics to, at the time, unimaginable heights. Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Richard Feynman can claim similar distinctions. For that, we recognize them as geniuses.

We can apply this sentiment to other fields of science as well- Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize (twice- once in Chemistry, and once in Peace) for his contributions. We don’t offer the Nobel Prize to the people who started the project- we offer it to the person who found the answer and finished it. That’s why Watson and Crick were so excited when they beat Pauling to the finish in elucidating the structure of DNA.

And this sentiment extends to the business world. We give patents and the accompanying profits to the person who actually develops something useful for us, not to the people who tried, but didn’t get quite far enough. We can extend this concept to every human endeavor: People deserve credit for what they offer to society. This is a fundamental aspect of morality, and is the defining feature of Capitalism.

And yet, not everyone agrees. Notably, just last night, President Obama said, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He’s taking a page out of the Communist Manifesto by declaring that Society deserves credit for all of your accomplishments, and you don’t. This is consistent with his previous statements that, despite the weak economy, “The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.” This also matches the sentiments expressed when he said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

These statements should offend anyone who believes that individuals deserve credit for their own accomplishments. Barack Obama’s rhetoric speaks towards a complete rejection of Capitalism altogether. He will continue to lie and pay lip service to Capitalism when it’s demanded of him. But it’s clear that his view of individual accomplishment is purely a Communist one.

Dear American Progressives and Socialists,

I can tell that you and I are making each other unhappy. I want this country to be one thing, and you want it to be another thing, and no matter how much data we compare, it seems like our value system will always be opposed. I believe in the traditional American ideals of rugged individualism and libertarian freedom, and you believe that Europe has it figured out with their welfare states. I don’t think we can reconcile these differences in values, and I don’t think we can tolerate each other.

Well, I have a solution for you that I believe would be mutually agreeable. Rather than trying to change the US, why not pack up and move to Europe? You’re always telling me how great it is there, so why not live in that sort of paradise? I’ll enjoy my heartless, deregulated, Gilded Age plutocracy, and you can enjoy a 35-hour workweek, socialized health care, government trains, and all the “social justice” you can stomach. I hear France just elected a Socialist Party president. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? To live in Paris under a radically left-wing government?

Believe me, I would pack up and leave the States if there were somewhere more libertarian I could go. Singapore is nice, but its government tends to get a little too positively involved in businesses. They are busybodies. Australia has implemented some reforms lately, but I’m not so sure it will last, considering how “European” the Australians are (they’ve nationalized health care!). I’ve also considered Switzerland, but I have the same concerns about the European influences on them. Hong Kong looks great, but I’m not so sure about the intentions of their new masters. The US is the only country in the world that I know has a large population favoring libertarian values, and the tradition to keep it around. So at least for now, I’m stuck with it.

I mean, let’s be honest about the United States now. The Supreme Court is about to make nationalized health an impossibility here for a generation by striking down Obama’s Individual Mandate. Mitt Romney is almost certainly going to be president in January, and Scott Walker is certainly going to survive in Wisconsin. The Tea Party has embedded itself in the Republican Party, and Ron Paul’s followers are growing in number and gaining more mainstream recognition. The Great Blue States of the West and Northeast are losing population and influence as their budgets explode into the red, and their regulations multiply along with their cost-of-living. The Progressive Era here is ending as Libertarianism returns to the forefront of American thought. Do you really have much to gain by sticking around?

So please, won’t you take the step that will allow us to live in peace and harmony…far away from each other? Please move to Europe. Or Latin America or something like that. We will both be happier for it.

Signed,
Your Friendly Libertarian Neighbor,
Tristan

Social Choice Part II

There is something else I want to append to the ideas described in my previous post. I’d like to expand a little bit on the process society goes through in choosing whether the man lives or dies.

The reason Krugman was reframing the binary choice in such an unrepresentative way is because he believes people are incapable of organizing unless forced to through the violent power of the law. So, he feels that in the libertarian framework, the choice would most likely be that the man dies, whereas having a law would make it so the man would most likely live. However, in thinking about the issue in this way, Krugman is completely ignoring the process it takes to actually create a functional law with the desired result.

Sure, the process of voluntary organization to solve this particular societal problem in a liberty-based system requires the efforts of thousands of people who have no mandatory obligation to actually do their part to organize a solution. It requires the support of millions of people to give such a solution the wings it needs to get off the ground. Sounds difficult, right? And yet passage of a law has nearly identical requirements!

So if Krugman wants to examine the difficulties associated with Society voluntarily and freely developing a solution, then fine, but let’s take the honest approach and compare that to the political battles and sausage-making that it takes to generate a solution through government. If instead he wants to focus on the finished product, then fine, let’s compare the efficiency, sustainability, and effectiveness of the finished products that would come out of the two systems. I’m confident that libertarians can win on both the “generation of solutions” front and the “quality of solutions” front when fought separately.

But to take the finished product of one system and compare it to the struggle to get there of the other system is just plain dishonest. And it’s that aspect of his arguments which leads me to so vehemently despise Paul Krugman.

Here’s what Obama is gonna do if he stays for 4 more years

He will continue doing much of what he’s done for the last 2.5 years. That means:

More indefensible bureaucratic expansion. [link]
More regulation of company mobility to prevent profitable enterprises from fleeing Democratic majority states to search for more freedom elsewhere. [link]
More economic failure, leading to Carter-style stagflation. [link]
More debt growth, as he resists all attempts to steer the country away from an imminent Greek-style crash. [link]
More moralistic nationalization, enforced through militarization of the US police forces, pushing us towards a Soviet-style police state. [link] [link] [link]
More corrupt abuses of executive power, bordering on illegality. [link] [link] [link]

If you want to continue these disturbing trends, to disregard liberty in favor of a Soviet-style socialist nation under a government with totalitarian control over your personal life and endeavors, then by all means, vote for Obama in 2012. But if you want change- economic recovery and the restoration of the values of liberty -then for your own sake, vote against the Democrats!

Future Leaders of America Express Reservations About Freedom of Speech

This is a little scary. My generation isn’t too fond of the right to freedom of speech. And when I say “Future Leaders of America,” I don’t mean it in the trite and meaningless way it’s normally used- I mean it literally.

Georgetown University is famous for producing many of the political leaders of this country. Notable alumni include Governor Mitch Daniels, Pat Buchanan, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, George Tenet (Director of the CIA), John Podesta, M. Ashraf Haidari, Justice Antonin Scalia, Senator Dick Durbin, Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Representative Steny Hoyer, Lt. General John Allen, our 42nd President, and many others. You’d have a hard time finding a committee or bureaucracy in Washington without at least one Georgetown alum.

Isn’t it a little bit disturbing that the youngest generation capable of voting has become so complacent about the concept of liberty that those of them who may one day be running this country seem to think it’s a good idea to censor those they disagree with? How do we put an end to this dangerous complacency?

Government is Violence

What is government?

An answer I hear a lot is, “It’s an elected body of individuals to represent the interests of a body of people.” It’s not hard to find exceptions to this definition. We call many unelected groups “government” (such as any dictatorship), and there are many elected entities which we do not call government (such as the members of a board of trustees). The point is, the writing of laws, operating through elections, or representing the interests of a group of people does not make a government.

There must be something else; something which uniquely gives a group of individuals enough control for them to be called a government; something which allows them to impose laws and have others listen. So why do we follow laws dictated by “the government”? Is it because we agree with them in all cases? Certainly not.

We listen because we don’t want to be arrested and imprisoned. If you defy a law and get caught, the government will use violent force to deprive you of life or liberty. No other entity can impose that upon us. If they try, “the government” declares war on them. Government is the only entity which can use violent force to control our actions. And that’s what defines them. Government is a monopoly on violence. “Government” and “violence” are synonymous.

That’s not to say that all government is wrong. Is violence always wrong? It’s certainly not wrong when used in self-defense, or in defense of the lives of our family members. There are many other situations where violence can be justified, but these situations are still very specific and limited.

So we all must ask ourselves, are we using government only for the things for which we would use violence? Or have we lost perspective, forgetting the connection between government imposition of laws and imposition through violence? Should we use violence to punish that guy who got high for fun in his own home, hurting nobody but himself? Should we use violence to force each and every person to make a contract with a health insurance company, whether it’s a good financial decision or not? Should we use violence to force charity? Should we use violence against people who make decisions leading to their own obesity?

These are all things we currently use government for, and there are many more examples of questionable uses. Is it right?

In this sense, Libertarianism is pacifism tempered by the right to self-defense (disclaimer: this is a quote I got from this dude). It is a philosophy of ethical treatment of human beings. Though libertarians often find themselves arguing on pragmatic grounds, in the end, it all comes down to a question of whether or not the ends justify the means.

The End of an Era

I found an amazing article that perfectly describes the current state of political dialogue.

The one thing that people of all political colors can agree on is that we have some serious economic and fiscal problems to work out. The question of “how” is where the disagreement begins.

Ask Paul Krugman or Barak Obama, and they’ll both say we just need to spend more. We just need to put more money into the services and programs that are failing, and then they will have enough resources to provide a good product. We just need to modify the regulations a bit, tighten them here and there, force everyone to do things in a better way, and then we’ll have control over our economy. But the thing is, the progressives haven’t had a new idea in 75 years.

Our education system sucks, and they say we need to increase spending, but that’s what we’ve been doing. It doesn’t work.

Our infrastructure is falling apart, our big cities are in decline, and they say we just need to increase spending, but that’s what we’ve been doing. It doesn’t work.

Our health care system sucks, and they say we just need to increase government control of it, and then we won’t be wasting so much money on competitive profit-based system. It doesn’t work.

The thing is, a lot of smart people like Krugman just can’t seem to accept these simple, hard facts. They can’t get their heads out of the overly simplistic thought constructions of “more spending => better products” and “more control => better engineering.” They’re stuck. But when we reach a point where even the simplest, most widely-held ideas like “increasing educational spending increases education,” turn out to be wrong, a new kind of thinking is required.

The thing is, when it comes to something as complicated and reactionary as an economy, evolutionary development is far superior to rational design. It’s impossible for anyone to ever be sure of what the economy needs at all levels of organization. More often then not, our elected leaders will be wrong about something in their attempts to rationally design a well-engineered economy. It doesn’t matter what party they’re in- it’s just a fact of chaotic complexity that it cannot be fully understood with perfect predictive power.

Consider the example of the horse-drawn carriage in the article I linked to. If you rationally design every part equally well, then when something goes wrong in a way that would destroy one part, all the parts will have the same chance of breaking, and you’re in danger of a total collapse. On the other hand, consider evolutionary development. If one part fails, it is soon replaced by something else which can do the job better. Big crises pose less threat to a system which is more adaptable and capable of recovery.

It all comes down to this simple phrase: If we all live in the same way, then when crisis hits, we will all fail in the same way.

Hence, we should completely decentralize control over economic decisions. Take the government out of the economy. Let the economy evolve on its own. When one business fails, it will have little impact on other businesses which are doing things completely differently. And those businesses which survive will learn from the mistakes of the failed ones, and continue on with their own more successful business model. This is how the economy evolves to become stronger.

The same is true on an individual level. When one individual fails, everyone learns from it. They all continue on, having a better idea of what the correct decisions are. The entire community of individuals adapts to its needs. We don’t need a military-backed government to impose a certain lifestyle. That only harms innovative adaptability. We can choose our own lifestyles, and the entire community will benefit if one of us finds a new formula to success.

We’re at the end of the era of progressive thinking. It’s time to move on to something better- something that actually works. This new decentralized economy- this is the face of the new era.