Public Choice Theory Takes a (Minor) Beating

Not that it's already been proven as non-universalizable by Jeffrey Friedman, among others.

British economist Chris Dillow cites a paper studying the relative altruism of those working in the non-profit and for-profit sector, published by the Centre for Market and Public Organization . Probably not surprising to a leftist - or, well, most people quite honestly - it finds that those in the for-profit sector were less likely to engage in "helpful behavior intended to benefit other people unmotivated by professional obligations." Dillow says this is a smack in the face, of sorts, to the neoliberal economists who posit unabashed self interest on the part of government agents. He writes:

This suggests that what Julian Le Grand called "knightly motives" are significantly more common in the public sector - because people with a strong sense of vocation are likely to avoid working for someone else's profit.

But a sharp commenter by the name of "ad" notes, just as I begin to suspect, that Dillow forgot to mention that the paper looks at non-profit organizations in general, not just those of the government. In which case Arnold Kling's self designation of "civil societarian" gets a nod.

As a critique of the Virginia School's assumption of self interest on the part of state agents everywhere and always, I'm in full agreement, and in any case have been suspicious of that assertion for some time anyway, but by neglecting the fact that civil society (what Rothbard refers to as the free market, period) includes an abundance of non-profit institutions, no "point" has been scored for the pro-government crowd, overall. (Half a point for keeping the cliche'd libertarian talking point in check, however.)

But don't get the wrong impression about Chris Dillow. He's actually quite the friend of libertarians for the most part, at least from what I've read.

Let us not forget that by crowding out the voluntary sector, it's not particularly surprising that the state would then "soak up" the altruistic types.

Inadvertently Progressive Pirates

Though I don't much like the term "Progressive" given their actual history.







Economist Peter Leeson has a study entitled The Invisible Hook: The Economics of Pirate Tolerance. He documents the relatively more racially inclusive environment of pirates vis-a-vis the "respectable" and official seafarers of the 17th and 18th centuries. This was not due to a conscious, egalitarian ethos, but rather to (vulgar) self interest.







The data portray highly racially-mixed piratical firms. The percentage of black crewmembers in the sample ranges from 13 to 98 percent. None of these pirate companies were all white. In seven of the 23 crews, or nearly a third, half or more of the pirate crew was of African descent. If this sample is representative, 25-30 percent of the average pirate crew operating in the height of piracy's golden age between 1715 and 1726 was black.







The phrase used here is "equal pay for equal prey", while simultaneously throughout the British Empire slavery for blacks - i.e. "no pay, you're the prey" - was the order of the day, everyday.

That Conservative Comfort with "Rule of Law" and Quietism

Via the Booker Rising Blog, here is conservative Gregory Kane writing in the Baltimore Sun:







Is it just me, or has anybody else noticed that America is becoming a society where it's all the rage for people to pick and choose which laws they'll obey and which ones they won't?




I was driving east on Belvedere Avenue one day when I stopped for a red light where the street runs into Northern Parkway. The sign there is big enough for any literate driver to read clearly: "No Turn On Red, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m." (I guess I'll give my position now: Illiterate people really shouldn't be driving.)




Now, I'd seen drivers completely ignore that sign and make illegal turns on red between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. before. But this particular day -- around high noon, sunny, with nary a cloud in the sky -- one of these scofflaws was behind me, angrily honking his horn for me to make the right turn on red so he could follow.







Here we see the supposed "cowboy" mentality of conservatives nowhere represented. Even something as asinine as waiting for a light to turn green before turning right, even when it's clearly safe - no harm you, no harm me - is, in the view of this writer, a perfectly respectable and legitimate law that ought to be followed because...well, we have "rule of law" in this country! Or ought to. But in fact that the US government itself has been the primary exception to this purported "rule of law".

I'd sympathize with Kane on this traffic thing if he simply made it clear that although following the letter of the law in this case is inane, the driver behind him is in the wrong to angrily and indignantly pressure him to break it. After all, it'd be his ass if he got caught. But then I'd be asking him to be me, I suppose.

And check this:







Approaching a traffic light that's just turned red? Hey, why not run it? It starts off with little things and then goes on to the big ones. That law saying that people can't enter the United States illegally or stay here once their visas have expired? If it doesn't work for you or your ethnic group, or is at odds with your politics, why not break it or encourage it to be broken?







This is an abuse of the concept of "slippery slope" (not to mention an ideologically charged leap from red lights to...immigrant visas?!). If he means to say that running red lights when it's safe and residing within a nation-state without evidence of having hurt anybody threatens the broader moral order, then I think he misconcieves the nature of that order. It doesn't stem from arbitrary statist tinkering with traffic rules or State Department issuance (or not) of HI-B Visas. Get a clue.



He goes on to criticize the Civil Rights movement, or at least the popular, grassroots part of it:







Conservatives of that time pointed out the pitfalls of civil disobedience: If we permit it for a good cause, what's to stop others from using it for a bad cause? When Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace blocked black students from entering the University of Alabama in clear defiance of federal law in 1962, wasn't that an act of civil disobedience?




Didn't rioting whites throughout American history -- who had no more need for the rule of law than rioting blacks of the 1960s did --help create the unjust conditions African-Americans found themselves in?




James Farmer, the late civil rights activist who was the head of the Congress of Racial Equality, said in his autobiography, Lay Bare The Heart, that NAACP head Roy Wilkins used to chide Martin Luther King Jr. about civil disobedience. It was the NAACP working through the courts, Wilkins told King, not civil rights demonstrations, that won most of the battles black Americans waged for equality.




In other words, it was that old reliable standby -- the rule of law -- that won the day.







Well, the modified letter of the law made it all official, but it was the protests, sit-ins and rallies that preceded the Civil Rights Act by some years that made it all possible. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.


This reminds me of Hillary Clinton's statement about LBJ, reminding everyone that it was he who got the civil rights legislation passed, not MLK jr. Well, yes, the guy with the full force of the state behind him will have to put pen to paper to put things in to motion and make it all "legit", but that's because said state is a monopolist in both violence and, increasingly, all manner of what was once purely within the realm of the voluntary, grassroots "sector". In light of this, it's hard to claim nobility on behalf of LBJ in passing this legislation. If power flows to the top because it has to, due to the very structural imperative of the state itself, then there's nothing particularly virtuous about the person at the desk where the buck stops.


Back to Kane. He'd be hard pressed to declare that the rule of law is inherently just. After all, the founding of the US itself was a violation of the rule of law - Britain's.

Interesting Diversions

Not in the way that Animal Cops: Houston is diverting, but in the way that coverage of ordinary-folk-vs-the-state stuff in foreign affairs di-verges within the libertarian movement.

After reading another piece on the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood (and their co-religionists) in Egypt over at Anti-War.Com, and being reminded of an analysis of just that topic by the classical liberal Muslim outfit Minaret of Freedom, I decided to see if the Cato Institute is also up on their plight. (I could not find the online reference I wanted for "analysis" above, but I've got the PDF published by MFI, if you're interested.) I typed "Egypt" into the Cato search engine, hoping to find an equivalent human interest story (as opposed to another policy analysis), and came up with multiple references to Kareem Suleiman, Egypt's "freedom blogger", described as a "freethinker". Suleiman's crime was to criticize Al-Azhar university, the government and Islam generally.

It appears that part of the appeal of Kareem is his similarity to other firebrands such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or those willing to take on religious extremists and even Islamic society itself, the latter charged with inertia and silence in the face of a societal-wide cultural malaise.

One would get the impression, then, that Egypt is a kind of religious police state, brutally suppressing secularists and encouraging the aforementioned malaise. But in fact Egypt is more accurately described as a secular nationalist state of an obviously Arab orientation, with perhaps Sunni Islamic overtones. It's population is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim and the Muslim Brotherhood has alot of support, with a designation of "populist" not at all far off the mark. Indeed, the MB represents Egypt's most powerful opposition movement. This phenomenon, pitting the secular state vs. the "opium of the masses" has been detailed by Mark Jurgensmeyer, of Terror in the Mind of God fame, in his book The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State.

The State Department, in its wrongheaded effort to reach out to Egypt's freedom loving, anti-government opposition, seems to be in the dark about all this.

Alejandro Beutel of MFI writes:

The [United States] government's public vocal support for opposition movements and figures in Egypt is highly inconsistent. State Department officials have not explicitly denounced mass detentions and physical violence against peaceful MB supporters, but they have been extremely vocal for support of secular activists like Ayman Nour.

Beutel also tackles the issue of authoritarianism and the alleged undemocratic tendencies of the MB, but finds this is based largely on myth and stereotype. (Again, the PDF I've got, and will release upon request.) But this is for another discussion. However, some writing on the civil society successes and democratic tendencies of the MB can be found here.

So, the Cato institute is doing more or less what the State Department has been doing for years: overlooking grassroots concerns and privileging the relatively secular and western educated elite. This both materially and by way of public expression of sympathy, even as one Arab public opinion poll after another finds disdain for America stemming from just such a detached and biased point of view.

This is not to say that private organizations and individuals should not support whomever they wish, but considering the very real potential for violence this tactic has shown to be for my own personal safety (terrorism, when it happens, is no joke!), and the less than obvious benefits of an explicitly secular humanist regime, I wouldn't even necessarily advise a blogger in Indianapolis to contribute to Kareem over the far more widely loved MB.

Anyway, the "liberaltarian" vs. "paleolibertarian" saga continues. It would seem the latter have just as many friends on the domestic far right as they do on the academic far left (but is "far" even accurate? Postcolonial studies departments are a staple of the academy by now). From Saba Mahmood to Haifa Zangana, there is a bone to be picked with all this trendy imperial paternalism.

A Compendium of Recent Anti-Anti-Chinese (Government?) Articles

Justin Raimondo at Anti-War.Com:

The hosting of the Olympic Games in Beijing is the focus of much pride in China, seen by the people as well as the ruling caste as symbolic of the nation's arrival in modernity. As such, the worldwide protests and political posturing of preening politicians – from Pelosi to Nicolas Sarkozy – are bitterly resented and have been met with increasingly shrill denunciations by the Chinese state-controlled media – a sentiment that probably understates popular resentment of Western criticism in the Chinese "street."

My favorite quote:

Traveling all the way to India, at taxpayers' expense, Madam Speaker [Pelosi] visited with the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala and announced that if Americans don't speak out against Beijing's repression in Tibet "we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world."

Ha! Right, only now, with the frightfully neglectful attitude of some silent number of Americans of "please, it's none of our business!", do Americans risk losing "all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world". It's the constant talk of human rights coupled with a muscular policy of military humanitarianism that has earned Americans so much hate and anger to begin with. The built-in hypocrisy of a practiced "benign" hegemony is too much to bear.

Here's Russell Berman at Telos:

So: why do they hate China? The answer is complex. Arabs kill Africans and China is treated as the primary culprit. Westerners seek spiritual enlightenment and romanticize Tibetan poverty. China has become capitalist, which plenty find offensive: China-bashing is the new anti-capitalism. Inexpensive Chinese exports, which keep prices down for U.S. consumers, are strangely seen as harmful. And there must be some element of traditional racism in this too.

It isn't as simple as Arabs killing Africans (nor Muslims killing Christians, though the Christian wing of the Save Darfur movement would disagree), but whatever.

And here is Brendan O'Neill, with possibly the most damning criticism, at Sp!ked:

Leaving aside the disturbing physical features of the Chinese in the Free Tibet Campaign’s postcard, it is also striking that the image depicts the Chinese as pollutants. It shows expressionless, militarised Chinese riding a train into Tibet and pumping thick smog into the environment. Again, the Chinese have for a long time been shown as a singularly destructive force, indeed as a ‘pollutant’ that threatens the moral integrity and ecological purity of the countries they ‘invade’. For example, the Australian cartoon directly above, first published in The Bulletin in 1886, shows ‘the Mongolian Octopus’ strangling moral goodness in Australia by introducing such terrible things as ‘cheap labour’, ‘immorality’ and ‘opium’.

Why Public Events in the US Make Europeans Tense

Going to the movies today usually puts me in the presence of a couple hundred inconsiderate loudmouthed idiotic boors. It certainly doesn't make me happy, which is why I stopped going.
Indeed, almost any venture to any public event reminds one that rude, unthinking, lowbrow, crass and solipsistic are the defining adjectives of public life in America today.

This from a commenter named, ironically enough, "Bartman", at the Econlog blog.

No, I don't know that this person is European, but I'll guess he or she is.

Let me put forth a kind of reverse devil's dictionary (or, thesaurus rather) to this person's complaint:

(1) Rude: Forthright

(2) Unthinking: Whimsical

(3) Lowbrow: Folksy

(4) Crass: Ostentatious

(5) Solipsistic: Individualistic

Public Opinion, Cuba and Cognitive Bias

There isn't nearly as much public opinion data in Cuba as there is in the US, but an anecdotal bit of evidence for the popularity of the Cuban economic system comes from blogger Michael Stastny, who writes that

the people I talked with were actually quite happy with their situation ("We don't earn much, but as opposed to other countries education and health care is for free!" (translation mine)) and couldn't see that people in developed countries who are considered as dirt poor have a way higher living standard (I didn't have the impression that they were afraid to speak openly).

The pictures he took are vivid, and indicative of the truly dilapidated state of Cuban society, or at least the material dimension. Excepting the state of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I've seen no area of the US quite this bad, and covering so much area. The overhead shot looks like a hypothetical Brooklyn after having been bombed in roughly the 1950s, and unable to recover for 5 decades.

Assuming that the people Stastny talked to are representative of more or less a cross section of ordinary Cubans, it's striking how much this goes against the concept of a universally valid desire to be "free", at least as defined by, for example, the National Endowment for Democracy (a "private" organization receiving annual government appropriations). Whether it be Iraq, Cuba or the United States, there is a strong tendency to loss aversion, status quo bias and social proof heuristics. Essentially, the American move to full on state socialism is inhibited by fear of change and influential elite opinion, often implicit, but explicit too (see the phenomenon of "think tanks".) Likewise with Cuba.

Now of course the proliferation of information contradicting official Cuban propaganda is hard to come by, so the proper balance between risk taking moves toward change and contentment with the current state of affairs isn't allowed to manifest itself. But Stastny claims that he didn't get the sense that people were afraid to speak openly, so perhaps things aren't as "out of balance" as we might think. (After all, child pornography isn't allowed in the US or the rest of the civilized world, but does anyone really think that allowing it would tip the scale toward a large portion of society embracing it?)

Many questions are raised by the above comments, but I'll leave it at that.