Stimuli For Your Moral Taste Buds
The food-for-thought menu includes The American Way, Mealy-mouthed Elites, The Political vs. Cultural Libertarians, Musk as homo speculans, Censorship, and Why 'Liberal' ≠ left-of-center.
Note: The core tenet that underlies ‘our perspectives and opinions’ derives from our innate propensity to favor some moral taste buds over others. In this series, I'll be intently reading intriguing articles with a unique voice with the intention of exploring my innate tendencies. You might also discover your preferred moral tastes by reading these articles and my opinions. In light of this, I urge you to rearrange today's articles in accordance with your moral preferences. It may be that a piece of writing that appeals to my Care/Harm taste bud may appeal to your Liberty/Oppression taste bud. In this moral divergence, layers of different perspectives on the same issue are uncovered.
The Care/Harm Moral Taste Bud: The American System Can Teach Us to Build Again
What do you think are the alternative political economy interpretations, as seen through a conservative lens and presumably divorced from libertarian schools of economic thought? We know where the two overlap. Both conservatives and libertarians would agree that politically motivated government intervention is bad because of the self-interest of politicians and the coercive nature of any form of intervention. However, large-scale government intervention is a fact of life. The overall consensus is that there should be constraints to limit the scope of government interference in the economy, which will both increase the effectiveness of policy and, more crucially, control the size of such large-scale government intervention. In all of this, what sticks out to me, is that the American conservative lens, in unison with libertarian schools of economic thought, shares a sentiment of “non-activism” that theoretically champions the big government's non-interventionism in today’s American society, typically distinguished by forceful street activism favoring maternalistic big government policies reinforced by narrative convergence in sympathetic media and academic discourse. Does this imply that the new conservative political economy lens will push for a shift from "non-activism" to some form of activism supported by a quasi-religious impulse to reorder policy priorities from the bottom up in the coming years? In any case, I'm looking forward to this series of essays.
Sample this:
“Applying lessons from the history of American political economy does not mean clinging to the policies of the 1830s instead of the 1980s. It is about intelligently looking at the broad range of historic responses to economic questions and how they might echo today’s debates. Theodore Roosevelt’s trustbusting success has been a popular reference point for critics of the Big Tech monopolies and Eisenhower’s interstate highway an inspiration for advocates of building more infrastructure. More broadly, these historical examples encapsulate how American leaders used to approach political economy. But this only scratches the surface of the nation’s economic history.”
And this:
“Despite this, the right has allowed itself to become too narrowly focused on libertarian strands of economic thought. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman undoubtedly made major contributions to the Reagan Revolution. Conservatives co-opted their ideas and worked with libertarians to pursue shared policy goals. There might still be space for some of this cooperation to continue, but focus on it has caused conservatives to lose sight of alternative understandings of political economy.”
The Fairness/Cheating Moral Taste Bud: The Hypocrisy of Elites
This article's reference to "luxury beliefs" made me think of something Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote in Skin in the Game:
Virtue Merchants
“If you manage to convince yourself that you are right in theory, you don’t really care how your ideas affect others. Your ideas give you a virtuous status that makes you impervious to how they affect others. Kids with rich parents talk about “class privilege” at privileged colleges such as Amherst—but in one instance, one of them could not answer a simple and logical suggestion: Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line? Clearly the defense given by people under such a situation is that they want others to do so as well—they require a systemic solution to every locally perceived problem of injustice. I find that immoral. I know of no ethical system that allows you to let someone drown without helping him because other people are not helping.
Likewise, if you believe that you are “helping the poor” by spending money on PowerPoint presentations and international meetings, the type of meetings that lead to more meetings (and PowerPoint presentations) you can completely ignore individuals—the poor become an abstract reified construct that you do not encounter in your real life. A famous Canadian socialist environmentalist, with whom I was part of a lecture series, abused waiters in restaurants, between lectures on equity, diversity, and fairness.
Which brings us to the principle: If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
And a solution to the vapid universalism: If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.
[...] When young people who “want to help mankind, reduce poverty, and save the world” ask, “What should I do at the macro-level? My suggestion is:
1) Never engage in virtue signaling;
2) Never engage in rent-seeking;
3) You must start a business.
Put yourself on the line, start a business. Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others.
The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society. Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large-scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming).
Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.”
The Liberty/Oppression Moral Taste Bud: Must Libertarians Care About More Than the State?
The need for the state arises from a class of issues where individual freedom and the free market produce subpar results. This is the area of “market failures.” In my opinion, variations of libertarian labels are one example of this form of market failure. With each author creating their own nomenclature, there are too many labels, which, to put it mildly, results in an anarchy of definitions. Can somebody direct me to a dictionary of libertarian terms?
One reason for so many different overlapping libertarian labels could be the failure of any one label to capture the general public's imagination. So, just via semantics, the libertarian base has grown to make up for the loss of influence over mainstream politics. Instead of being accepted by and of interest to the general public, these are "labels of need and constraint."
Sample this:
“Is individual liberty merely the highest political principle, the thing for which government exists, or is it a philosophical north star by which to direct all aspects of our lives? Let us call the two groups "political libertarians" and "comprehensive libertarians." (What of "lifestyle libertarians" who think we should maximize liberty in our private lives but say the state may prioritize other goods—equality, say, or security—ahead of freedom? I submit that these are not libertarians at all. They're libertines. Libertarianism requires a commitment, at minimum, to prioritizing liberty in the governmental sphere.)”
Now to more substantial takeaways from the article:
“To say that a good society just is a free society and a good life just is a free life is to miss all of that. Greater freedom from force and fraud is always a positive thing. Greater freedom from cultural constraints may not be.”
Finally this:
“For questions in the nongovernmental sphere, comprehensive libertarians have a default answer. Political libertarians have a parable about a fence. In 1929, the English Catholic G.K. Chesterton asked his readers to imagine "a fence or gate erected across a road." He then described two reformers: "The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
The Loyalty/Betrayal Moral Taste Bud: The Crypting Point: The role of chaos in contemporary political and economic thought
We know about the ecological calamities of the Anthropocene but have we stipulated the etiology of socio-economic calamities homo speculans experiences in the Capitalocene—viewed as a system of power, wealth, and self-perpetuation that drives our chaotic web of social networks? Whatever happens, I'd rather be living in the Capitalocene than the Communocene.
The Authority/Subversion Moral Taste Bud: The Dangerous Lesson of Book Bans in Public School Libraries
If we can think of “the captured economy” as being flush with cronyism, such as vote bank-induced subsidies, unexplained regulatory exemptions, or punitive measures that unsettle the playing field, making a mockery of free markets and the rule of law, what prevents us from considering the top-down ban of some books or movies as part of the "captured information-empathy economy"?
The Sanctity/Degradation Moral Taste Bud: Dan Klein: The Liberal Christening
The two World Wars made it possible for governments worldwide to move toward regulating social relationships, creating a semantic distortion, especially in North America, where, unfortunately, government intervention or statist policies came to be associated with being "liberal." As a result, it became easy and even “virtuous” to develop the habit of instructing people on how to live their lives, making Classical Liberal and nonformulaic libertarian desire for the state to create stable conditions and disappear into the background, enabling each person to pursue their contentment in their way without disturbing the overall stability and order of the society appear out of step with the identitarian age.
My western readers would be surprised to note that a quote from M.K. Gandhi can come in handy when thinking about one perspective of libertarian ideas. If I'm not mistaken, he said, “The ideal nonviolent state will be an ordered anarchy.”
The operative words so far are stable and ordered. What do stability and order mean to today’s polarized American society with values and morals in constant flux? One must mull over this because the stability and order of liberalism, once believed by many in the West as the apex of all political theory, is now threatened. The callous semantic distortion of liberalism has in part given the intuitive charge for the great awokening, coinciding with Xi Jinping becoming a ruler for life, ensuring liberalism grudgingly journeys through the five stages of grief, as its presumption that economic prosperity would usher in a liberal political order in China and be the uncontested political theory that everyone would adopt has fallen apart. I reckon liberalism is now somewhere between bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
To accelerate its march toward acceptance and beyond, all classical liberals and nonformulaic libertarians must wrestle with fresh, workable conceptions of stability and order in the US of today, with current social sensibilities at play. But through what lens should you see fresh, workable conceptions of stability and order? Will it come from a prudent, conservative lens of liberalism that respects the status quo and builds on it in a gradualist bottom-up manner? Will it come from Daniel Klein’s mere libertarianism lens that respects the jural dualism of our society where we have equal neighbors and those who govern the equals? Or will Tyler Cowen’s unique state capacity libertarianism offer practical lessons? No matter the answer, one thing is clear, every political system in every age contains Jacobin elements that must be reined in because they are drawn to abrupt revolutionary initiatives that upend order and stability, furthering classical liberalism's intellectual decline.
Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
An additional feature on today’s menu is an interesting Twitter thread:
Leaders in charge of recruiting and retaining employees may blame the turmoil in the labor market on the cliché that "nobody wants to work anymore." What would seem to be a current post-pandemic grievance actually dates back to at least 1894.
Links to the previous two editions of Stimuli For Your Moral Taste Buds are here and here.
Good selection (and commentary) Vishnu.
Re: your choice for Liberty/ Oppression. As a European I need said vocabulary too, it seems. If I were to infer some insights regarding fragmented ideological spaces, I would probably look to the Greek Left. You get many small groupings/ labels based on either "noble" reasons (philosophical/ political views and interpretations), or petty ones (personal feuds and squabbles). Or maybe both? And they are that exactly: Small. The bigger formations, those which seek to project electoral power, brush off such nuances and act as "umbrellas". Nothing really new here, I think that Downs' economic theory of democracy does the trick, more or less.
And to quote my other fave, Olson, too, "[t]he need for the state arises" should probably read "the roving bandit that decided to become stationary (and btw started correcting some market failures)" ツ