European paternalism

These may be unimportant news… or perhaps not. Adducing a certain research on the dangers of listening to loud music in mp3 devices, the European Commission wants to limit the decibels such electronic gadgets may reach, effectively banning the manufacturing and distribution of the more powerful ones in the European markets.

Nice the most top political institution in Europe pays attention to our health in such trivial matters. However, should it not devote its energy to the issues it has a explicit mandate over? Why governmental bodies find it so difficult to differentiate between making information relevant to our private daily lives available and ruling on private matters? Why they often cross the boundaries of their legitimate and beneficial informative functions -no objections to the Commission diffusing the aforementioned study- to become paternalistic organizations that feel entitled to control private decisions that affect only the individuals making them, not to speak of broadly distort markets?

Since all answers given to these questions throughout history have to do with the accumulation and use of power, this fact highlights the importance of states observing neutrality over different conceptions of what may be regarded as a personal good life, and of limiting governmental authority, in particular when it comes to the undisputable core of our private realm.

Photo: ‘Bossanova ‘84: Orwell’s world’, 2008 © Manuel Todde

Neoliberalism, or the making of an empty concept

Coming from Europe, I thought here in North America political language would be used more straightforwardly and efficiently. How naive I was…

Here, as in Europe, and particularly in Canada, you hear the word neoliberal at all times. Neoliberal fiscal adjustments, neoliberal aligment with the current Bush administration, neoliberal foreign policy, neoliberal bastards…

Actually, what does neoliberalism mean? Let´s see… What is ‘neo’ or ‘new’ in classical liberalism? Nothing, since classic liberals stand up for the very same individual freedom, rule of law, limited government principles -thought constantly adapting them to the new circumstances- of Hayek and Berlin. If any, new liberals would be those belonging to the British tradition of social-liberalism starting with Thomas Hill Green in the ninetieth-century, or perhaps earlier with the late works of John Stuart Mill. However, I do not think the people using the expression neoliberalism refer to this kind of modern liberalism accepting a greater role for the State in social and economic affairs.

Quite the contrary, neoliberalism points to everything we dislike in political or moral terms; it singles out our enemies, those who are not leftist, progressive enough - and there is no limit in this, obviously, so nearly everyone is potentially a neoliberal, depending on the extremism of the one making the claim. It reminds me of the way American conservatives used to employ the word ‘communist’ in the McCarthy years, or far-rightists in Europe until not so long ago: communism equals dangerous evil. Period. ‘We’ (those conservatives in power) will say who is a communist. Period. (Actually, the current Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been using the word communist as a synonym of everyone and everything he considers ‘wrong’ in his country until this year, apparently with good political results for him. Italy is such a weird political case…)

On a more careful consideration of the matter, neoliberalism is one of the emptiest political concepts man has ever invented, since there is no agreed, clear definition of what is to be a neoliberal.

Neoliberal is just an insult, and indeed a very useful one, since no one wants to be labeled that. However, as a scientific concept and as a description of a state of affairs, it is completely meaningless.

Photo: Shell, 2006 © Darny

Fascinated by symmetry

In my late teens and early twenties, I tended to divide the political world in good and evil forces. There was no room back then for doubts, subtleties or shades. Everything was black or white, right or wrong, and you were either with me or against me. Of course, I thought the correct side was the left, the progressives, the ‘reds’. I wanted to change the world. I felt the poverty, injustice and harsh living conditions of those around me, and of suffering people I saw on TV and newspapers. The ‘good’ guys had to be those who wanted to get these people out of poverty and adversity by means of redistributing wealth, freeing them of the cruelties of the market as much as possible. Actually, I never sympathized with communism, but nevertheless really believed in the liberating possibilities of socialdemocratic public policies and the limitless opportunities government action offered to change the world for good. Emancipation was the key, a word which conjured up more than just freeing people from the whims of capitalism; it also meant elightening them, and once this was accomplished, the world would be pure harmony and welfare for all. My ideals were not only noble, but the democratic, socialist way of accomplishing them was perfect, flawless and unparalleled by any alternative theory or practice. Of course, I kept hearing complaints and objections against this way of thinking, but I deemed those making them privileged, selfish and self-interested. They were the ‘bad’ guys.

As it turned out, my passion for perfect emancipatory theories grew out with time, as I engaged in the complexities of the real world and discovered the limits to collective action, human fallibility, the endless plurality of desires and worldviews, the mighty power of chance and the many imperfections concomitant to human nature. In particular, I learned governmental power may be as bad as private power, and usually much more so. On the other hand, I still feel the injustice and suffering in this world, but no longer attribute all evils to some bad guys controlling our fate.

Since I landed at the blogsphere I have paid some attention to the curious opinions and attitudes of the so called Spanish anarcho-capitalist bloggers. For them, governments are the worst tragedy ever befallen to humanity, and everything sort of its complete erradication is wrong. The likes of Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are their gods, and they scrutinize their works as a rabbi or a priest studies the Torah or the Bible in search for the Truth. They think taxes, laws, policies and anything related to the state amount to the most severe of immoralities. Governments are criminal; all laws except those sanctifying property enslave individuals; all taxation is theft. If we wiped out governments from the face of earth, humans would spontaneusly organize themselves and everyone would be happy and free at last. They call anyone not sharing their views a ‘socialist’, including here not only leftists but also liberals, classic liberals, moderates and conservatives. However their extremist views, they dispense themselves with the need of giving any detailed arguments to prove their points. They judge repeating time and again the same clichés about the criminal nature of government suffices. Do they think for a second their theories may be put into effect? Do they ever consider reality as something else than an a despicable annoyance? Are they convinced of being useful, of doing something meaningful to others? Will they ever venture out of their ivory towers to deal with the real problems human societies face? I guess many of our local anarcho-capitalists are very young, have not studied much yet, or have not done so dispassionately, and have seldom experienced the real world. In those circumstances, it is easy to be fascinated by accounts in which everything is perfect, symmetrical and beautiful, and any intended moves lead invariably to the desired outcomes. I felt this kind of fascination at their age. By relating to those narratives, we skip the wearing task of finding our place as active citizens in an imperfect world and solutions to its real problems, solutions which always will be incomplete, imperfect and contingent upon given circumstances. Eventually, some of these devotees of faultless theories and ideal worlds will leave behind their utopies. Very few ones will become notable libertarian thinkers, and still others will always remain the doctrinaires they were meant to be. Dogma needs believers as much as they need a faith.

Photo: Battlestar Galactica poster

Liberalism, elections and the proper place for religion

In a free society, religion should remain in the private realm, period.

To be sure, churches and sects will always to try to exert influence in the political arena, claiming to be above earthly legislation if they are (or purport to be) the main religious denomination in a given community, or demanding tolerance in they are a minority. Acting this way, they conduct themselves just like any other interest group. If, for the sake of maintaining freedom, we deem essential the state is neutral between different conceptions of the good -that is, that we have a liberal order, leaving aside for a moment the many varying interpretations of this notion-, then the appropriate public policy towards interest groups will consist in avoiding them to impose their views on the general population.

As some liberal historians have shown, what is central in the constitution of liberal thought is not the economy but the religious problem. The seventeenth-century liberals considered the only way out of the political crises that mired the European political landscape was to achieve the neutrality of the state in religious matters. From then onward, tolerance has been the key concept, and many liberal thinkers have struggled to show that to bring about fully the idea of tolerance and peaceful social co-existence between different creeds, the state should be completely detached from religious sects, moreover granting none of them any privileged status.

Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian liberal economist and theorist, summarized the classic liberal position on the subject when he wrote the following lines in 1927 (Liberalism. The classical tradition, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 2005 [1927]:

“If one considers the peaceful cooperation of all men as the goal of social evolution, one cannot permit the peace to be disturbed by priests and fanatics. Liberalism proclaims tolerance for every religious faith and every metaphysical belief, not out of indifference for this “higher” things, but from the conviction that the assurance of peace within society must take precedence over everything and everyone. And because it demands toleration of all opinions and all churches and sects, it must recall them all to their proper bounds whenever they venture intolerantly beyond them. In a social order based on peaceful cooperation, there is no room for the claim of the churches to monopolize the instruction and education of the young. Everything that their supporters accord them of their own free will may and must be granted to the churches; nothing may be permitted to them in respect to persons who want nothing to do with them.”

If contemporary liberal parties, which claim to be the political heirs of distinguished liberal thinkers such as Mises, are to follow their ideas, they cannot turn their backs to an institutional design that allows members of different denominations to practice their own faith without forcing others to be involved with it, either mentally, socially or financially. If they favor, as we often witness, one cult over the others -for example, the self-proclaimed liberal Spanish Popular Party tends to align itself with the opinions of the Catholic Church-, they should be considered as conservatives and not as liberals.

However, a certain democratic perverse effect is at work here, apparently blurring the distinction between liberalism and conservatism. Given the majoritarian nature of our contemporary representative political systems, the main contending parties are forced to become catch-all parties, as theorized by Otto Kirchheimer, to maximize their electoral support and, hence, their chances of arriving to power. That means they will include different proposals in their political programs, however incoherent they result, in pursuit of the highest electoral support. In the case of the centre and right of the centre parties (a purely journalistic but rather empty classification), where liberal parties are usually found, this implies appealling to both secular and religious voters in a sort of unclear -and impossible- equilibrium, hard to fathom by true liberals. Such ideological exercises tend to lean towards the conservative pole time and again, since liberal parties´ strategists usually believe there is more to lose -in terms of sheer voting numbers- neglecting the conservative part of the constituency than the secular, liberal one. In practical terms, that means they will align themselves with the church and will favor it finantially or in other ways when they are in power.

Yet liberal parties have an alternative to what seems to be the only route in terms of electoral tactics, which is restoring political pedagogy its good name and effectiveness by again practicing it. That implies they should not merely adapt their political platfoms and policies to the perceived or seeming inclinations and whims of the majority but try to persuade voters of the benefits for freedom and prosperity of their core liberal ideas, however unpopular, with clear, coherent programs, determined public policies, and courageous and articulate leaders.

Photo: Orthodox cathedral, now the University of Saint Petersburg, Russia, 2006 © Loudsoul

The convictions of a libertarian candidate

Reading some of the opinions about a variety of issues of one of the American presidential candidates, you may think we are no longer living in the 21st century and travelled back in a time machine to the age of the American founding fathers. You cannot accuse Republican congressman Ron Paul of flip-flopping or dithering about his principles. However, in the words of this Texan libertarian, Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan become strange bedfellows. Paul claims governments are the biggest threat to freedom, thus the need to reduce their size as much as possible and devolve decision powers to citizens in nearly every realm of social life. This includes upholding the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which allows American citizens to keep and bear arms, and reapeling every single piece of legislation devised to put into effect that right in the case of assault weapons or psychopaths. What Paul eschews to acknowledge -it would go against its libertarian beliefs-, and many other libertarians as well, is that the sole purpose of arms is to kill or wound, that we no longer live under tyrannical regimes -though far from perfect, we have devised institutions to help us have a say in what is being done to us and in our name-, that we no longer require armed militias to defend ourselves from our own government, that modern, functioning democracies are not just examples of ‘majoritarianism’, and that if we want to keep social order we better grant the state the monopoly of violence and then try to control it with reasonable checks.

Paul makes sharp and appropriate comments regarding government´s meddling in our private affairs (i.e.: the war on drugs) and, as other libertarians and classic liberals before him, the limits and failures of government intervention in many areas of public life, but fails to identify the present and future challenges to our freedom and our welfare, which do not come from democratically elected governments whose actions are subjected to the rule of law. Also, he does not recognize we may not fight many forms of discrimination in our modern societies with liberalization and free markets alone, and that some sort of government action is needed. True, governments may end up worsening the very problems they tried to solve -for instance, he is right at stating governments are exacerbating the problem of ethnocultural relations with their notions of ‘multiculturalism’-, but that is not an argument per se against public policies -to follow with our example, doing nothing will not improve social and economic integration-. Those challenges and threats -global terror, climate change, mass migrations, AIDS and other diseases, failed states, some forms of discrimination or how to bring the benefits of globalization to many world regions, to name but a few- are best meet with a flexible combination of private entrepreneurship and the accompanying role of a limited, effective government constrained by national and international laws (Paul is a self-proclaimed and extreme isolationist who advocates the U.S. withdrawing from or opposing institutions such as the UN, the NAFTA Agreement or the International Criminal Court).

Our libertarian candidate makes yet other remarks (i.e: against abortion, against federal funding for stem cells research and other comments on religion) that have nothing to do with liberalism. I am interested in knowing about his ideas on gay marriage or euthanasia, though I may easily guess at them. I claim these particular views make him a conservative, like scores of others who purport to be (classic) liberals but actually defend the status quo and despise certain lifestyles they dissaprove.

Ron Paul´s official website

Photo: Ron Paul © The Ithacan

A measure of progress

No relativism, no nihilism. No march towards any kind of socialism. No plans for vast planetary income redistribution. No big-scale welfare state. No forced enlightenment of the masses by the ‘Avangarde des Proletariats’. No substitution of ‘God’ for ‘Science’. No huge increase in GDP´s. No revolution…

If humankind is to show any degree of moral progress, it should take the form of Richard Rorty´s insightful definition: human solidarity, understood as “the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation - the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 192).

Hobbesian doubt 1: fraud

Let us imagine we live in a distant future society in which the ownership of all goods remains in private hands and all the production and distribution -even of public goods- is carried out through the market. This is the libertarian world advocated by the anarcho-capitalist ideologues of the ‘minimal state’. According to those theorists, in this social order the state would have marginal, though important, functions, compared to our present states: defending nations against external enemies, preventing people from harming or coercing each other, and making sure voluntary contracts are respected.

In our radically free, libertarian society, states should not determine which kind of goods or services would be sold, who could buy or provide them or in which quantity. That means, for instance, that anyone could claim to be an architect or a doctor, and that consumers would have to rely solely on reputation by means of the information provided by the market. Individuals would then be forced to face the consecuences of their free, rational and informed -or prejudiced, stupid and ill-informed- choices. In due time, bad providers would have less and less clients and would eventually vanish from the market, whereas good ones would experience the rewards to their probity.

In this kind of society, should governments proceed against fraud? Could we not just think that cheaters would be ‘naturally’ ousted from the market? Remember, reputation is the key, so why not let people find out about bad architects or doctors for themselves, when the house they built for them falls on their heads or the treatement they recommended worsens their heath condition? Could we, on the other hand, consider fraud as a form of unilaterally breaking an ‘implicit’ contract? Remember as well that states should guarantee citizens observe contracts, since people acting otherwise would ensue chaos. So, what is the nature of this implicit contract, if any? Nowadays, if you buy, say, a medicine to lower your blood pressure, but you discover instead it has been made of cocaine, that is fraud and you may sue the company which manufactured it. But if you pay a psychic who promises you will be able to chat with your late grandfather, you cannot sue her if that communication does not occur, since it is considered you voluntarily purchased the services of a cheater out of sheer superstition. In our libertarian world you could buy the service of an alleged doctor who promises to cure you of your cancer by means of you listening, say, to the whole discography of Elton John. Should you be able to proceed against her for fraud? Then, why not go against the catholic church -or any other religious sect-, which promises you eternal life? Fortunately, belonging to a religious community is not mandatory -except in some Islamic countries-, but neither is it buying this product or that service if we are not forced to do so from a monopoly, and still governments act sometimes against liers, even when we voluntarily buy from them. Let us bear in mind fraud would be eventually wiped up from the market, so why intervene? However, we should also consider that a) even when liers and bad producers will eventually leave the market, nothing may prevent other liers and bad producers to get in -in fact, the reality will be surely closer to this constant in-and-out flow than to a perfect situation of honest and competent producers; and b) it make take some time until the public at large realizes the fraud and stops buying from a particular cheater, and, as as result, tragedies may occur, sometimes involving massive deaths, and often without time passing but rather all of a sudden. In many cases, government intervention does avoid those awful outcomes: think of air companies regulation or food and drug administration, to name but two examples. Could a truly free market provide this level of safety, or even a higher one? I really think so, but, at what initial price in human lives?

So, in our ideal libertarian world -indeed in our present world- should governments care for the accuracy of the information available to us and prosecute cheaters? Always? Never? Sometimes? When, then? Which are the criteria for a legitimate public intervention in this area? Nowadays is widely thought consumers may distinguish rather easily among good and bad food or shoe producers, but not so among good and bad oncologists, for instance, health care being such a specialized and complex good that governments should regulate its provision, be it public or private. Is it really so? Could we not get reliable information solely on market basis, however complex or crucial (even unreparable) the choice to be made? Do we have different answers to this question depending on the area? And, if markets are not providing the information we need to make decisions, does government intervention solve the problem? If so, at what price? Alternatively, could we have any sort of market solution to it? If so, at what price?

Isonomia today

May a socially and economically unequal society enjoy politic and civil equality? By ‘politic and civil equality’ I mean all citizens are equal before the law and enjoy the same chances of participating in government tasks. The Athenian polis gave an affirmative answer to this question. It did not employ a single definition of equality but many of them. Isonomia (equal political rights), isegoria (equal right to address the political assemblies), isomoria (equal distribution of land, which we might compare to income redistribution policies in our time), and so on. Of these, isonomia and isegoria were paramount in the Athenian political system, and while isomoria was claimed by most Athenian peasants and poor citizens, the city never granted it. The farthest it went in this regard was to engage in some public works, which meant jobs for the poor, and to pay some money (obol) to those attending the assemblies, for the polis was committed with the idea of equal political and civil rights for its citizens, not with their economic well-being. Here we have a functioning egalitarian political system despite its citizens basic material inequality. Nowadays things seem rather different. While libertarians and classic liberals claim equality before the law is the only possible equality we may attain without jeopardizing the very idea of freedom, egalitarian liberals, socialdemocrats, the few remaing republicans, and even conservatives -or collectivists in disguise, for some observers-, the latest for reasons dealing more with the maintenace of status quo, consider that without some basic economic and social equality there can be no equal political participation because political power will always rest on the hands of the economically powerful. Roughly speaking, they are committed with the idea of equality, because without it one cannot fully enjoy political freedom, or because if one has to devote most energy to satisfaying basic needs there is no time left for participation, or because in a socially unequal world some will always dominate others, preventing them to become full citizens. Since the goal of achieveing material equality in a society is a perfect recipe for disaster (think of all the collectivist projects in human history), but given the fact that a generalized economic insecurity entails a very biased power distribution and very restrictive patterns of political participation, the questions are: how much economic equality may we attain without putting at risk our basic liberties and our economic development potential? Which degree of material equality is needed to enjoy a meaningful sense of freedom? Is there a trade-off between political equality and social equality? Is isonomia possible in today´s world?