It's part of care

I originally thought to title this, "I'll show you strict father."

While perusing this Ron Paul video linked by DistributedRepublic, I noted this other video featuring George Lakoff. Only partway through what I hoped to be an illuminating experience did I start to take notes on what I realized might have to come forth as a post. The block-quoted, italicized material is what he was saying; I use quotation marks where I actually bothered to run it back and forth to obtain an accurate quote, just one of the many Potteresque sacrifices I make for the greater good:

Four things that conservatives want to stop government from doing:

1. regulation
2. tax
3. workers rights
4. lawsuits

Which seems essentially correct. It doesn't apply equally well to us classical liberals, but since Lakoff can only think in one dimension and therefore chucks us liberals in with the conservatives, I suppose I'll have to selectively respond to him. He does not seem to find anything on which to criticize "progressives", unless it is to think too much like conservatives.

Apparently, "progressives" think differently about these issues. It's not just that they are in favor of all of those things: it's that they really care.

• Regulations are protection from negligent corporations [caution: trying to combine two terms is a Lakoff alarm-ringer: it means that he is trying to cement "negligent" and "corporation" together in your mind]
• Taxation means protection and empowerment - the government builds highways!
• The internet was ARPAnet, built by the government.
• Satellites were built to help NASA.
• The banking system was created by government.
• The court system was created by government.
• The stock market is held together by the SEC.
• And of course, there's education.
  

And progressives support these things because it's "part of 'care'."

Which is also essentially correct: people styling themselves "progressives" actually think in those terms. And they believe that if you can think of it in this way, it must work this way. I'm going to use the same phrase I did in reaction to Skocpol: Plausibility is not all. Actual motives and actual outcomes count for something, too.

Now, don't be nasty little gits and point out that regulations were requested by corporations to protect themselves from competitors, or that private highways once dominated the transportation system and the public highway system underlies our oil-based culture and were originally promoted as efficient means of carrying out war preparations, or that ARPAnet was a contractor-designed mechanism for letting physicists in MIT and Cal State design nukes on high performance computers for the purpose of punishing the USSR and not anywhere near the MCI- and Cisco-backboned system that exists today, or that NASA is a waste of money whose raison d'etre was to demonstrate that we had the power to nuke the Soviets with our massive phalli without actually nuking them, or that banking, markets, and school have all existed at one time or another without the SEC, Fed, or federal Department of Education. I'll almost concede that the government created courts when Lakoff can explain to me which department invented them, as his phrasing implies.

In religion, the two frames emphasize a strict versus a nurturing God

I doubt both versions - any being sufficiently that far advanced would be more interested in the act of creation and does not need the resulting creatures either fearing or trying to please the creator, nor does that creator take an interest in the fortunes of individual talking monkeys. If God exists, God is an engineer, not a brittle politician.

Foreign policy: strict American-centered vs. nurturing "you care"

I disagree with both - foreign policy should be conducted the same as any person conducts business with other adults: I'm going to do some things that don't concern you, you can do whatever you want that doesn't concern me, let's cooperate where it works to both of our advantage, and I will defend myself if you do anything aggressive (and I should not be surprised if you react similarly when I am aggressive toward you). At first glance, this seems uncaring, but when you consider the number of ways that American foreign and other policy harms, for example, grain and cotton farmers in Africa, then I propose that they will be better off. Furthermore, I believe they gain much more from the aid contributed by individual Americans than from the USAID handouts that front as more farm subsidies, or mechanisms for bending foreign governments to our will. The best example of Lakoff's nurturing foreign policy: Victoria's Britannia, saving the savages from themselves. They had a flag, you see.

Education - "progressives are adopting conservative views because they've heard them so much." Strict - "we're going to tell you what's right and you're going to learn it," v. progressive "you're going to develop as a person." First is punitive, we're going to punish students and schools. Production view of education, consumer model which comes from strict father view. Other view says education is not just a business. Finding this more and more among progressives.

That's a lot to parse.

• There must be both to some extent (rote memorization and developmental encouragement) plus better critical thinking (why are things this way and what aren't they telling me?).
  
• If leftists are accepting that paradigm frame, why don't they take more credit for having authored NCLB instead of laying the whole thing at George's feet? "Progressives" aren't interested in holding schools accountable per se; they are interested in holding schools accountable as a means of centralizing the control of them.
  
• Public schooling has been more about how to mold them into consumers and voters who accept one or the other branch of the one true religion. This has been the emphasis of both the left and right.
  

Lakoff's view of business strikes me as very immature. Apparently, production and consumption is "strict father" thinking. So, how does "nurturing parent" industry work? I suppose the model of production is that we are going to take these inputs (ore and energy) and encourage them to develop as goods, steel for example, or lollipops. And we aren't going to consume them, we are going to encourage them to develop them as final products: the steel could become a refrigerator, or it could become an ice cream bar if that's what it wants to do. In the end, we won't consume the ice cream, we nurture it into a fully developed Mr. Hankey. Isn't that beautiful?

Seriously, though, it's clear that Lakoff's view of business and production is not well thought-out. Going back to his earlier view about markets "deciding" is the same as markets "punishing", it says that his model of consumer/business interaction is win/lose. I would point out to him that markets are (a) not people (who is engaging in anthropromorphism now, Dr. Lakoff?) and (b) mechanisms for coordination and encouragement. Even Marx understood this when he talks about the "socially necessary" amount of labor: some producers are better at using their resources and talents, and the markets tend to reward them, i.e. nurture them, while simultaneously encouraging their competitors to do the same, i.e. develop.

Idea of energy independence came out of environmental view: We should have alternative forms of energy. Other view [conservative], "we have coal, we have ethanol." Conservative view is anti-ecological. Comes to be accepted by progressives and then press.

Again, lots of stuff bundled together that needs parsing:

• He does not explain why ecologists wanted alternative forms of energy to begin with. Was it not perhaps because their efforts to punish mainstream energy producers were not successful? Or is it because their efforts to promote mainstream energy consumption were too successful?
  
• He does not at this point explain how "conservative view is anti-ecological" though I might be inclined to agree if he did. No does he admit that it was "progressives" who first started and then continued to support ethanol (unless he'd like to argue that Jimmy Carter and Tom Daschle are conservatives).
  
• In one sense, this is a fabricated difference between the "let's grow our own for the planet" and the "let's grow our own to screw foreigners." Both left and right have long been anti-import, this is nothing new, so this allows each Bootlegger to be the other's Baptist. In another sense, so long as people are doing this on their own dime, I'm all in favor of growing our own and defunding the state oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela.
  
• And come on, Dr. Lakoff, aren't the conservatives just nurturing those other fuels (coal, ethanol)? Gosh, I'm getting the hang of this spinning framing thing.
  

Illegal immigration is the wrong frame; it should be a gratitude deficit.

I must not be a conservative because I agree with him on illegal immigration - there should be a debate about gratitude deficit. Oh wait, there is. For lols, though, we might extend it: where's the gratitude deficit for oil companies, who are after all only providing you with the fuel you want at a price below that which you are willing to pay?

Incidentally, the phrase "conservative frames" comes up over and over, as if he were trying to get us to think that only non-progre ... ah, I get it! A quick pair of googles results in the following:

"conservative frame" lakoff - 654 hits
"progressive frame" lakoff - 362 hits

So, conservatives actively frame, while the poor, innocent, honest, straight-talking progressives never do. I got it.

Our job is "Not just changing a slogan".

Except that he should know this is how Democrat politicians intend to use the idea. Incidentally, if true, why does he never use "Democrat", "liberal", or "left", but always uses "progressive"? This sounds to me like the non-ideological ideologue's belief system.

Taxes don't cause literal, physical pain, only metaphorical, financial pain. To understand this, you have to have conservative view. Progressives say, "[taxes] are there for protection and empowerment. You can't live in a country like this without them. They allow you to do all the things that your do. They allow businesses to exist and to function. then you can't have tax relief. Not only that it would be like saying we want democracy relief, we want freedom relief."

"Taxation is empowering business."

Incidentally -- "strict father" vs. "nurturant parent"? Is that not the most awkward phrase ever? An audience member with an accent finally asks the obvious:

[Why isn't it strict father vs. nurturing mother?] "You seemed to have framed it yourself to leave the female aspect out of it."

"Well, one of the interesting things about America [talking down to the audience member who had a foreign accent], is that it became the nurturing parent probably in the Roosevelt administration. But in a way it's been there for a long time. These values, If you go back in the history and read the early documents by the founding fathers, you see lots of nurturing views applied to government. It had nothing to do with men and women. ..."

In progressive families, fathers are expected to be equally nurturing.

Any data to back up any of that? That was the worst non-answer of the session.

Toward the end, with respect to war powers, Lakoff is on the same sheet of music as Ron Paul:

Congress is the Decider.

Then this diatribe:

"There are some people who call themselves conservatives all over the country who are progressive Christians who believe that really you should feed the hungry you should heal the sick and that's what the country should be doing, very very different from conservative Christians.

"You have people who call themselves conservatives but are progressive business people. But they don't think of themselves as such. They turn out to be honest, they treat their employees well, they would never harm the public. They are basically progressive businesspeople but they don't think of themselves as being that.

"There are people who call themselves conservatives but want to live in progressive communities. What's a progressive community? Where you have leaders who care about people and are responsible and where you have people who care about each other and are responsible to and for each other and who do community service. All over this country there are people who want to live in those communities."

This is an incredibly dishonest discourse. Anyone who calls themselves a conservative but doesn't do the wrong thing is not a conservative by definition -- Lakoff's definition. He basically assumes away the honest, kind, conservatives on the basis that anyone who is good is a "progressive" and anyone who is malicious is a conservative. Nice frame job.

"Our job is the democratization of knowledge."

If we accept his frame, then the opposition is obviously in favor of the plutocratization of knowledge. But who controls knowledge? Whose job is that? The mainstream media? Academia? Federal agencies (the FDA comes to mind)? What are the political leanings of those institutions?

I also recommend reading Jesse Walker's article at Reason and a synopsis of the Lakoff vs. Pinker debate at MixingMemory blog for background on Dr. Lakoff.

Random things about the lecture that just strike me oddly:

• The false dilemma between this or that frame. No third frame? Jesse Walker points out one possible alternative to the daddy state and the mommy state: the state in which we are all treated as adults. I illustrated that in a post a few days ago.
  
• The father v. parent. Seems artificial as well as being a false dilemma.
• I think what he really means is the Old Testament vs. the New Testament paradigm. Old Testament is "punish evil", New Testament is "love everyone". Punish evil means both God punishes evil (that's where poverty and disease come from) and people punish evil (through stoning and shunning). Love everyone is nihilism. It works well if you happen to be God in the form of man, though. Well, until you piss off the wrong people and they decide to nail you for it.
  
• It's a false frame since strictness could be a necessary component of nurturing. You could recast the strict father as the protective father who keeps away bad guys or keeps his kids from doing what will obviously harm them, or the tough father who encourages them to stand up to bullies and learn to stand on their own. You could recast the nurturing parent as a negligent father who allows bad guys to run roughshod over them, the nurturing parent who sets no boundaries (they might be limits to growth), the nurturing parent who shields the kid from the real world? The metaphor is simply dishonest.
  
• The strict father/nurturing mother dilemma seems artificially intended to divert attention away from the fact that and steps toward authoritarianism have been identified as the "nanny state" and most of the worst authoritarian governments have been explicitly "progressive" in the Lakoffian sense. Uncle Joe doesn't want to punish; he sent you to a correction camp (gulag) so you can mend your ways and be a more productive citizen. Chairman Mao wants you to confess your class guilt before your peers and undertake our own re-education so you can become a better, more productive citizen.
  
• The conservative v. progressive.
• Another false dilemma. Even the Rockridge pamphlet points out the uselessness of a linear theory of politics. And "progressive" is the most self-aggrandizing term I've ever heard. As I've argued before, people calling themselves by this term are generally very conservative: mention vouchers and watch them froth at the thought of changing the perfect educational system.
• The idea that only conservative frames need to be changed. It seems miraculously fortunate that Lakoff and his fellow travellers have no misleading and possibly unhealthy misconceptions about the world.
  
• The supposition that because he understands something about the brain and linguistics, that he therefore has something to say about economics and politics. The entire speech and his own description of his books come across as the work of a political advisor like Dick Morris or James Carville. "We figured out this about the brain, therefore everyone who doesn't agree with me is a liar, therefore Hillary should be president." Dr. Lakoff, I think maybe you need to work on the middle and last part.
  
• The fact that many of these issues can be cast in either frame, depending on what you are talking about. Statists may want to help guide the behavior of corporations; they do so by establishing strict fines and other penalties so the government can punish them! President Bush only wanted to invade Iraq to help the people there to grow as free Sunnis and Shias. Etc.
  
• The fascination with framing as if this were a new idea. It is not: we used to call it "paradigm" and "spin", and before that they called it "state of mind" and "lies told by The Man". There's a reason that, since the 1970s or 80s, we haven't had a pro-abortion/anti-abortion debate but rather we've had a pro-choice / pro-life debate. The reason is that people long ago figured out that it was better to cast their own agenda as positive, pro-something in order to imply the other guy is negative and anti-something. The esoterica of the physiological, psychological, and neural science may be new, but the rest of it is an ad man's game.
  
• There is an underlying theme, shared by people like Anne Coulter, that the other side is not dealing honestly. To adopt his methodology, in Lakoff's metaframe, there are people who deal in dishonest frames which they force on the honest people. But he doesn't believe that his own explanation is an obvious straw man, and neither do his disciples. In order for the explanation to make sense to them, they have to believe that the other side believes in something that nobody would accept if they knew what it really was, so they had to conceive of a brilliant lie to get others to accept it. Thus, the other side is good at promoting their bad ideas because they cannot actually have any good ideas. It apparently never enters the heads of Dr. Lakoff or Anne Coulter that the world is more complex than either the good frame (Lakoff's or Coulters) or the bad frame (anyone with whom he or she disagrees). This is a problem with some libertarians, too. That's why I try to promote the idea that one should refrain from thinking of one's opponents as stupid, insane, or evil.
  

Bottom line: the anti-liberals are all out of arguments if this is their new approach. Apparently they've decided to resort to better marketing. Which is pretty much what they've been doing since their experiments in Russia, Germany, and the United States have all fizzled.

Rationalizing the Oldest Industry by Force

Alfred Chandler's best known book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, describes the shift from the atomistic, entrepreneurial market described by Adam Smith to the modern economy dominated by small groups of integrated, managed firms. The references to the apparel industry can be summarized briefly since apparel is not one of the industries that became rationalized in the way he describes.

The first industrial use of non-animal energy was the water-powered automatic loom developed in England in the late 18th century and brought to New England in the early 19th century. This led to a concentration of the textile industry around water sources. There was only a slight shift in the industry when anthracite coal arrived and steam-drive replaced stream-drive.

The coal-fueled energy revolution led to the railroads becoming next big industry, not because they were using it but because they were hauling it (coal-driven locomotives didn't become widely used until the last quarter of the 19th century). Telegraphy followed the railroads in a symbiotic relationship that formed the foundation for what followed: use of all-weather, high-speed transportation and long distance communication to coordinate the flow of goods from production through distribution to consumers.

The next industries to rationalize were those that could either use heat, transportation, and/or communications. These included:

• metal working (steel, using coal)
• wholesale & retail (using telegraphy to coordinate, trains to streamline)
  
• meat packing (Swift's rail cars)
• oil (first railroads, then pipelines)

Aside that will become relevant later: Dry goods merchants protested the rise of the department store, then the rise of the mail order operation (like Sears). Today, they protest the rise of the Big Box Store (Wal-Mart). The small retailer, while less common than before, has survived each of these consolidations, so far.

Chandler returns to apparel later in the book while looking at the most heavily capitalized and concentrated industries. He asserts that the returns to scale and capital for apparel are very low because

[e]ssentially, the machines took the place of manual operations. A machine did a task comparable to that of a worker in spinning, weaving, sewing, cutting, and fabricating. The maximum speed of cutting or shaping wood, cloth, or textile products by machinery was quickly reached. Nor did the spinning and weaving of natural fibers or the tanning of natural leather lend itself to massive increase of throughput by a greater application of energy.

This is entirely consistent with Kathleen's point

Sewing will always be labor intensive because cut fabric pieces cannot be smelted out like metal rods. Garments cannot be cut like sheetmetal and welded by machines. Fabric is flimsy; it must be handled by hands. No amount of technology will ever change this.

So, despite being an early link between the entrepreneurial Smithian world and the managed Chandlerian world, apparel was not consolidated, streamlined, and "rationalized" when so many other goods have been.

Not content to simply make a living, some people become enamored with the idea of getting rid of the competitors who kept them from becoming fabulously wealthy. There are few mechanisms for doing so successfully. You can try undercutting them and then buying them out, but John McGee showed that was not a feasible strategy even for Rockefeller. You can try combining with them through a cartel or horizontal merger, but the former is known not to work and Chandler showed that horizontal integration also failed; you had to both vertically integrate and develop a successful management structure to make mergers work.

Gabriel Kolko has described a third alternative; get the legislature to pass legislation ostensibly designed to help the consumer but which actually serves the interests of industry (or specific groups within industry). When rate cartels failed, the railroads ultimately turned to the federal government to act as their cartelizing agent. This function was performed by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), an agency ultimately charged with responsibility for setting both maximum and minimum rates for the railroads. In time they came to serve a similar function for over-the-road trucks and served as a model for the Civil Aviation Board (CAB), which oversaw the creation of no new interstate airlines from its inception in 1938 to its demise in 1978. Meatpackers also sought protection, which they received with the help of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the novel which aimed at Americans' hearts but managed to cover Congress' backside. Bankers also wanted protection and got it with the Federal Reserve Act, which gave them input to a quasi-public board of governors and the US Treasury.

The Kolko Thesis describes what is happening in the apparel industry today. No firms have been able to internalize the coordination of a significant portion of the industry, either from the production or the distribution end. Though not perfect, it is surprisingly atomistic given the enormous size of the world market.

If you try to produce something of superior value and charge premium prices, there is nothing preventing someone from "knocking off" an article that required no small amount of inspiration, engineering, costly fabric and accessories (buttons, zippers, doodads) to produce. Like the Red Queen who was running as fast as she could just to stay in place, you are forced to constantly innovate in order to stay ahead. That's not a very satisfying way to get rich. The other option is to produce a commodity -- t-shirts, jeans, hoodies -- on which you make pennies on every piece and try to make it up on volume. That also is not a very satisfying way to get rich. Rather than taking either of these losing paths, it looks like a group of designers has decided to enlist the state to eliminate competition by seeking patent protection for designs.

The standard argument for copyright or patent protection is that it will encourage innovation by securing to the innovator exclusive rights to the innovation long enough to extract some monopoly rents. While that is a superficially plausible argument in this case, I'd say that Kathleen's description of the outcome of HR 2033 is much more likely:

I realize that sounds like a dramatic and exaggerated claim but if this legislation passes, contractors, pattern makers and even retailers will be exposed to liability. Let's say you have this nifty design that you claim you made up all on your own, with no inspiration from anybody anywhere and you hire one of us to make it up for you and you sell it and make your pile. Then, somebody comes out of the woodwork and claims it is their design, they own it and now you owe them. Problem is, you likely don't have much money, they'll want to sue everyone in your production and retail chain. That means me, your contractor and the stores who bought your stuff. After all, we "enabled" you. So, in order to avoid exposure, any contractor, pattern maker, sales rep or store owner -in the interests of avoiding law suits or facing criminal prosecution for dealing in pirated goods- is going to require you to prove ownership of your concept before they'll have anything to do with it. Minimally, you'll have to hire a lawyer, pay for searches through a design database of all existing design registrations. I cannot even begin to imagine how long this would take. You thought a trademark or logo search was bad? I have no doubt there's over 10,000 clothing designs out there for every logo. This will cost a fortune. But, you'll have to do it. No one will take your work otherwise. And because we'll have to have our own lawyers to check up on you and draw up contracts, the prices we charge you will at least double. We operate on tiny margins. I charge $50 an hour for patterns. IP attorneys get $250+, I'll have to triple my prices just to break even. Even with proof in hand, you will have no recourse other than to produce your registered design exactly as sketched. No design changes or iterations in process are allowed, otherwise you'll have to start all over again. Forget shortening that sleeve, changing the shape of that neckline or tapering the pant leg of that prototype. So what if it ends up looking lame and you have to start all over? That's the new cost of doing business. Feeling protected yet?

But hasn't IP protection been good for those industries that use it most? Perhaps, but the temptation is to say, "Look at the cell phone industry: there seems to be no shortage of innovation there." Ah, yes, but compared to what, exactly? What does cell phone innovation look like in an atomistic, entrepreneurial economy instead of in the oligopolistic, state-capitalist economy we (and Japan and Finland and South Korea) have now? Indeed, there was lots of innovation in the industry: as Bell's original patents expired, there were something like 200 telephone companies operating in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio alone (from Adam Thierer's "Unnatural Monopoly"), but AT&T appealed to the federal government in 1913 and had themselves set up as a protected monopoly. You might remember that we had one phone company for the next seventy years.

The cell phone market consists of a few companies (Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung) while apparel consists of thousands of producers and thousands of retailers. Recall that small retailers have repeatedly complained about and then survived the onslaught of department stores, then mail order houses, and now big box stores. There survival has remained possible because the small retailers can still purchase from small manufacturers. When IP protection comes along, the industry will get vertically integrated and the supply for the small retailers will dry up. The companies that secure patents first will hold something over on first their competitors. Retailers will not be able to sell something from a producer who doesn't have a copyright. There will be no more than a dozen producer/retailer companies in the end: Wal-Mart, Nike, The Gap, and Target may soon be integrated apparel retailer-producers.

But why now? IP was around 100 years ago; they were aware of it in the industry (you should see the number of patented fit systems from the 19th century). Here is my best guess at the relevant history (with help from my wife, who clearly understands this better than I and may not agree with all of what follows):

1) Regionalism: In the period in which Chandler describes the process of consolidation in many other industries (roughly 1880-1920), apparel was resistant to consolidation for a number of reasons.

• The returns to scale limited as Chandler asserts
  
• Regional weather differences - cold, wet, dry, hot, windy all require different dress schemes.
• Resistance to rail distribution for various practical reasons. You wouldn't want to get the clothing near a coal-fired steam locomotive because it would be filthy upon delivery. You also couldn't effectively fill the box cars. In the steam rail era, it would have been much better to ship stacked bolts of cloth (only the outsides would get dirty, you could fill a box car) and produce garments on site.
  
• Shipping cotton and cotton cloth had occurred since the late 18th century, but there were still regional resource differences. Wool, cotton, leather would not have been equally available everywhere.
  
• Regional preference differences based on, for example, what they did for a living. Cowboys don't dress like bankers.
• Foreign influences - Texans met different people than New Yorkers
  

2) The post-war era created several changes:

• Increased prosperity. Prior to 1950, people generally only had a limited wardrobe. More disposable income set the stage for change.
• The washing machine. Prior to the 1950s, you had to wash it all by hand. More appliances lowered the cost of ownership.
• War: The federal government became the single largest consumer of clothing both through WWII and the Cold War. This meant the government set certain design and production standards, and as the single largest consumer, the various related industries (sewing machine manufacturers, for example) followed orders (in both senses). Women started wearing pants.
• Television and the interstate highway system: Prior to that, there was more regionalism in speech, food, and clothing. The decline of those barriers through television allowed more mass distribution, and that meant shifting from catering to local tastes to catering to the lowest common denominator. The interstate system lowered the cost of trucking. Hats and dress gloves became passe.
  

3) Logos: Terry Agins' The End of Fashion describes how, as clothing all became similar, companies began to resort to logos and branding to distinguish themselves. Remember the Izod alligator?
4) Sloan Managerialism: As Bill Waddell has theorized, many manufacturing firms have been taken over by MBAs with little or no production experience and an education in an Ivy League school where they were all taught the Sloan/Dupont theory of management. Production is a cost, so keep the logo and IP, outsource the production, and rely on branding.
5) Piracy: Branding has led to the rise of piracy. If you knock off a generic piece of clothing, you make no money. Knock off a Polo shirt, you make a little less than what Ralph Lauren makes. Piracy has also proliferated as Chinese production has come onto the market.
7) Agency: Diane von Furstenburg is the new president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and the perfect agent of change. Having achieved only one notable design success, she basically became a brand and now wants to take the concept to the next level: the corporation with the most lawyers gets to control fashion. The CFDA is pushing HR2033 with the help of several trial-lawyer-fueled congresspersons. She could be a character in an Ayn Rand novel.

Apparel manufacture is still one of the few manufacturing businesses that you can start in your garage and sustain profitably on a small scale. HR 2033 will effectively put an end to that.

The True Grim Reader

Oscar the cat can apparently "predict" when people are about to die.

Road market addendum

When I wrote this post, I wrote, "An obvious start would be to privatize the freeways between cities or at least make them toll roads." I forgot that an equally obvious start might be to follow London and Singapore's lead(s) with congestion pricing. Fortunately, VoxEU is here to help me remember such things. Georgina Santos writes,

Singapore realised this in the 1970s when, in the midst of high economic growth rates, it decided to reduce traffic congestion.

...

The scheme was a success. The ALS increased average speeds from 18 to 35 km per hour (Willoughby, 2000, p.10).

...

The most interesting feature about ERP charges is that they vary according to vehicle type, time of day, and location of the gantry. For example, charges for passenger cars, taxis and light goods vehicles vary between S$0.50 and S$4.50. There is even a special rate for the first five minutes of each new charging period to discourage motorists from speeding up or slowing down to avoid higher charges. The charges are published on the Land Transport Authority website, and are adjusted periodically in order to maintain target speeds.
...

Singapore adjusts the various charges to maintain target speeds. In London the £5 and the £8 charges were decided almost arbitrarily, although with some public consultation.

Altering the charges to maintain a target speed - that's pretty cool. It ain't private roads, but it gets people used to paying to drive (is this a legal wing stub?). It probably also comes close to internalizing some of the externalities of road use.

Deathly Hallows with spoiler

Finished Sunday night during dinner. Not bad, better than the last two I'd say. Didn't last long enough to add to the current reading list, though.

As I commented on Knowledge Problem (also spoilerized)

Are you struck a little by how Rowling uses churches and other icons of Christianity without actually acknowledging what they are? The church by the graveyard, Christmas, etc.? And of course the most obvious Christian symbolism, ala Gandalf and Aslan?

Was this intentional on Rowling's part, or has Christian mythology become this ingrained?

Rockridge Institute's Thinking Points Chapter 4

The background is Jesse Walker's article at Reason, The Man Who Framed Himself.

The chapter is entitled, "Nation as Family".









Childish, yes, but in context it makes for a succinct review.

(Foxit is an open source pdf reader that doesn't require 743 MB and 2.3 minutes to load - it's not perfect, but I like it better than Acrobat. hattip: J. Mazzetta)

Libertarian Evolution

Tyler's opinion on water rights and law unfortunately confirms my opinion on The Libertarian Transition: it will have the same difficulty as Evolution Theorists: how do you get to a flying animal from one that does not? Wing stubs?*

How do you get to a free market with well-defined property rights and functional institutions from one with ill-defined property rights and dysfunctional institutions (or one big dysfunctional institution) without the legal equivalent of wing stubs? I don't think you can, so the question then becomes - what does a property law wing stub look like? And how do you prevent the little guy from getting screwed (worse than he already is right now, that is) in the process?

* I can hear Joe Pesci screaming at the guy about being a fast grit cook: "Are you kiddin' me? Is that all you got?"

Dan Klein and the Impossibly Private Roads

On a usenet exchange regarding private roads, I once posted the fact that per capita investment in the original turnpike movement exceeded that in the contemporary US. My interlocutor said that proved it was a bad idea: they were obviously too expensive. Today, our per capita investment in personal computers far exceeds that in the US in the 1980s - are they are clearly much more expensive now than then?

I believe the source for the turnpike investment factoid came from Gabriel Roth's Roads in a Market Economy. But Roth himself might have gotten it from the Dean of Private Road History, Daniel Klein. Klein has a half dozen papers about private roads in the US on his website. And a lightning shaped scar on his forehead where He Who Shall Not Be Named ... but that's another story.












The history has four basic eras: the Turnpike era (1792-1840), the Plank Road era (1847-1853), the Western roads (1850-1902), and the modern era. Klein's contribution is mostly to the first three though he has looked at the last; Roth's book was a good reference for the modern era, but much has happened since he first published it.

I do not believe that you could take the existing system, slap toll gates onto it, and expect it to operate as well. The turnpikes were means of transportation between discrete urban centers. If we had a geography today similar to what existed then, we could expect much less shunpiking today because whipping your Prius off the freeway and cutting through a field would not be nearly as much innocent fun as doing it with a horse.*

But we don't have a similar geography. We have the stupid megalopolises that occupy the Northeast Corridor (roughly, Boston to Richmond and/or Philadelphia) and the Southwest Corner (San Angeles). Central Texas and parts of the Midwest and Florida are getting that way. In other words, pretty much the area that would see candidates if the Electoral College were abandoned. And guess what they would want: less congestion, more lanes, more roads.

It was in fact with respect to roads that I realized that libertarians have dual problems with many of their ideas: one is to articulate a vision of a better society, the other is to figure out how to get there. Others will reject these ideas until we solve both problems. Having solved them, people won't stop rejecting them since this is one area that definitely reminds us of Howard Aiken's insight, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." For one thing, there's status quo bias.

For another, lots of people stand to be upset by a system of privatized roads:

1. Commuters who believe their now-obvious cash transactions are more onerous than fuel, sales, and property taxation
2. Privacy advocates who worry about electronic tracking via cameras and automated toll collection systems
3. State highway department employees who worry about lost jobs
   
4. State highway department contractors - not all, just the ones who rely on incompetence and corruption
5. State legislatures who divert fuel tax funds into the general fund
6. People who worry about the regressive nature of the toll burden
   

There isn't much to be done about most of these. The fuel taxes are probably going to have their names changed to "carbon taxes" just as they increase, so there can be no enticement of commuters with lower fuel costs to make up for the tolls. The privacy advocates are probably right, if the horror stories Radley Balko is reporting are any indication. Government employee unions are generous donors to Democrats, so they have strong beliefs about which side their bread is buttered on and they simply are not going to be convinced by claims that "In a free society, there will be more jobs for everyone and everything will be cheaper."** Nobody cares if incompetent and/or corrupt contractors are disciplined by the market encouraged to change their ways to become more socially responsible (do I know my Lakoff, or what?). The redirection of fuel taxes into the general fund is going to cause problems, especially as legislators apply the traditional spin (taking milk from poor mothers -- while charging those mothers more to drive to the grocery store -- just so someone can make a profit). Finally, tolls should be no more regressive than fuel taxes, which, as M1EK argues (and more at Env-Econ blog), are not as regressive as typically claimed. Note that the entrenched interests and the conservatives that protect them would normally be called "Progressives" to distinguish them from the theocrats normally referred to as "Conservatives".

An obvious start would be to privatize the freeways between cities or at least make them toll roads. Strangely, we are told to emulate the Europeans in devising our transportation systems, so why not the Autostrada? But that would be a superficial start. While reading one of Klein's papers, I found that one of the articles cited was contained in The Voluntary City. While looking at it on Amazon, I noted this comment in a review by Christopher Jones:

You're not the only one that wonders whether the government that is supposed to guarantee your private property rights seems more interested in making sure your vinyl siding runs the same way as your neighbor's. This is the way of things in America today, where municipal governments segregate business from housing, then wonder why everyone thinks he has to own a car.

Yes, urban "planning" requires cars which require increasingly massive highways. Then more central planning is required to mediate the effects of concentrated quantities of cars. Then public transit has to be introduced so that those who can't afford the required cars can just get around. Of course, thicker pavement and wider streets are required to handle buses and more cars. No telling how much this costs in terms of health care as dependence on the automobile and the amount of time spent in traffic for the simplest chore comes to displace a short walk or cycle ride. Meanwhile, the oil companies who provide the needed raw materials for all of this planned activity to work are scapegoated. Just one of the many ways that dedicated, sincere government employees create balance for you.

But I digress. The point I was wrestling is that the way to private roads lies right through the middle of planning, geography, and lots more entrenched interests. Here again, I like some of the ideas in A Pattern Language, including mixed use, segmenting cities into well-defined areas, etc.

It's tragic that a thing as simple as a system of private roads would be regarded today as impossible when in the past it was the primary means for funding roads. When they ridicule you for suggesting it, what can you do but marvel at the profound arrogance that allows them to believe that if they have never heard of it, and upon a millisecond's reflection cannot conceive of how such a thing might work, then such a thing must have never worked? The few anti-libertarians vaguely aware that there was such as thing seem to think it was a failure, possibly on the basis that because we no longer do it that way, it must have failed. Fortunately, we have Daniel Klein doing the research into the actual history of this institution.

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* Would Lancaster County present a special case today? Or can we trust the Amish to pay tolls?

** I'm not convinced of that as a blanket statement, either. I **hope** driving is more expensive in a world of private roads. I believe that more costs will be internalized.

Local, Action: Association

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and a French companion toured the 24 United States to investigate their jails in preparation for a reform of French prisons. What we got out of the deal was Democracy in America, a very comprehensive review of the state of the nation at that time, a glance at the country prior to the full onslaught of finance, managerial, and state capitalism (that and a kick-ass C-Span series). One of the more memorable themes of the book was the notion of Americans as association joiners:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

In America I encountered sorts of associations of which, I confess, I had no idea, and I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely.

This strikes me as the kind of society in which I would like to live. It is a society in which people form ad hoc associations to deal with problems as they arise, perhaps even creating new institutions for addressing the more serious institutional failures (I'm going to adopt Glen Whitman's semantics). That's a long way from the usual strawman offered as "what libertarians want", a strawman which is usually labeled "hyperindividualism" or "You're On Your Own".

Recently, I came across a Slate article critical of de Tocqueville written by Theda Skocpol. Actually, it's an article critical of people who look at that period as one free of what Skocpol might characterize as beneficial federal government influence. At first, I was intrigued since it seemed to support some of my suspicions, but upon reflection I decided that there were some problems with it.

First, she overlooks the reasons why government was involved in such things in the first place. Sure, the postal service and postal roads are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes...To establish Post Offices and post Roads"). However, it does not follow that because they could, they should. Nor does it follow that because you can plausibly argue that outcome X was the result of action Y that X was an actual and significant outcome of Y. Nor does it follow that Y was necessarily undertaken for X in the first place. Plausibility is not all.

With respect to the first of those objections, it should be pointed out that Thomas Jefferson argued (Virginia Protest, 1825) that federal road subsidies were an infringement of state sovereignty:

But the federal branch has assumed in some cases, and claimed in others, a right of enlarging its own powers by constructions, inferences, and indefinite deductions from those directly given, which this assembly does declare to be usurpations of the powers retained to the independent branches, mere interpolations into the compact, and direct infractions of it.

They claim, for example, and have commenced the exercise of a right to construct roads, open canals, and effect other internal improvements within the territories and jurisdictions exclusively belonging to the several States, which this assembly does declare has not been given to that branch by the constitutional compact, but remains to each State among its domestic and unalienated powers, exercisable within itself and by its domestic authorities alone.

If the state is capable of such things, what reason is there for the federal government to do them? If the state does not desire them, by what theory does the federal government prove the inhabitants are wrong? Not democracy.

With respect to the second objection (still on the first problem, that of why the federal government was involved), that the subsidization of coaches, mails, and newspapers was neither the "non-zero-sum" game nor the Congressionally-directed system that Skocpol describes, I think this seems naive. As Kelly Olds argues, the postal system in place at the time was an extensive patronage system.

Giving out the postage revenues to groups with political power became the Post Office's second function. Measured monetarily, it was the Post Office's primary function. Thomas Jefferson, suspicious of the Post Office, had written:

I view [the Post Office] as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post-office revenues; but other revenues will soon be called in to their aid and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their states; and they will always get most who are meanest [Jefferson 1892-99: IX, 324-25].

The government resisted subsidizing the Post Office until the 1850s, partly out of fear of that which Jefferson prophesied.

The means by which the system was internally subsidized was that some routes were run at high profits and those were used to support the unprofitable routes. The activity was not directed by Congress, but a result of the way the USPS did business and therefore a benefit to the executive. The constituents favored by the system included coach companies and later railroads, newspapers (as Skocpol points out), representatives with franking privileges, rural voters, and the 1796-1804 Ezekiel Armstrong cycling teams. The reason for the patronage was not to bring general improvement to the country so that people like Alexis de Tocqueville would be amazed at the transportation and literacy in America; they were subsidized so that their purveyors could make money, privileges (jobs) could be handed out, and politicians could win votes. It was not so different then as now; the Halliburtons of that day had their Cheneys, too.

But given that mail, coaches, and newspapers were indirectly subsidized by the granted monopoly, does it follow that people were more informed or that travel was better as a result? More chartered mail coaches does not necessarily mean more or better passenger travel. More coaches who used shunpikes did not benefit turnpikes. More franked junk mail and speeches from congressmen does not mean a more informed populace (in fact, in an age devoid of alternative news sources, we could argue the opposite).

Olds also points out that the use of stamps and intra-city delivery were both originated by private mail companies and later copied by the USPS; for the favor, Congress forced many of them out of business during the 1839-1845 period in which the USPS was granted much of the extensive monopoly powers it protects today. To me those indicate that the system was overpriced and underserved compared to what it would have looked like in a competitive environment. If Congress really intended to increase rural travel and mails, those two things could be directly subsidized while the rest of the system ran privately and more efficiently. Today, I would argue that even the rural service is a red herring: a friend of mine once saw a UPS truck in Beaverhead, NM; you would be hard-pressed to find a place more rural.

The second problem with Skocpol's argument is that it overstates the magnitude of the federal government's involvement in the development of early roads, literacy, and associational tendencies. Skocpol's key claims are that the America De Tocqueville observed was largely the creation of a centralizing nation and the centralizing tendencies:

Social historian Richard D. Brown emphasizes that the Revolution, political struggles over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and deepening popular participation in national, state, and local elections served to spur associational life. So did religious and cultural ideals about self-improvement, and growing awareness of extralocal commercial and public affairs through widespread newspaper reading.
...
In retrospect, it is obvious that what social historian Mary P. Ryan has dubbed the pre-Civil War "era of association," from the 1820s to the 1840s, coincided with the spread of adult male suffrage and the emergence of competitive, mass-mobilizing parties: first the Jacksonian Democrats, then the Whigs, and finally, the Free Soilers and the Republicans.

Daniel Klein has written extensively about private roads in America (see this collection). Of the three periods (the turnpike era, the plank road era, and the western road era), the first is the most relevant to the subject at hand. I am citing from "The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods? The Turnpike Companies of Early America."

Not counting the land grants involved, only four states subsidized roads, and of them only Pennsylvania did so substantially. The charters were means for getting private capital to take over the maintenance of the roads because the municipal governments could not afford it. Tolls were sufficient to keep the roads up, but not enough to make the roads extravagantly profitable. Nevertheless, participation in stock purchasing was surprisingly widespread.

In fact, it seems that many of the roads were the results of the actions of ad hoc societies. As Klein explains it,

The town meeting was a central institution in which all important residents were expected to participate. Sly ... says that in the early 1800s "[t]he town meeting was ... at the highest point of development." The turnpike meetings were well attended and stock pledges were made publicly. For example, Wood ... says the Fifth Massachusetts Turnpike "was formally organized at a meeting held in the inn of Oliver Chapin, probably early in 1799, and sixteen hundred shares were issued with a par value of $100 each. Meetings with attendances of 50 and 100 people have been recorded [Connecticut Courant, March 19, 1798]....

Turnpike promoters relied of course on the most basic form of selective incentive, person-to-person solicitation. In an 1808 letter regarding the formation of the York and Conewago Canal Turnpike, the writer tells ..."

Further, putting to question the Skocpol's assertion that Jacksonian and Tocquevillian era newspapers were the result of mid-century federal investments in road building and post offices, Klein goes on to note newspaper campaigns conducted in 1798, 1804, and 1805. It appears that Skocpol had it backwards: voluntary associations and use of newspapers to convey information about private road companies pre-date the era she is citing as being a result of federal road-building and paper subsidization.

Rather than weakening de Tocqueville's observations, the existence of roads and the history of how they came to be financed reinforces them. Local townspeople noted the potential for the public benefits of a road (increased land value, incomes, access to cultural goods such as theatre, and buggy racing), so they formed organizations to obtain a state charter and raise funds. Despite or perhaps because of Virginia's objections, the federal involvement was extremely limited in those early years. Though the land grants and eminent domain provisions are troubling, this is much closer to the libertarian's understanding of how communal goods can be provided than the caricatures and strawmen normally offered.

A note on those land and eminent domain grants: the land granted was typically land already commonly used as a trail, path, or road. It probably had value for little else (that's why it was used for such). Granting it to a company for the purpose of improving it doesn't bother me much, especially when the company receiving the title is widely owned by the citizens who stand to benefit and who probably asked for the charter as townsman in the first place. The eminent domain powers were apparently not abused: they seem to have used them in conjunction with the voluntary fundraising efforts, i.e. persuasion and trade: "We'll give you stock in return for the title to this part of your land." That is a far cry from today, where a government merely announces they are going to take part of your land in exchange for a take-it-or-leave-it settlement, sometimes for the purpose of transferring it to someone who had the money to negotiate with you directly but didn't want to be bothered (and now that I think about it, I'd cut a break on the price of some land for the opportunity to not have to talk to Donald Trump). I think I'll have more to say on this in a future post on localism.

The Slate article also understates actual outcomes of the America described by de Tocqueville and tries to paint increasing centralization as either benign or beneficial. Mutual associations and the excludable goods associated with them, i.e. insurance benefits, are probably among the best-known examples (well, at least to me, an obviously biased sample). From Mancur Olson (The Logic of Collective Action), we would expect successful societies, i.e. the ones we have heard of, were able to provide something to the members (benefits, prestige, self esteem) that could be withheld from non-members. For this privilege, members would have had to contribute their money, time, and perhaps social capital. As David Beito shows in From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, these societies continued to be vibrant and active until the government agencies took over the roles they served, i.e. the excludable goods lost their value.*

The penchant for association also worked into the managerial revolution described by Chandler (The Visible Hand). As they were beginning to recognize that rails and other businesses were no longer Mom & Pop operations carried on by partners and their sons, the various professional disciplines (managers, engineers, accountants, researchers) began to form professional associations. Among these, for example, were societies dedicated to promoting the ideas of Frederic Winslow Taylor with its rigidity and emphasis on central planning. These included the Efficiency, Scientism, and Technocracy movements, advocated the idea that all of man's problems could be solved "scientifically" by central planning and were taken seriously at the time both in the US and abroad. Lenin and Mussolini were fans, and many of the repealed provisions of the Second New Deal were an attempt to apply the theory.

Skocpol reads the period thusly:

In short, the early American civic vitality that so entranced Alexis de Tocqueville was closely tied up with the representative institutions and centrally directed activity of a very distinctive national state. The non-zero-sum nature of U.S. governmental and associational expansion becomes even more apparent when we consider that most of the big voluntary associations founded in the 19th century prospered well into the 20th, often building toward membership peaks reached only in the 1960s or 1970s and in full symbiosis with public social provision.

The Grand Army of the Republic spread in the wake of state and national benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War, for example. The Fraternal Order of Eagles was so active in promoting state and federal old-age pensions that the Grand Eagle himself received an official pen when FDR signed the Social Security Act of 1935.

The same mutual aid societies that brought health insurance, unemployment insurance, and pensions went into decline as a result of Social Security and other federal programs. To characterize them (by their association with the FOE) as prospering (as I'm sure many other organizations did) is surely misleading; at best, it was not the "non-zero-sum nature of U.S. governmental and associational expansion" asserted. Though some of the mutual associations themselves bought into the idea of using "free" money from the government to extend benefits universally, support for social legislation was not without internal controversy. Again, Beito is the better guide to the inner workings of mutual aid and service organizations:

There is reason to believe that a relationship existed between the emerging welfare state and the decline of fraternal services. Most notably, the first signs of benefit retrenchment began after 1935, the year the Social security Act became law. Officials of the homes for the elderly and orphans of the SBA cited Social Security and other welfare programs as justification not only for rejecting applications but for closing down entirely. In 1939, Malcolm R. Giles, the supreme secretary and comptroller of the Loyal Order of the Moose, urged the council to consider restricting sick benefits to members under age 65. As justification he stressed that these individuals were eligible for aid under the Social Security Act. The same year Norman G. Heyd, the chairmen of the Moosehaven Board of Governors, reported that Moosehaven had the smallest population since 1931. He asserted that the major reason "for this decrease is undoubtedly the operation of the old-age pensions in most of the states.
...
[M]any fraternalists still voiced opposition to the expanding welfare state, although they were far less influential than in the past.
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Bina West of the WBA also condemned New Deal programs. ... West ridiculed suggestions that Social Security was just an expanded form of cooperative insurance or represented a culmination of fraternal principles. She charged that the trust fund was not a true reserve but instead a mere "bookkeeping entry." The premiums used to finance the program, she asserted, could be used by the government for "any purpose, good or bad." [>coughLBJcoughVietnamcough<] As with compulsory health insurance, West worried that Social Security would pose a threat to American practices of mutual aid. "Is there any beautiful ritualism or human tenderness in a government bureau?" ... Even fraternal supporters of Social Security, such as Giles, shared these concerns. While Giles praised Social Security as proof that "imitation is the sincerest flattery," he cautioned that government was incapable of approximating the warm handclasp from a fellow member or the "friendly visitation of fraternalists to a stricken brother."

Side note: It is also worth pointing out that unemployment benefits, popularly thought to be a creation of Progressive or New Deal eras, were actually a mutual aid benefit long before, and were also offered by states prior to federal involvement. The federal government was a johnny-come-lately, not providing substantially higher benefits at all. Also, lest it be supposed that fraternalism died as a result of the Depression, it should be noted that many societies had bounced back from early hard times and by some measures fraternalism actually showed an increase during the 1930s, but a rapid decrease after 1940. Given the second rapid expansion of the federal government in Johnson's Great Society, it seems perhaps significant that Skocpol chooses to select that as the period at which the big voluntary associations reached their zenith, having declined ever since.

It seems worthwhile to mention also the labor movements that achieved success prior to the period of federal involvement. Union involvement as a percentage of the workforce peaked in the 1950s and as an absolute number peaked in about 1972. Some would argue that unionism has been in decline because of rather than in spite of the NLRA: the purpose of government involvement was not to support the workers but to support the employers who wanted a union that was interested in form, contract negotiation, and business, not workers' rights. This is indeed a symbiosis, but not of the type Skocpol implies.

Skocpol also never notes the rise of mutualism and syndicalism elsewhere in world as the 19th century progressed. I'm only a novice student in this area, so I'll leave the heavy lifting in this area to people like Kevin Carson, Zhwazi, Shawn Wilbur, Joel Schlosberg, Wally Conger, and Brad Spangler. In any case, there was certainly a growing reaction - Le Chatelier-like - to the rise of the nation-state. In America, the nation-state grew out of both the European model and the town hall meeting, giving rise to a reaction that was highly individualist, i.e. Emerson, Thoreau, Spooner, and others. In Europe, the reaction placed more emphasis on class consciousness, the influence of both the experience with feudalism, its remnants (the aristocracy in England, the Junkers and monarch in Prussia, the remaining monarchs in Austria and Russia), and Marx, giving a reaction that was highly communitarian (Owenism, Fourierism, syndicalism). These are hardly supportive of a "civic vitality" that desired to be "closely tied up with the representative institutions and centrally directed activity of a very distinctive national state." If anything, these are movements that are interested in civic vitality but resistant to centralism and long-distance bureaucracy.

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* Hmm, that's interesting. Is a good provided by a fraternal organization with wide membership a "communal good" even though it is excludable?

Communal Property

I noticed in two recent, separate posts that libertarians are accused of not understanding the concept of communal goods (here*, via Radley, and in the comments of Megan's fromthearchives post). In the first, libertarians are also ridiculed for "not minding government funded roads". And in the comments to that post, they are also ridiculed for actually discussing private roads as an alternative to government funded roads.

Huh?

Now, I realize that people don't realize that not all libertarians agree, and nor is there agreement among all of the people with whom libertarians disagree. But still it shouldn't be that difficult to realize that some libertarians accept public roads and so therefore probably understand and accept that concept of communal property. Is it too much to put those two snipes together and realize, "oh yeah, nevermind"? It would only take a little deeper thought to realize that other libertarians understand something that only the Deep Green left seems to understand about communal property: it isn't always and everywhere good!

I probably need to back up and point out that many on the left (and right) who speak about "communal goods" with such pious tones probably mean "the type of property of which I approve", like parks and military power and such, but they probably haven't thought about it much further than that. There is a symmetry, with one side thinking "private property mostly good, communal property mostly bad" and the other the opposite. Neither of these strikes me as sophisticated analysis.

Deep greens and libertarians have recognized that communal property is frequently used for private gain. An old joke is that BLM stands for Bureau of Livestock and Mining; these were the guys who invented chaining, the act of dragging a chain between two bulldozers to clear out small trees and make land more amenable to cattle. The Forest Service is the federal agency within the Agriculture Department in charge of building roads used for transporting equipment and logs up and down mountains in order to clear cut enjoy our communal crop of old-growth. And the nation's roads are the communal property means by which we consume oil and produce air pollution, time-wasting congestion, and sprawl.

Sure, the oil-users pay road taxes at the pump, but you don't suppose that all of it goes to roads, do you? The last time I saw a figure (Gabriel Roth's Roads in a Market Economy), about half of fuel taxes intended for roads actually makes it to roads. But you don't suppose that means that we are short of roads, do you? Of course not; as M1EK points out for the Austin area (start at the bottom), large portions of the roads are supported by bonds that are repaid out of sales and property taxes.**

No quarter is given to libertarians on issues such as roads: use them, support the status quo, advocate change, it doesn't matter: you are either a hypocrite or a crackpot, no middle ground is given. I find that odd, given my ideal transportation system. I don't know what to say about Pandagon's commenters who defend public roads; they are being consistent with their support for public property, but inconsistent with almost every one of their other principles. Here I should think M1EK would join my team and wonder how in the world they can make statements such as "The US interstate highway system, warts and all, is a gem that most of the world envies."*** Maybe if you live in Afghanistan; Germany certainly doesn't. The French wouldn't admit to it even if they did envy it (which they probably don't). And even an American who has sat in rush hour traffic is probably doing the opposite of envy, even if they can't comprehend what a real alternative would look like.

One of the commenters makes a valiant attempt at claiming that roads are not a public good. Perhaps not a pure public good, but they meet most of the criteria. And like many communal goods, they show the signs of the tragedy of the commons. Most libertarians are familiar with the general idea that commons, including such diverse examples as National Parks and fish stocks, may give rise to a tragedy in which it is in no user's interest to conserve. The difference between the left and libertarians lies in their choices over what actions they prefer to avert the tragedy. Both private and state action may lead to unsatisfactory consequences: underdistribution on one hand and overdistribution on the other.

By that, I mean that privatization of a commons always has the problem that one person gets title to the good though it is not clear how that person and no other should get it. Because he is first? That seems arbitrary. Because he is mixing his labor? That seems slightly less arbitrary until you consider that his first arrival now prevents others who would mix their labor with the land if given the chance. But the other end of the spectrum, political control, results in overdistribution: too many people trying to do too many things with the property and none of them having full responsibility for the outcome. You can try to solve that problem with majoritarian rule, but that also seems arbitrary: first one to 50% + 1 wins!

I would tend to look for the approach most likely to lead to the least worst outcome in a dynamic environment. The worst outcome would be permanent assignment to the first arbitrary winner who happens to be particularly inept. The best outcome would be that use is shared among all users according to the utility they derive from the good, an admittedly utilitarian argument to which I would solicit Will Wilkinson's anti-utilitarian response. In my opinion, private institutions have proven more adept at seeking the optimum use. Megan's requirement that I prove that the average farmer be a profit maximizer is a red herring; all we need is for the marginal farmer to be attracted to selling his water rights. A job, especially for a farmer, is not only about income maximization; sometimes it's about doing things your own way, including choosing when and how to leave it. The average anyone is not a profit maximizer, and yet we find that supply and demand generally work; otherwise, things like CAFE, carbon taxes, and tax rebates are futile efforts in a world where people could choose Toyotas over SUVs and until recently have not.

*I only get one hit on that bingo card, so I guess I don't win the prize.

**Incidentally, M1EK writes interesting posts about transit and urban development issues, but his over-the-top, self-described "bile" interferes with the message. His case for hybrids over turbodiesels generally ends up in lots of arm-waving and glossed-over points while accusing his interlocutors of failing to compare fairly (i.e. claiming that the Golf is substantially smaller so doesn't compare to the Civic when the Civic is actually the smaller car in both passenger and cargo capacity, claiming that all tests that show the Jetta having higher mileage are unfair or outliers, claiming that the Prius is midsize and the Jetta is a compact, etc.). In my opinion, the entire debate is silly: it's like the musclehead "Camaro vs. Mustang" debates of yore. At the end of the day, we should simply be happy that consumers have choices for high mileage cars. His comments on Econbrowser and other places can be very snipey. And yet you get the idea from reading his blog that he's probably a nice guy in real life. Can we blame the vulgar libertarians for blurring issues so badly that M1EK is driven into such states?

***The rest of that comment is hillariouser: "The US military shows how socialized health care can be provided for large numbers of people at a reasonable cost. (It’s when the poor soldiers fall into the hands of the VA that the care - and my point - fall apart.)" (1) It is no different than any employer-provided healthcare, except perhaps in scale (and that not much more than the largest private employers). That is to say, it sucks. Quit the military and see how far it gets you. (2) Can you put "The US military shows how ... at a reasonable cost" in a sentence and keep a straight face? (3) Yes, the parenthetical portion pretty much summarizes it.

I am not evil, either

No posting for the past week or so while I've been in the Dragon's Lair. Meanwhile, our exploits have been chronicled here and here (and probably more since then).

A few notes about those posts: Tyler is a really nice guy. Kathleen and I met him just as we were getting married, which became the subject of an MR post. I am afraid we made nuisances of ourselves during this visit, managing to disrupt the entire building so badly that Robin came out to investigate the source of the commotion. Tyler was busy preparing for a trip and very graciously put up with the disruption.

Though Bryan made an attempt at taking the geek crown, I think my photo in the Smithsonian deserves at least honorable mention. Kathleen says he looks too young to vote; I think that probably doesn't matter, given his recent publication.

Robin's job in life appears to be to question everything. No, I mean everything. I think he's up to it, too. It's an honorable pursuit.

And despite his normally polemic posts, Alex may be the quietest of the bunch. Too bad.

All of the stuff we really wanted to see at the Smithsonian was in closed sections (Arts & Industry and American History), so we settled on the few American History artifacts temporarily displayed in the Air & Space Museum. We also went to the Native American museum. It's been a long time since I've been to the first, and the second was built since then. I was surprised to see:

• The actual piece of Woolworth's counter from the 1960 sit-in
  
• A stump from Spotsylvania. Wow.
  
• General Sherman's hat (looks like it went through hell)
  
• General Custer's coat (some odd stains on it)

If stuck in Washington and in need of vegetarian food, be sure to check out the Native American museum. The choices and quality were very good, though it was a little pricey. Peasant food is almost always vegetarian because it is hard to catch, cook, and store meat; this may be therefore a very historically accurate depiction (there were also fish, fowl, and buffalo menu choices).

The Museums of Industry and Arts and of American History are both closed. The SI staff indicated that there is no definitive plan to reopen them. They blamed it on a lack of funds; I'm not sure what to make of that given that recent SI chief Lawrence Small was both a record fund raiser for the Institution and a record, er, spender.

The DC metro bus system is not bad, or were we just lucky that our hotel lay on the same route as the Library of Congress, our primary destination? The freeway system in Northern Virginia and DC is a complete mess. The light rail system in Baltimore is okay, but not great.

At one point, we were on a road headed into a cluster of indistinct concrete buildings. I was thinking, and then my wife said, that it looked like something out of Brazil (the movie, not the place). Washington is freakish: you can walk from the high rent district to a neighborhood populated by people who probably do not have permanent addresses within a few minutes, yet all the while knowing that over $2 trillion is controlled nearby.

The Library of Congress is bizarre. We were both issued library cards. There were bold signs warning us that they were not souvenirs. No library employee ever wanted to look at them thereafter.

You cannot visit the stacks: you must find what you are looking for through the card catalog, then submit a request (in triplicate, with carbon paper), then wait for it to be delivered if it can be found. It may take a day. Several of the books my wife requested were not found even though they were not shown to be "charged" (you can't check them out). The librarians shrugged it off: they're probably either gone or misplaced. Gone? You have to go through security both entering and exiting; the security is tougher coming in then going out. Misplaced? This was blamed on the contract workers down in the bowels. Most people would generally accept the idea that the library staff who hired the contractors would have some oversight responsibility -- metrics, incentive alignment, and such -- but I think those quaint ideas exited in the Viet Nam era or earlier. I pointed out that a particularly old pamphlet was in bad shape and should probably be restored, or at least stored in a larger folder - yeah, the librarian said, but there's nothing that can be done. Don't they have a restoration department? What exactly is the point of the LoC if not to preserve these artifacts?

In Baltimore, I went to one and only one tourist attraction: The B&O Museum's Allegheny, a 2-6-6-6 monster of a steam locomotive. Well, that and a bunch of other stuff at the B&O museum. And there's some other stuff in Baltimore, I suppose.