Mental Health

This news story reminded me about a post I started a few weeks ago.

I have long believed that the existence and treatment of mental illness poses a tough political problem for libertarians generally (including the Civil Libertarians in the ACLU). I once attended a lecture given by Thomas Szasz; I could not accept his claim that mental illness is not really a disease. He claimed that it could not be legitimately called a disease since there was no cell pathology, e.g. no germ had been found to cause schizophrenia. Neither sickle cell anemia nor scurvy is caused by a foreign organism, so that doesn't seem to be the best argument to take. Furthermore, he seems to have fallen into Taleb's round trip error: "no germ found to cause disease" has become "no germs exist to cause the disease" [1]. However, he made a good case that the state has historically been given powers too broad for locking people up on the basis of insanity, for reasons that once included a wife's disobedience.

The problem as I see it with mental illness is that it is tough to construct a mechanism for treating the patient when the patient does not necessarily agree with either the prescription or the diagnosis. It seems easy to say that we should treat patients against their will when they are a danger to others, but what about when they are only a danger to themselves? Who gets to decide that? And on what basis? Is not a mortally obese person a danger to themselves? What about an extreme sport enthusiast? What about bicycle messengers? Abused, this could become a thin veneer for a state that wants to lock up the merely idiosynchratic. These people might include Howard Hughes, most physical science researchers (physicists), and Andy Kaufman. I'm afraid of its abuse by a government that already wants to assert broad powers for locking people up and holding them for indeterminate periods of time without a trial on the basis of secret evidence. [2]

The involuntary treatment solution is also known as Assisted Outpatient Treatment or AOT. The State of New York, among other places, has passed a form of this in Kendra's Law. Kendra's Law failed the gentlemen described in "Free to Die in Iowa" (Michael Judge, WSJ, 22 Dec 2007) (hattip: fashion-incubator) because the doctors apparently didn't know that they could have treated the man involuntarily. Kendra's Law is so-named for a girl killed by a man in the NYC subway. The man apparently had some limited access to treatment (199 treatments in two years and $95k in one year is hardly a lack of access), but he refused treatment on many occasions.

The primary advocate of Kendra's Law is a researcher by the name of Edward Fuller Torrey. Torrey is a former adviser to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), an education and advocacy group. NAMI was founded in 1979 in the wake of the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s. NAMI advocates community treatment, a comprehensive approach involving the "consumer", their family and friends, civil authorities, medical professionals, and other orgranizations.

The deinstitutionalization movement started in the 1950s and 1960s, and achieved success in the 1970s. The Community Mental Health Act (CMHA) of 1963 is said to be a significant milestone in the history of the movement, though it isn't clear whether the measure was taken to address concerns for the rights of patients or for fiscal reasons (probably both). Another significant event in the history of the movement was the success of the book and subsequent movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The movement has elements of Post Modernist Michel Foucault's thoughts on the cultural and social meaning of "sanity" as well as ACLU opposition to involuntary incarceration and the anti-psychiatry movement. The anti-psychiatry movement itself is fueled in part by Scientology and in part by legitimate recognition of some of its shortcomings, such as the fact that homosexuality was listed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatry Association as recently as 1974. More recently, the finding of increasing numbers of children to have ADHD in order to control their behavior with Ritalin seems to have some merit as legitimate criticism. Additionally, it is noted that many clinicians are also stakeholders in pharmaceutical interests.

I think that much of the thinking that goes into this subject is too simplistic. In part, this may be because the entire debate is locked up on the left end of the political spectrum between those who have never met a federal program they didn't like and those who don't believe the state should ever have a police function. There is broad overlap with the former group and socialists, and between the latter group and libertarians. I'm skeptical of both. [3] At the other end of the spectrum, we frequently find people like Michael Medved ranting about the injustice of failing to lock up everyone who poses a danger to anyone without any apparent consideration of whether jail is the appropriate environment for people whose main problem is bad genetic luck.

What are the meta problems?
- Who will watch the watchers?
- How do you take politics out of defining what "risk to oneself" means?
- Where do you draw the line on risk to oneself? 1%? 10%? Imminent danger? Isn't the latter the most obvious category, and one that is mainly detected too late no matter how much we spend on the problem?
- Can we recognize that we are talking about locking people up, but we simply aren't calling it jail? We can call it a hospital, but that doesn't mean it is any less oppressive than jail. The patients are still at the mercy of the staff and to a large extent other patients.

I have very little problem with funding mental health initiatives. As usual, I would rather see it done at the private, then the local, then the state level, but not at the federal level at all.

To some extent, this is exactly what is happening. NAMI is private. The local chapter of NAMI has obtained some sponsorship of temporary communal living quarters. That has been augmented with City and State funding. I think it is underfunded, but that should only drive the creativity of the advocates that much harder (isn't this what they say when they advocate unfunded mandates on various industries?)

We also know that action in the private sphere is moving faster than in the public sphere, due in part to consumers who are demanding more of their employer-sponsored health packages. "During the past three decades, per enrollee spending for a common benefit package has grown at a slightly slower average annual rate for Medicare than for private health insurance," according to this. To be sure, this doesn't help people who are unemployed, but it does help those teenagers whose parents are employed and insured to get early treatment, keeping them off the public programs.

The money is spent on doctors, nurses, support staff, facilities, and medication. Not as much money is required if stabilization can be achieved quickly. That means having a very effective, broad program that directs people into the system quickly.

I doubt social medicine works any better on this score. Homelessness and schizophrenia are significant problems in both Europe and Canada. Recall the recent riots in the Netherlands as homeless people were evicted from squatting in abandoned buildings? Or the recent problems with moving the homeless in Paris?

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[1] E. Fuller Torrey has been looking at the possibility that a parasite found in cat feces may have something to do with schizophrenia.

[2] And if you think secret evidence and holding people without trials started with George W., I have a bridge to sell you. The Clinton Administration also locked up foreign suspects without trial on the basis of secret evidence (see, for example, this article). I doubt this problem started in the 1990s, either. In fact, Wilson's Palmer Raids come to mind.

[3] I am reminded of the claims that Ronald Reagan is primarily responsible and the Republican party partially responsible for the lack of mental health care in the United States. This claim is due to the fact that Reagan happened to sign an 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act that repealed another law, National Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, that had never gone into effect. In fact, that 1980 Law would have reduced federal expenditures on mental health care. In addition, the 1981 Omnibus bill kept the cuts, but "converted them to block grants disbursed with few strings attached. New York State, which used block-grant monies to fund community-based programs, and other states [had] to cut mental health programs." The issue then was not that the Reagan Administration was cutting funding for these programs, but more specifically, they were cutting some funding and then cutting the strings attached to that funding. The local authorities were given broad powers to use the money, and apparently failed to direct it to mental health. The blame for that failure should fall on the entire spectrum, from left to right, but it doesn't.

I think any reasonable person could conclude that Reagan's involvement was incidental since the deinstitutionalization movement preceded him, guided Congressional action on the 1963, 1980, and 1981 Acts, and led to the founding of NAMI, and that furthermore nobody has come along since and proposed replacement legislation at either the state or the federal level despite the fact that Democrats occupied the White House for 8 years and controlled Congress for 15. It seems apparent to me that there is broad recognition of the problems laid out at the beginning of this piece: that involuntary treatment of adults is a difficult problem with no easy solutions.

Risks of libertarian societies

In this article, the technomadic packratt points out a risk of living in a libertarian society. To wit, involuntary servitude could occur in a place where laws against it and police to enforce those laws do not exist. As evidence, he cites four real occurrences; one in modern Florida, the Pullman strikes, Colorado mining communities, and the Ludlow Massacre.

The Packratt's post is extremely valuable. No matter how many times these stories and especially their interpretations are refuted, they bear repeating. It shows a high level of concern by the author to make sure that truth never goes unchallenged by compelling narratives.

One of the most instructive aspects of such narratives is the author's ability to distinguish between minarchy and anarchy. By pointing out that minarchists would not have laws, least of all against fraud, kidnapping, or assault, they find that minarchists are really anarchists. Then they argue that anarchist societies would look exactly like today's society, only without a police force. In this way, they can find the result they want: that large corporations would come to dominate anarchist societies, and from there, that large corporations would dominate any libertarian society.

It would seem that an obvious retort would seem to be that both the Pullman Strike and the Ludlow massacre depended not on a private army, but on the actual army (or national guard). Another obvious retort to this might be that we have such things as existing slavery despite the fact that we do not live in either a minarchist or anarchist society. Fortunately, people like the Packratt are here to show us that such rationalizations have no place in their understanding of the debate. We should not contemplate the fact that most slaves in the US today are caught on the wrong side of immigration laws, the fear of which is used to keep them in line. Neither should we consider whether workers could raise their own armies in an anarchist society. We should definitely not accept libertarians' hackneyed argument that fraud, kidnapping, and assault would still be illegal in a minarchy, or anarchists' dubious claims that management and owners would not be able to hide behind the the liability limiting legal fiction of "the corporation". For the Packratt and his fellow travelers, the fact that those four examples of slavery were real and that private actors benefited from them is enough to confirm the possibility that a minarchist or anarchist society would be a Dickensian Dystopia. That should be enough to persuade even the most committed anti-libertarian that we are blinded by our biases.

Me vs the libertarian vice

As the argument goes,

Private actors and markets tend to be dynamic because the actors respond to incentives. Proactive people will be promoted in dynamic companies and those will win market share from companies that stifle creativity and drive creative individuals away.

Government bureaucracies are static; there are no incentives. If they do a job poorly, they still keep their market share and jobs.

It occurs to me to take to heart Tyler's suggestion that the libertarian vice is to think that gov't quality is fixed. I confront the second statement from above, asking whether it is true if we consider what I have said about bureaucrats. Chiefly, are they self-selecting? If so, then they have reason to see a good job done regardless of the benefit to themselves, i.e. in spite of the fact that they have few or no market incentives to do a good job.

It seems that there would be a tradeoff between "work for myself" and "work for my ideals", i.e. some might not be self-selected and some might be sell-outs. What percentage of people are self-selected, and how strong are their ideals? Also, they may over time begin to blur the two, perceiving "that which makes my job easier" as "that which is right".

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.

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.

Salt iodization as market failure - Part II

From my previous post on this subject, the evidence seems overwhelming that the iodization problem is more complex than can be summarized with the term, "market failure":

• Iodized salt is not the only source of iodine: iodine is for sale in underdeveloped areas, but is also underconsumed.
  
• Iodized salt is available in places where there is no government mandate.
  
• Iodine intake is falling in industrial societies despite knowledge and wide availability and even government iodization mandates.
  
• Iodine overdoses are a real problem in places where iodization has been mandated.
  
• There are genuine historical reasons for mistrusting government regulation of salt.

I think by now the generous reader would agree that iodization is not a market failure as generally understood, and/or the particular theory of market failure used here is not sufficiently developed. The specific market failure here seems to be a problem of information perfection, but neither consumers nor regulators have that perfect knowledge in either the developing or the developed countries. The one thing that we have seen is that when a large scale movement creates an increased demand for iodine, consumers will buy it, and demand will wane when the perceived need wanes. That is tautological. But assuming the experts are correct, a society whose consumption is not what the experts think it ought to be needs to be convinced to change. Such widespread change is created by shifting values or reference points. There are both private and public mechanisms for shifting those references, so this is a debate on how to conduct such a debate.

As my wife has suggested to me, sometimes the benefit of judicial activism is to foster discussion of problems in need of solution. You could interpret this as creating a new Schelling Point. So too, regulations. However, I hold that a new problem may be created by the means by which reference points are established: not only do consumers change their attitudes, but society as a whole establishes a new reference point for solving problems. Regulation itself becomes a mechanism for establishing Schelling Points -- a "Schelling Means" as it were. Prior to the regulatory or paternalist state, society relied on such means as association, argument, proselytization. One-on-one discussion and public oration were the primary means to moving Schelling Points; in Tocqueville's terms,

The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

In the post-Progressive era, we increasingly rely on mass marketing and authoritarian pronouncement.

I think the advantages of the old system over the new are many, though not perfect. The organic system relies on consensus and does not punish nonconformists. Insofar as the nonconformists are occasionally correct to resist the new paradigm, it rewards them. The mass, like the experts, is not always correct. The organic means requires strong argument from smart people to overcome objections to change. This requires the facts to be weighed carefully and weeds out the bad arguments in the process. As might be realized, however, the organic Schelling Means is slow.

The regulatory Schelling Means is fast and inexpensive. In fact, it would be fastest to grant large amounts of power to a vanishingly small number of people in order to drastically reduce the social cost of decision-making. Call them what you will - a council, a cabinet, an executive committee, technical experts (Hayek's term), an executive - decision-making is less costly the fewer people involved. This was the Federalist argument for organizing the United States as a federal system, using representation and a strong executive. It was also the German Romantic argument for getting rid of the parliamentary "debate societies":

"The more the linguistic Babel corroded and disorganized parliament, ..."

"The restrictions of speech imposed on the Kaiser by the Reichstag angered me greatly because they emanated from a source which in my opinion really hadn't a leg to stand on, since in a single session these parliamentarian imbeciles gabbled more nonsense than a whole dynasty of emperors, including its very weakest numbers, could ever have done in centuries."

Those are, of course, the foundation for the Fuhrerprinzip from a book written by the most famous advocate eight years before he came into power. Hitler was by no means the originator of the idea, nor was he the last advocate. Thus, this is no reducto ad Hitlerum, but just as people in North America have forgotten the scourge of goiter, so much of the world has forgotten the problems of concentrated political power. Even Marx and Engels warned against "parliamentary cretinism", the unfortunate conviction that a parliamentary majority was the ticket to utopia, but their intellectual heirs took their warning in the opposite direction and accepted the same German Romantic solution that Herr Hitler did.

This is why I distrust utilitarianism in and rationalism of the public sphere. Yes, government action can be less costly and faster than organic change. More lives may be spared in the short run. But society itself is changed and perhaps not in a good way as the Schelling Means is shifted from one that is more democratic and consensus-oriented to one that is more authority- and action-oriented and therefore more tolerant or even demanding of executive action. De Tocqueville had this pegged, too: "The more [government] stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are causes and effects that unceasingly create each other." The paradigm is shifted from one of consensus and argument to one of decree and punishment. Advocates of the regulatory model - one generally finds them in the partisan camps of the two main parties - may not favor the police state, but they certainly favor a police state.

Veg-er-tarians

I keep discovering libertarian vegetarians. It runs counter to the hypothesis that all libertarians are basically libertines, that they just want to do whatever they want to do when they want to do it without regard to morality, social consciousness, or whatever. It does, however, confirm the hypothesis that libertarians ..., uh, ... have "different" or "eccentric" ideas about morality.

No doubt this is not an extensive list. I wonder if any of the bloggers in the list below would like to join a Circle?

• Vernon Smith - not a blogger, but fairly well known libertarian
• Bjorn Lomborg - not a blogger, but fairly well known libertarian (at least more libertarian than his enemies would like)
• Megan McArdle - well known blogger and libertarian, vegetarian dabbler
• Jason Scorse - somewhat libertarian (he gets virulently attacked when he posts on free market environmentalism, but seems to have unrealistic expectations of Democrats), but committed vegetarian

[UPDATE]

• Kevin Meyer - Did not know it.
  
• Kevin Carson? - Not! (I thought there was a chance, but he disabused me of that notion. Maybe we can change his mind?)

[UPDATE 2]

• Julian Sanchez - 15 years!
  

What would it be called:

• Classical vegetarian?
• Veg-lib?
• Lib-veg?
• Vegertarian?

And what would we do? Commiserate?

It did occur to me that we might appeal to the business sense of a few key national chain restaurants to take us seriously. Instead of the old-school, PETA-style approach (spray painting "MEAT IS MURDER" or "COW KILLER" or whatever), we could send them letters that attempted to convince them of the efficiency and profitability of incorporating more vegetarian-friendly recipes. By this, I mean

• c'mon guys, does every dish have to have meat in it? Can't you just leave one bacon-free bean selection on the buffet?
• The breakfast buffet at Furrs and Golden Corral have bacon, sausage (links, patties, etc.), ham, steak, ground beef, etc. So why do you feel compelled to put diced ham and chopped bacon in the potato and other dishes as well?
• I shouldn't have to quiz the server and the cook on soup contents - mark the menu when they are vegetarian, and if it's a soup du jour, educate the wait staff
• I wonder how much the risk of bacterial contamination costs restaurants each year in terms of liability insurance, cleaning, the effect of strong oxidizers on the capital equipment, lawyers, staff training, and refrigeration? Some of this would go away if you eliminated or drastically reduced your dependence on meat.
• A well-cooked vegetarian meal could be just as enjoyable as the obligatory slab of flesh, we would pay similar prices for it, so it could be more profitable (at least, it would be until your competitors figured it out)

There are lots more social cost points to be made, but I wouldn't include those in a letter attempting to explain the business case for going vegetarian (or at least vegetarian-friendly).

Counterpoint to Sweatshop Thinking

From the Mutualist Blog, another viewpoint. First you have the anti-sweatshop activists and scholars. Then the anti-anti-sweatshop scholars and hangers-on. Now, anti-anti-anti-sweatshop scholarship from Ellenita Muetze Hellmer. JLS editor Roderick Long writes this about her article (not free, as of this writing):

In "Establishing Government Accountability in the Anti-Sweatshop Campaign: Toward a Logical, Activist Approach to Improving the Working Conditions of the Poor," Ellenita Muetze Hellmer questions the logic of this response, given the fact in many of these cases the employment is not truly chosen voluntarily -- either because the government literally and directly forces people to work at certain jobs, or else because government policies that displace farmers from their land leave sweatshop labor as their only alternative. Where multinational corporations are the beneficiaries of state-mandated slave labor or something close to it -- Hellmer cites instances from Burma, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador -- the libertarian impulse to defend sweatshops is no longer valid. In such cases, Hellmer argues, it is a mistake to think that boycotts and embargoes hurt the workers, since most of the "wages" from such schemes are going to government officials rather than the workers anyway, and disinvestment could have the salutary effect of discouraging these tyrannical policies, or of weakening oppressive regimes by reducing their revenue. Hence Hellmer recommends, not abandoning the anti-sweatshop campaign, but rather reorienting it so as to focus on genuinely coercive arrangements.

I am forced to adjust my definition of a sweatshop, justified here:

Any factory where the workers are legally prevented from quitting, striking, or organizing, and/or where the employers have perpetrated a fraud upon the workers by successfully misrepresenting the conditions of work, and/or where the workers were forced out of their (now) second-best choice of work by government policy.

Kathleen gave me another way of thinking about this; workers should control the condition of their employment, specifically whether or not they can quit at will. I will read the Hellmer article when it becomes free (yeah, I'm that cheap), as I think it adds another wrinkle to this debate.

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