Tyler Cowen suggests that smart classical liberals and libertarians have, as if guided by an invisible hand, evolved into State Capacity Libertarians, which he defines via these propositions:
1. Markets and capitalism are very powerful, give them their due.
2. Earlier in history, a strong state was necessary to back the formation of capitalism and also to protect individual rights (do read Koyama and Johnson on state capacity). Strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets.
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3. A strong state is distinct from a very large or tyrannical state. A good strong state should see the maintenance and extension of capitalism as one of its primary duties, in many cases its #1 duty.
4. Rapid increases in state capacity can be very dangerous (earlier Japan, Germany), but high levels of state capacity are not inherently tyrannical. Denmark should in fact have a smaller government, but it is still one of the freer and more secure places in the world, at least for Danish citizens albeit not for everybody.
5. Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity. Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending.
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6. I will cite again the philosophical framework of my book Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
7. The fundamental growth experience of recent decades has been the rise of capitalism, markets, and high living standards in East Asia, and State Capacity Libertarianism has no problem or embarrassment in endorsing those developments.
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8. The major problem areas of our time have been Africa and South Asia. They are both lacking in markets and also in state capacity.
9. State Capacity Libertarians are more likely to have positive views of infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power (requires state support!), and space programs than are mainstream libertarians or modern Democrats.
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10. State Capacity Libertarianism has no problem endorsing higher quality government and governance, whereas traditional libertarianism is more likely to embrace or at least be wishy-washy toward small, corrupt regimes, due to some of the residual liberties they leave behind.
11. State Capacity Libertarianism is not non-interventionist in foreign policy, as it believes in strong alliances with other relatively free nations, when feasible. That said, the usual libertarian “problems of intervention because government makes a lot of mistakes” bar still should be applied to specific military actions. But the alliances can be hugely beneficial, as illustrated by much of 20th century foreign policy and today much of Asia — which still relies on Pax Americana.
I disagree. Coercion is not being free. Politicization of everything, which means coercion of everything, is not being free.
He obviously can’t call Denmark “free”. A Free society is where a person can choose his own level of relation with state outside a small core that always will be coercive.
The biggest problem we have is that is impossible with current political framework to draw down the intensity of political process. Military budgets change a lot from peace to war. Why political process does no have mechanism to draw down the politics if the needs are less? For example, non-political participation should be represented as empty seats in Parliaments. He risks vouching for the Managerial State.
Yeah… No. Just… No.
“Strong” states inevitably evolve into overreaching totalitarianism. Most of the ills you lay out result not from the “failure” of such states, but from the essentially uneradicable nature of these problems that they try to address. And, the cycle is always “Oh, we can’t fix that with the power we have now, give us more…”. Inevitably, the power accrued gets to the point where the tail wags the dog, and we have the ossified overly powerful bureaucracies that create things like the homeless “crisis” in our major cities.
Here’s a news flash for anyone in government: You grant power to something, some agency, some position, and you’ve just created a honey pot for human scum that will seek to use that power for their own ends and to their own benefit. The only answer to this problem is not to have those power sinks in the first place.
Civilization falls not because those civilizations failed to grant sufficient power to its internal organs, but because they do, and the people who wind up running those organs are besotted with their own self-imagined wisdom and then proceed to conduct themselves and the affairs of those organs as though they are all-knowing and all-seeing, Jovian in their wisdom.
Reality is, no human being is capable of such. Best not to allow such power sinks to accrue, keep things small, and let shit happen, because when you try to stop an avalanche, all you’re really doing is putting off the day that it comes down on you, allowing it to sit there and gain more energy.
The best solution is to dance on the edge of the falling avalanche, ensuring that you remain on top of it all. Trying to stop it is a fool’s game.
I agree with Kirk and Lucklucky.
The guiding philosophy should be “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
The State should be ‘able’, but mostly refrain from interfering in the lives of citizens. I like the negative freedoms guidelines of the Bill of Rights that draw a containment around the State. Of course, the containment has long since been breached.
I think the “state” as a construct is part of the problem; sure, it enables a lot, but does it benefit the majority of us?
It’s an unhealthy thing, our obsession with the holy “state”. If you look back on the last two centuries the “state” has killed more human beings than the damn plague, but we still worship at its altars around the world. Why?
I would suggest that the smart thing to do is to simply opt out of the entire shambolic enterprise, and find a better way to do things. Once enough of us have grown up, that will no doubt happen.
….”Here’s a news flash for anyone in government: You grant power to something, some agency, some position, and you’ve just created a honey pot for human scum that will seek to use that power for their own ends and to their own benefit. The only answer to this problem is not to have those power sinks in the first place.”…..
There is an anecdote (likely apocryphal), about Margaret Thatcher.
During a cabinet meeting, she brought up a particular issue, something like youth unemployment in the north or whatever, and said she wanted something done about it. One of her ministers proclaimed, excellent idea, we will strike a committee to study the problem and make recommendations for possible solutions.
She cut him off, saying something along the lines of, “NO! I want this solved! if we create a committee, then we will get a group for who the continuation of their jobs and perks depends upon the problem continuing to exist.”
Up here in Canada, we have an Indian Affairs Dept., which spends something like fifty grand a year for each “Status Indian” in Canada. Yet poverty and dis-function continues on our reserves. I have a colleague at work who was married to a status Indian, her response to me asking if she felt she got fifty grand’s worth of value from them was rather pungent.