Friday, November 29, 2013

Quality and Quantity of Government

There are two metrics from which we can assess government – quality and quantity. There’s a lot of dispute about what the quantity of government should be. A lot of the difference in that dispute comes from differences in how they think about quality of government.

Some people assess an optimal view of government’s quality, and then conclude that we need a higher quantity in order to reach that quality. If government can do better, then it should do more. If government can feed the poor, then we need government to spend more on welfare.

The president said something like that. He said something like, “it isn’t a matter of bigger or smaller government. It is a matter of is government working.” Some people think about what a working government would look like, and that determines that we need more government to get there.

That seems reasonable. But if government isn’t working – if government does not and will never reach that optimal version of the one in your head, doesn’t that imply that we should have less government?

Other people assess a realistic view of government, how often it fails to reach that optimum, and then determine how much government we should have from there. If government can do better, that doesn’t mean that it will if you let it do more. Even if government can feed the poor, maybe it still shouldn’t spend more on welfare because it realistically won’t feed the poor, or it will but also do proportional harm.

One illustration of this is the people who want to replace the welfare system of the United States with that of Sweden. Suppose that they’re right, and the Swedish system leads to better consequences than what we have. It’s natural to think that this implies this person wants a larger welfare system for the United States, but it doesn’t. Yes the Swedish system if larger, but it is one of many large welfare systems, many of which lead to terrible consequences. If government gets a larger welfare system, it might look like Sweden's, but it probably won’t, and you’d have to assess something typical or realistic in order to justify a larger welfare system. We can’t take the best government can do from each country, and if our government hasn’t done that conclude that it should do more.

I think that there are a lot of optimal policies that government could do to improve outcomes. The best government would be large. But I also don’t have very high expectations for the quality of government if government does more. Government isn’t going to be perfect, so given these imperfections, it shouldn’t be large.

A big part of why I don’t think government will realistically improve outcomes is that my ideal policies are not popular, and the popular policy debates are totally inane. It isn’t just the elitist in me speaking, it has been shown again and again that voters fail a simple survey of factual questions about government and policy, why should I expect their opinions to be any better? And if government at best follows the democratic will, then isn’t government at best will follow an inane public policy?

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Bill Nye’s False Dilemma

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This is one of my least favorite memes, but it keeps showing up.

The problem I have with it is no that being anti-evolution is true, or reasonable, or not dogmatic. Suppose it is dogmatic. What Bill Nye does is forwards the position that dogmatists need to deny science generally in order to deny one aspect of science that they’re biased about. Making them choose between science + evolution and anti-science is a false dilemma. It is really science + evolution and science – evolution. One can be for science while denying an aspect of it because it happens to contradict the dogma. When the false dilemma Nye is selling is bought into, many more people will choose anti-science than I think Bill Nye would prefer.

It is not imperative that everyone accept this basic tenant of biology. I don’t think it is practical or intrinsically valuable for everyone to have a basic understanding of every single scientific discipline. People believe silly things all the time. It isn’t a big deal. High school biology can easily be replaced by a million other disciplines that aren’t core curriculum (statistics!) We will get fewer biologists it is true. It is imperative; however, that they accept the good work of science generally.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

The Music Industry, Artists, and Anti-Piracy Laws

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This is from Digital Music News.

Most people who advocate for anti-piracy laws do so because they think the artist deserves it. In that sense this is an interesting graph. It is very probable that artists gain from the shift from selling albums to concerts tickets, since they earn a much higher portion of income from concert tickets.

But if you think about that popular rationale for more than five seconds, it is very hard to hold onto consistently. I always have a mind fit when I see that big anti-piracy picture show up at the beginning of a dvd. “Piracy is not a Victimless Crime”. Every positive economic change has been at the expense of at least some producers. Tractors put some farmhands out of work -- machines and factory workers – Youtube and TV broadcasters --  Microsoft Word and secretaries – Starbucks and coffee maker manufacturers -- the internet and music artists, but that doesn’t mean they were victims of our crimes.

If downloading Lady Gaga’s new album is theft, then why isn’t reading this blog? Why isn’t repeating an idea I had to your friends? Intellectual Property laws can’t be justified by appeals to justice. Because ideas can’t be stolen, they can only be multiplied. When one person gains an idea, another person hasn’t lost it.  That is the single best aspect about ideas. You own the disk and the computer, the only thing that you might be “stealing” is an idea of a song, and you’re stealing that when you sing it in the shower.

In general, not letting prices fall (even to free) doesn’t make economic sense. If something can be produced for free, it should be produced for free. Your punishing multitudes of consumers for the sake of a few producers. If Star Trek Food Replicators were invented, it would be spectacular even though some chefs would would lose out. It would be outrageous to say, “we have food replicators now, but you must not replicate food, because the people who make that food deserve your money”.

There is a better rationale for anti-piracy laws than appealing to make-work bias or justice. Simply put, if the producer can’t capture the total net benefit in the price, they won’t produce as much as is efficient. Something that is expensive to produce, but cheap to replicate, not enough will be produced. If it costs millions to put a new dish into the replicator, there wouldn’t be any food to replicate. That makes some sense. But in entails that we care about the music industry as a whole, not just artists. So the graph above isn’t relevant.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Is the God of the Old Testament Responding to man or Continue His Work?

Some people find it hard to accept that the God of theism would act in history (deism). It is said that if God were all powerful and omniscient, then he wouldn’t need to act in history. He would have gotten it right the first time.

I think that assumes that by acting in history, God is in some way responding to human action as if it weren’t anticipated. But action doesn’t need to be a response. It could be that God is simply continuing his plan, and that plan rationally requires divine intervention – like a piece of wood that requires time between sealing and sanding

Some of the language of the bible sounds like God is responding rather than continuing his plan. God is responding to wickedness in Noah’s Ark, why would he have to try again? Abraham Bargained with God over Sodom and Gomorrah, how could God be bargained away from his perfect will?. Moses pleaded with God that he would not destroy his chosen people over worshipping the golden Calf while Moses was away, and God repented. How could a perfect God repent?

Bible fundamentalists will reinterpret these events in order to harmonize them with what they already believe about God. They will say that when God repents what that really means is… whatever. So they interpret away the simple clear meaning of words and passages. They have to. The bible is their epistemological foundation.

Either that or they can appeal to the mystery of God’s ways – a classic excuse to not seek.

There is another way of way of understanding these scriptures as continuing rather than responding. That is, the author just misunderstood what was going on. This doesn’t seem compatible with biblical inerrancy since inerrancy demands that both the facts and the interpretation of the facts be inerrant. But it makes sense to simply reject interpretations, even if they’re in the bible, that don’t make any sense.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Cornelius Van Till’s two authorities

I was reading from the Christian Presuppositional Apologist, Cornelius Van Till recently. In his Survey of Christian Epistemology he pretty much sums it all up,

Christianity is no hypothesis at all. It is accepted on the authority of the self-attesting Christ of Scripture and at the same time it is the presupposition without which predication is unintelligible.

Christians of this kind seem to be stating explicitly what many other Christians simply take for granted. This is demonstrated by straightforward appeals to the bible and “proof texting”. Presuppositional Apologists speak for mainstream evangelicals who don’t question the claims made in the bible, and lack the articulation skills that Presuppositional Apologists excel at.

I assess that it is a false epistemology.

You’ll notice Van Till is in fact speaking of two different authorities; one is the Christ of scripture and the other is reason (the belief that unintelligible presuppositions can’t be true). When he appeals to the law of non-contradiction by claiming that alternatives to Christianity are unintelligible, he is violating his bible-based epistemology.

If you consider it, the bible cannot attest unto reason. Even if it said explicitly, “reason is true”, rationality needs to already be presupposed by interpreting the claim as other than, “reason is not true”.

It would be very difficult but not impossible to show that reason attests unto the bible. The bible is a bundle of claims, and showing that the alternatives to some of the claims are impossible does not show that the other claims are also true.

Suppose I write on a piece of paper three things -- “God is real”,  “Mahalalel begat Jared”, and “I can see through clothes”, it might be the case that alternatives to the first claim is impossible, but that doesn’t mean that my piece of paper is inerrant.

On the other hand, reason would be able to attest to Christianity if it were shown that alternatives are impossible. But Christianity cannot mean the whole of scripture. It means those claims that distinguish it from all else. That means the basic claims of theism – God exists and his fundamental attributes, and the redemptive claims specific to Christian theism– People are in sin and are therefore in need of redemption and Jesus was that redemption.

 

 

I wrote another similar post about a month ago called, If there was one thing I could tell Christians

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Using the Slack between Mild Deontology and Utilitarianism in either Direction

Lets establish some assumptions. Common sense morality is mildly deontological – people won’t kill another to save two, but they would if it saves the world. The ends justify the means only if they’re much greater ends than means.

The principle becomes one of much milder deontology when we’re talking about a non-action rather than an action. So fewer people would kill a sick person in order to distribute his organs to save five people, than people who would not save a sick person in order to distribute his organs to save five people. If a train is going to hit 5 people some would pull the lever to divert the train into hitting 1 person. But virtually nobody would pull the lever if the train is going to hit 1 person so that it hits 5. They’re the exact same outcome, but when actions cause the damage it is more likely to be morally impermissible.

Here’s how I think the principle of mild deontology plays out in the public policy debate.

Some people analyze government like it is already there. If the FDA is banning a drug which saves 5 lives, but has side effects that kills 1, then moral intuitions will flare up at the thought of stopping the FDA. You’re pulling the lever which trades 1 life for 5, and that is morally outrageous. Others don’t think about it that way. Their minds begin with the state of nature and then build their policy views from the ground up. Should we enact an FDA which bans a drug which saves 5 lives but has side effects that kills 1? Of course not! You’re pulling the lever which trades 5 lives for 1.

The extra slack between utilitarianism and mild deontology can work in either direction depending on how you think about it.

In the last example, we were looking at a government which already exists like it already exists, which is appropriate. But some people analyze government policy like it already exists even when it doesn’t. Single payer health care will no doubt save some lives, but some people think about it like we already have single payer and eliminating it will kill people. Others see single payer as the action which would not only have to prove that the benefits outweigh the costs, but that the benefits outweigh the costs by a lot.

The slack between mild deontology and utilitarianism can be used to advocate either the pro-government or anti-government side either appropriately or inappropriately. It is appropriate only because it accurately applies the moral principle, not because the moral principle is in fact correct. I’m not a believer in moral intuitionism, and so I’m not a believer in mild deontology. Its arbitrariness goes against something that happens to be another commonsense moral principle called integrity – concern for consistency.

But I do share these common-sense moral principles, whether they are right or wrong, and I think they play a part in the policy conclusions we get to. It is not an all-in-all explanation of the difference in policy views because how mild each person’s deontology will go differs from person to person. At the margin, logically speaking, it should move people in one direction or the other depending on how they think about that policy.

I’m very curious how Michael Huemer would respond to the charge that he has to show that anarchy clearly and greatly outweighs the benefits of government, rather than the other way around. Since after all, we don’t already have anarchy.

Or how Bryan Caplan would respond to the charge that open boarders has to clearly and greatly outweigh the benefits of immigration restrictions. Since after all, we don’t already have open boarders.

I hope that either one of them could talk me out of it, since it is a conclusion I don’t prefer.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Bryan Caplan on the Economic Illiteracy of High School History

Here Bryan Caplan shares my frustration with historians who take their economics for granted. My own experience with high school and college history is that economic causes and effects are merely asserted – taken for granted as though it can be observed like a cue ball hitting an 8 ball into a pocket. The other methodology in my experience is simply quoting an economic illiterate from the time, as though Charles Dickens would be the authority on economics.

After picking apart his old history textbook, Bryan gives what the textbook should have said:

So what should history textbooks say about these matters?  This: Working conditions during the early Industrial Revolution were bad by modern standards, but a major improvement by the standards of the time.  Factory work looked good to people raised on backbreaking farm labor - and it looked great to the many immigrants who flocked to the rising centers of industry from all over the world.  This alliance of entrepreneurs, inventors, and workers peacefully kickstarted the modern world that we enjoy today.

And what of the "workers' movement"?  A halfway decent textbook would emphasize that it wasn't quantitatively important.  Few workers belonged, and they didn't get much for their efforts.  Indeed, "workers' movement" is a misnomer; labor unions didn't speak for most workers, and were often dominated by leftist intellectuals.  A fully decent textbook would discuss the many possible
negative side effects of labor market regulation and unionization - so students realize that the critics of economic populism were neither knaves nor fools. 

Don Boudreaux also linked to Bryan’s post.

The list of egregiously mistaken yet most widely held beliefs about economic history is long.  And one of the worst offenders on this list is the notion that labor unions created the American middle class – the myth that workers’ ability to bargain for higher wages and fringe benefits is chiefly a consequence of their heroically organizing with similar workers to collectively demand from employers this higher pay.  (Remember, workers at Ford Motor Co. were not unionized until 1941, but twenty-seven years earlier Henry Ford more than doubled his workers’ pay.  And he did so not chiefly out of any “personal concern” for his workers; rather, he did so because, by lowering worker turnover and reducing worker absenteeism, this higher pay for workers would result in higher profits for Ford.)

Is it possible that unionization had a positive net effect on the livelihood of labor? Yes. Is unionized labor what created the middle class? Give me a break.

Economic historian Mark Koyama also commented on Bryan’s post.

My memory was not 100% accurate as the best estimate for male working hours in London in England in 1830 (when working hours were at their absolute longest) is actually 3356 rather than 3000. This estimate is from Voth's use of court data in order to reconstruct how individuals used their time (2001). By 1870 other estimates put it at 2755. Working hours in excess of 3000 hours per year are seen as extraordinarily long in comparison to more recent episodes of industrialization so 4000 in the US still seems unrealistic (though it is not that much greater than the highest upper bound some historians have estimated). Of course, the point is that workers seemed to prefer working long hours in factories and using their wages to buy newly available consumption goods (cotton underwear which could be washed easily must have drastically increased consumer surplus relative to scratchy woolen underwear) rather than working in agriculture (where wages were lower and hours probably also long at least during some periods of the year).

In the UK and by extension the US, if a household had an able bodied adult male able to work then normally they would not be desperately poor (Robert Allen's wage series show that real wages in English and the US were perhaps 2 or 3 times southern European wages and people were able to survive there). One reason why perceptions of poverty increased in England during the early 19th century (in addition to the point that it was just more concentrated and hence visible) was to due with the social dislocation associated with urbanization (much higher rates of illegitimacy, more single earner households etc.). Families without male earners were indeed desperately poor and reliant on very young children working and these households became more common during Industrialization.

What we learn from this Woman’s Anecdote for and then Against Obamacare

Here is a story from Reason.com about one the president’s Health Care Success Stories now claiming that can’t afford health coverage.

Obama cited the letter from the woman,

“I am a single mom, no child support, self-employed, and I haven’t had insurance for 15 years because it’s too expensive.  My son has ADHD and requires regular doctor visits and his meds alone cost $250 per month.  I have had an ongoing tendinitis problem due to my line of work that I haven’t had treated.  Now, finally, we get to have coverage because of the ACA for $169 per month.  I was crying the other day when I signed up.  So much stress lifted.”

It turns out Jessica Sanford was part of a system error which gave applicants higher than allowed tax credits.

In reaction, Jessica changed her position.

Sanford, who is self-employed, tells CNN that she now plans to avoid purchasing health insurance entirely, because it’s simply not affordable on her budget.    

What have we learned?

What we should have learned is that personal anecdotes are a poor metric to judge the effects of a major policy change. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone has learned that. My assessment is that before the switch, Republicans would say that the story of Jessica Sanford was an outlier, and doesn’t mean anything. After the switch, the story now proves their point. Before the switch, Democrats would say that the Jessica Sanford story proves their point. After the switch, well Jessica is probably lying to get some extra attention.

The evidence always and forever confirms what they’ve always known in the first place. This clearly illustrates how flexible intellectual discipline is – and how easy it is to shut it off when something appeals to your political beliefs. If the public didn’t eat up these anecdotal stories, politicians wouldn’t tell them.

Interestingly, this itself is an anecdote. Alone it proves nothing. But if you’re like me you see this happening in virtually every single political debate. One side is super critical of the other side, but then the facts and arguments they get from their own side they accept with exorbitant naivety.

Monday, November 18, 2013

Whole Reason and the Problem of those who have not heard the Gospel

Whole Reason has a post on whether it is fair for some people to hear the gospel and not others. There is a common misunderstanding that the rejection of redemptive revelation is what sinners are responsible for. This is false. Christianity does not say that sinners are responsible for not knowing Jesus, but for violating morality in general.

I commented,

I think #4 actually comes closest to the right answer. “Those who do not receive mercy are not being unfairly treated, but justly so” is about right. I would only use the word “equal” rather than “fair”, just because fair has some connotations that imply justice.

Simply put, the sin we are responsible for is not the sin of denying, ignoring, or never hearing of the gospel. There is no reason why redemptive revelation would need to be general since those who have not received it end up with the just wages of sin.

I think that a Christian would run into problems if they see scripture either as the revelation of moral law, metaphysical justification, or the epistemological foundation. It leaves sinners with an excuse that they could not have known better. I think Romans 1:20 and 2:14 are claiming that these philosophical foundations are known through general revelation of what has been made.

I find it hard to square inter-generational guilt with Ezekiel 18:20

“The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.”

Perhaps the children don’t inherit their father’s sin, but rather the continuation of their father’s sinful way of life. They inherit the tendency to choose sin because their parents have not taught them knowledge.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

“I hate it when things are terrible for people who deserve only wonderful things.”

Someone I know recently said, “I hate it when things are terrible for people who deserve only wonderful things.”

I am unsure of the mechanism this person is employing to determine what people deserve. “Deserve” is a positive ought claim. So this person must know what people ought to be doing, or else how can he know what they deserve?

Forget about this person in particular – most people would agree that some people are getting what they don’t’ deserve, and other people are not getting what they do deserve. However, when these people are asked if they know what is Good, it turns out that they don’t know what is Good. They have assertions, but they don’t have justifications. They have goods, but no Good. So how can these people know what a person deserves?

I think we can press the matter a step further than “we don’t know who deserves what”. If people don’t know what is good, how can they be achieving what is good? The precondition for achieving what is good is knowing what is good. The precondition for knowing what is good is seeking what is good. Are these people seeking? Or are they too busy watching movies, getting ahead in their careers, and managing their love lives? When they philosophize, do they seek? or are they out to preserve their fantasy view of things? These people -- these people around us – aren’t even trying. That makes them in utter moral wrecks.

If the world is filled with the wickedness of people who don’t even do the preliminary work of seeking, then what makes them not deserve suffering?

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Black White Relations in the U.S.A.

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How accurate is this concise history?

Well, we see the white guy never would have gotten to where he is without slavery. I’m not one of those people who think that slavery actually had negative effects on economic growth, some have made that case, but the idea that slavery was a necessary condition or a significant stimulant for growth is false. Pre-slavery and post-slavery growth rates are similar. We observe poor countries of today getting that first step into economic growth without slavery. We observe many poor countries staying poor with slavery. Those institutional and market institutions that strongly correlate with economic growth have nothing to do with slavery. The product that all the slaves were producing could have been, and later were produced without slavery by just paying market wages.

Second, we see that the white guy and the black guy are the same people. Nobody believes in the principle of inherited guilt when it comes to anything else. I don’t pay for the sins or debts of my father because we’re different people. Likewise, I’m not owed anything because of the oppression of my father because we’re different people.

What is accurate is that being black is correlated with lower economic success. When we ask the question why, I think the answer does have to do with inter-generational progress from a lower baseline. And that baseline stayed so low because of slavery rather than some inherent goodness in a race. What do we do about it?

If it was some kind of stock of wealth being inherited from generation to generation, then maybe it would be time to give some of it back. After all, the wealth was gained illegitimately in the first place. The problem though is that it is not a stock of wealth being inherited, but rather a stock of characteristics and qualities that generate wealth. The wealth itself from general economic growth has gone to everybody – no matter what race you are, you’re better off than you would be 50 or 100 years ago.

I don’t find the “white people are hoarding all the wealth” story plausible. The flow of income correlates with race as well as the stock of wealth. White people are getting paid more and we know that employers care about productivity. You might think that rich parents are buying their children education, which is making them more productive. But average years of education is only weakly correlated with that of adopted parents, and it is strongly correlated with that of genetic parents.

Another story you hear is employer racism. But to the extent that you believe that employers are paying a premium for race rather than productivity is exactly the extent that employers don’t care about profit. Some people come from a worldview where the only thing that the wealthy love more than money is racism, but at a certain point these people need to stop telling ghost stories to each other and dig up some reasons for their claims -- especially in this day-and-age.

Once you identify that why some races are poorer than others is because of qualities that earn income rather than because they’re inheriting a giant sack of wealth, then the solution no longer has anything to do with race. After all, poor people of all kinds have been cursed with a lack of income generating qualities. The affirmative action debate reverts to the general social policy of welfare debate.

That is a debate worth having.

 

The Elephant at the Zoo and Natural Evil

The zoo near where I live keeps an elephant. Many people in the area protest against the keeping of the elephant because it is some form of animal cruelty. It isn’t like they beat the elephant, but they keep it in a cage, make it walk in the yearly parade, and so forth – a lot of usual things that zoos do.

I don’t find the protesters convincing. It is possible that the elephant would prefer the wild, but I don’t think we have a good idea of animal’s utility functions. Animals don’t discuss their preferences, and they don’t employ elaborate means to achieving their goals. Typically we can look at what somebody is doing in order to infer what they want, but the actions of animals are typically only one step adjunct from their goals which is not much information about what circumstances are best for their total life utility. Animals clearly prefer to eat, not get eaten, and not have their babies messed with. But besides that, animals don’t want much else that we know of.

I think the root of some of this kind of sentiment is in the failure to acknowledge natural evil, or at least realize the extent of it. It is not clear that an elephant would prefer a cage and regular meals or prefer the tooth and claw of the wild. It is easy to imagine that the wild is like Bambi, but it is like Animal Planet. I think a lot of popular movies that appeal to the kindness of mother nature demonstrates that people are eager to buy into a fantasy version of what the natural world is like.

There is another sentiment that human beings disrupt the self sustaining natural state. I don’t believe that nature when left alone is kind nor self-sustaining. The sun is not going to burn forever. Life on Earth is not going to continue after the sun stops burning. Nature is going to destroy all life on planet earth when left alone. We observe the fossils of extinct animal species in areas of the world where man did not live. If humans caused extinction by some random action producing an unpredictable string of causation, then the random action itself can just as well be produced by an actor within the natural system. If a human being can step on a mosquito and it lead to the eventual extinction of frogs, then so can a fox.

Some people root their belief that nature is self-sustaining in God -- Everything God made is good and self-sustaining, but man sinned and now man alone is a disrupter of the natural state. This not only goes against everything we observe in the cruelty and entropy of nature, but it fails to recognize God’s imposition of natural evil after man sinned. The lion will not lay with the lamb, and the thorns and thistles will now prick you.

So I don’t think there is anything wrong with zoos or putting animals in cages. I don’t think it is clear than animals prefer nature, and I don’t think that mankind is the disrupter of an orderly, self-maintaining, kind natural system.

Think Atheists 40 Questions for Christians

My friend at WholeReason responded to 40 questions for Christians by Cara at ThinkAtheist. Cara offered the answers she would have given back when she was a Christian.

The answers from Whole Reason is here. I think they’re good, but my answers are different enough from his that I will offering mine and try to be brief about it:

1. If a hundred different religions have to be wrong for yours to be right, does this show that people from all over the world like to invent gods that don’t exist?

There really aren’t a lot of options. Nothing is eternal (without beginning), or something is eternal. If something is eternal then it could be the self. Or it could be (in) the material universe. Or it could be God. That is not a lot of religions. Further divisions are made by each group’s beliefs in what that God is like, but the religions that all claim an eternal creator haven’t differed much in those claims: his justice, his love, his power, and his knowledge are all example which have been widely agreed upon. So there are not really very many basic religions, just a severe lack of understanding of how deeply they agree with each other on a God that does exist.

2. If your parents had belonged to a different religion, do you think you would belong to that religion too?

Studies confirm that religious labels are highly heritable. And I don’t see why it matters. If my parents were Buddhists or atheists then hopefully I would test those beliefs for meaning just like theism ought to be tested.

The redemptive revelation that distinguishes Christianity with its theistic counterparts is not general. And whether you receive it probably has a lot to do with your parents. But rejecting or not receiving this redemptive revelation is not the sin people are accountable for.

3. If people from the five major religions are each told conflicting information by their respective gods, should any of them be believed?

There is one God, not different ones. If people are told conflicting information by five different voices that each claim to be God, then you test their claims with reason. Do those claims make sense with what you already know about God?

4. How can you tell the voice of God from a voice in your head?

What do you mean in your head? I can distinguish my thoughts from what is not my thoughts. If I hear a voice then I test the claims it is making in light of reason.

5. How can you tell the voice of God from the voice of the Devil?

This is getting redundant. Abraham understood the significance of sacrifice, circumcision, and the manner of the birth of Isaac before he offered Isaac with the reasoning that God would raise him from the dead up to fulfill the promise God made. Abraham is an example of how to test the spirits, rather than believe any voice that pops into your head.

6. Would you find it easier to kill someone if you believed God supported you in the act?

Here we go again. My authority is reason, and that reason is used to understand what God is and is not saying.

Why in the world would I believe that God supported me in this act?

7. If God told you to kill an atheist, would you?

If the universe were such that morality constituted murder, would you murder? That’s the kind of question this is when you include the assumption that this is coming from the God who created morality and speaks truth.

These kinds of questions usurp the impossibility of accurately identifying God’s command without the use of reason. How we identify God’s command is through understanding, in this case our understanding of moral law ought to be relevant for testing the command for murder as not from God. The question itself necessarily involves a contradiction.

8. When an atheist is kind and charitable out of the kindness of his heart, is his behavior more or less commendable than a religious man who does it because God instructed him to?

More commendable. Knowing God doesn’t mean not getting to do what you want because some text told you so, it means wanting what is good.

9. If you are against the Crusades and the Inquisition, would you have been burned alive as a heretic during those events?

It is asinine to judge a claim based on the people who claim it. Would you have been burned alive in defense of innocent Christian martyrs? Maybe Christians are the worst human beings who ever lived – why would that change anything about what is true and what is false?

10.  If your interpretation of a holy book causes you to condemn your ancestors for having a different interpretation, will your descendants condemn you in the same way?

Scripture has to be understood in light of natural theology. Proper interpretation is not arbitrary. Correct interpretations ought to replace false interpretations, this is no different for me, my ancestors, or my descendants. Natural theology is done through reason, which is fixed – it doesn’t change with time, or place, or culture.

11. Rape wasn’t always a crime in the Middle East two thousand years ago. Is that why ‘do not rape’ is not part of the Ten Commandments?

Two thousand years ago? Is that when the Ten Commandments were given?

The 10 commandments as stated in the OT do not exhaust moral law, so we don’t have to explain why something isn’t in it. Many of the ten commandments weren’t always a crime in the Middle East, and yet they are included.

12. Do lions need a `god-given’ morality to understand how to care for their young, co-operate within a prides, or feel anguish at the loss of a companion? If not, why do we?

What is good for a lion is not good for humans. It is good for humans to use reason to know the highest reality, and that is God. So if we don’t know God, then we’re not living moral lives. And we don’t know God by blindly following divine command, but by seeking and understanding.

13. If organized religion requires a civilization in which to spread, how could this civilization exist without first having a moral code to make us civil?

It couldn’t. But organized religion is not the foundation of morality.

Also, civilizations are not always civil.

14. An all-knowing God can read your mind, so why does he require you to demonstrate your faith by worshiping him?

Worship is the natural outgrowth of knowing God and the knowledge of his glory.

15. If God is all-knowing, why do holy books describe him as surprised or angered by the actions of humans? He should have known what was going to happen.

The “holy books” are not void of human interpretations of what is going on. There is a fair bit of anthropomorphizing in their understanding of what is going on.

16. An all-knowing God knows who will ultimately reject him. Why does God create people who he knows will end up in hell?

Moral evil deepens our knowledge of God. The prodigal son returned home to a deeper knowledge of his father and his father’s way of life. The son who was always with his father was bitter, and the father told him, “everything I have is yours”. The prodigal son wasn’t given more than his counterpart brother, he was simply lost and then found, and through that process a greater good was achieved.

Since the question is about other people, we might retell the story of the prodigal son with another, third brother, who witnessed his brother return and in that way his knowledge grew deeper as well.

17. If God is all knowing, then why did he make humans in the knowledge that he’d eventually have to send Jesus to his death?

So that the knowledge of God can one day cover the earth as the water covers the sea. The means are necessary to the ends.

18. Why did a supposedly omnipotent god take six days to create the universe, and why did he require rest on the seventh day?

It is a story which either literally or metaphorically demonstrates work, and human uniqueness in the natural order.

19. Is omnipotence necessary to create our universe when a larger, denser universe would have required more power?

Omnipotence is to be understood as all-powerful or perfectly powerful, rather than more powerful than all the power there is.

20. Why are Churches filled with riches when Jesus asked his followers to give their wealth away?

This is another question about people, not about God. If you determine your beliefs based on people, then I infer that you care about what you look like when you believe something, not about what is true.

Jesus did not require his followers to give their wealth away. That is a misunderstanding of the text. We can talk about it some time.

21. While in the desert, Jesus rejected the temptations of the Devil. He didn’t censor or kill the Devil, so why are Christians so in favor of censoring many Earthly temptations?

Sounds to me like this would lead to Christian libertarianism, not atheism.

Jesus’ actions shouldn’t be taken out of context to fit any possible application. There’s nothing inconsistent with saying that sometimes we should sensor and sometimes we shouldn’t.

22. Given that the story of Noah’s Ark was copied almost word for word from the much older Sumerian Epic of Atrahasis, does this mean that our true ruler is the supreme sky god, Anu?

No. Why would it?

Is the supreme sky God Anu eternal? Spirit? Creator? etc.? If he is then in what sense are we not talking about the same God?

The Epic of Atrahasis is nothing close to a word-for-word copy. No doubt it is one of many great deluge stories, but  it is a completely different story with a few notable similarities. The text is here.

There is a general tendency for atheists to buy into far overextended or falsified similarities between biblical stories and other old stories. Smart atheists I know abandon almost all intellectual discipline when they hear about this stuff.

23. If your desire is to convert atheists so that they become more like you; do you think that you’re currently better than them?

We’re stuck on people again. I desire to convert atheist because theism is true and ignorance of God is culpable.

24. If religious people don’t respect their children’s right to pick their own religion at a time when they’re able to make that decision, how can society expect religious people to respect anyone’s right to freedom of religion?

For starters society and family are different in many ways. As it is, many (perhaps most) people don’t respect their children’s right to pick a religion, but do respect their next door neighbor’s right to pick a religion. So the question is phrased as if the two are incompatible, when they are compatible.

Authority is based on insight. Parents have an obligation to share insights with their children. That doesn’t mean cramming religion down their throats, but appealing to their reason. Teach them what you have learned.

25. If missionaries from your religion should be sent to convert people in other countries, should missionaries from other religions be sent to your country?

Sure. People I disagree with come knocking at my door all the time. I’ve never minded them.

26. If children are likely to believe in Santa Claus and fairies, does this explain why religion has been taught in schools for thousands of years?

They taught math in school for thousands of years, and that doesn’t imply anything.

27. When preachers and prophets claim to be special messengers of God, they often receive special benefits from their followers. Does this ever cause you to doubt their intentions?

Yes. Beware.

28. When you declare a miracle, does this mean you understand everything that is possible in nature?

No. Only that something is not possible in nature, which is not the same as, and does not imply that, you know everything that is possible.

29. If humans declared fire to be a miracle thousands of years ago, would we still be huddling together in caves while we wait for God to fire another lightning bolt into the forest?

No. Science would have still progressed and shown that fire is natural.

31. If God gave a man cancer, and the Devil cured him to subvert God’s plan, how would you know it wasn’t a divine miracle? What if he was an unkind, atheist, homosexual?

Natural evil is not punitive. so who was healed is irrelevant.

I wouldn’t know it wasn’t a divine miracle just like I don’t know if a lot of things are divine miracles. I would probably think that someone just got cancer and it went away.

32. Should an instruction to convert to your religion upon the threat of eternal torture in hell be met with anything other than hostility?

I’ve never threatened anyone with eternal torture, but I don’t think hostility is an appropriate response. Instead I would test the claims to see if their true rather than get all personal about it.

33. Can a mass murderer go to heaven for accepting your religion, while a kind doctor goes to hell for not?

You mean inherit eternal life? Being a kind doctor does not exclude one from sin which pays in death. Mass murder does not exclude one from eternal life if one is reborn.

34. Did the mass murdering Crusaders and Inquisitors make it into the Christian heaven?

You mean inherit eternal life? I don’t know, but people who mass murder are in sin and need redemption to escape eternal destruction.

35. How can we know what is right when we don’t know for sure who makes it into heaven and hell?

Because what we don’t know is about the people, it is not about the morality.

36. If aliens exist on several worlds that have never heard of your god, will they all be going to hell when they die?

If rational life on other planets exist then I would expect they would be morally culpable for knowing God --same as humans.

37. If someone promised you eternal life, the protection of a loving super being, a feeling of moral righteousness, a purpose for living, answers to all the big questions, and a rule book for achieving the pinnacle of human potential – and all in exchange for having faith in something that wasn’t proven, would you be suspicious?

Question everything. I’m suspicious of pretty much everything I hear coming from the mouths of Christians or anyone else. The result has been that my beliefs have changed drastically over the years.

38. If someone promised to give you a billion dollars after ten years, but only if you worshiped them until that time, would you believe them? If someone promised to give you eternal life upon death, but only if you spent your life worshiping a god, would you believe them?

No and no. I don’t believe in eternal life because someone promised it to me.

Eternal life is necessary for the Good to be achieved. If I have justified belief in God and his wisdom (knowing the good and means to it), then I have justified belief in eternal life.

39. Why does religion appeal more to poor, weak, vulnerable, young, ill, depressed, and ostracized people? Could religious promises be more of a temptation to these people?

Definitely.

40. If you have eternal life in the afterlife, with all your family and friends, don’t you feel it would be like an eternal visit to your in-laws house? Don’t you think you’d get bored after 10,000 years?

The knowledge of God is inexhaustible because God is infinite. We are also never bored because unlike other things, the knowledge of God satisfies and fills. It can continue on everlastingly.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Utilitarianism as the Best Government can do, even when it ought not do Anything

For a long time now, economists have followed a utilitarian guideline. They don’t input their own personal values, but rather assess what people value and organize economic policy to optimize it. What is good is whatever people want. What people don’t want isn’t good.

I’m not a utilitarian. Most people aren’t. Most people don’t believe that I shouldn’t be able to kill my wife even if I find her annoying and she’s depressed so I value her death more than she values her life. I’m fine with assuming that utilitarianism is a false ethical theory, while maintaining that in so far as government policy goes, utilitarianism should be the goal. I don’t think one has to assume anything more than that in so far as government is a morally permissible agency, government is for the people rather than the other way around. I don’t think that government is a morally permissible agency, lawmakers and enforcers do not live in a separate moral sphere than the rest of us. But if I should think past that conclusion, then the best government can do is enact utilitarian policy which economists try so hard to identify.

Perhaps an analogy is if I’m going to, say, rob the rich to give to the poor. You might say, “hey, it isn’t right to steal”, but then contend, “if you are going to steal, don’t give it to that guy over there because he’s not actually poor.”

IGM Experts Panel on Free Trade

Here is one of the results of IGM Chicago’s Economic Experts Polls. Their panel of economic experts were selected to be a representative sample of economists. They represent economists’ actual distribution of political positions, genders, ages, and the like.

Not surprisingly, they come to a big consensus on free trade.

Capture

Foreign products sell because they can be produced more cheaply (they have the comparative advantage.) When their domestic competitors find something else to do, then two things are getting made instead of one! Protect domestic producers from foreign competition, then one thing gets made instead of two!

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Responses to Jon Stewart’s 19 Tough Questions for Libertarians

A while back, comedian Jon Steward posed 19 tough questions for libertarians. I will attempt to keep my answers brief.

1. Is government the antithesis of liberty?

When libertarians say liberty what they usually mean is freedom from coercion, where coercion is the unwanted intrusion of someone’s body or possessions. We will take this definition as given as we move forward in the questions.

Government is the antithesis of liberty in so far as it is not coercing coercers so as to prevent a greater deal of coercion. A little force to prevent more from happening creates more liberty.

2. One of the things that enhances freedoms are roads. Infrastructure enhances freedom. A social safety net enhances freedom.

All changes in human institutions enhance some freedoms and eliminate others.

Some things that government does crowds out private sector activities. If we had a socialized food programs, there wouldn’t be grocery stores. Sometimes government solves the market’s failure to do something that should be done. Roads might be an example of this. Other times, government does things that shouldn’t be done at all. I don’t know any economic theory that would defend the post office for example.

Just because the private sector isn’t doing something doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a profit opportunity if government stopped doing it.

3. What should we do with the losers that are picked by the free market?

What should we do with the losers picked by the mixed economy? Or the socialist economy? There will be losers no matter what. The relevant question is in which system will there be more losers and what actions are morally permissible to alleviate the situation.

4. Do we live in a society or don't we? Are we a collective? Everybody's success is predicated on the hard work of all of us; nobody gets there on their own. Why should it be that the people who lose are hung out to dry? For a group that doesn't believe in evolution, it's awfully Darwinian.

Government is not the only collective institution we have. There are friendships, families, businesses, charities, and wing-night get-togethers. The house you live in was mostly built by people cooperating peacefully without government.

Libertarians do not believe that the losers should be hung out to dry. They almost always believe that the government means either do not justify the ends and/or do not end up at the stated ends, that is, fewer losers.

Demographic data shows that libertarians tend to be far less protestant than the average person, and slightly less protestant than liberals. Evangelical might be more appropriate a metric for predicting beliefs about evolution than protestant. Still, libertarians are far less evangelical than the average person, and slightly higher than liberals. Libertarians are not generally social Darwinists or anti-evolution.

5. In a representative democracy, we are the government. We have work to do, and we have a business to run, and we have children to raise. We elect you as our representatives to look after our interests within a democratic system.

The people are not the government. If the people are the people and the people are the government then there should be no contradiction between legislation and human decision making. There would be no need for laws. The very reason people want to use government is because it would make decisions the people wouldn’t make.

It is incorrect to assess that that the government is the people merely because people have an input and that input (votes) has something to do with the output (policies). The output is a messy distorted version of the inputs because they went through several stages between “votes” and “law” where the purity of the inputs diminish. The output is also messy because we vote for people not policies, and people are bundles of policies that may not be optimal. These people are also capable of misrepresenting what that bundle really consists of. People often don’t get what they think they’re voting for.

Inputs don’t have magnitudes attached to them. If I dislike x more than you do and another combined like x, x becomes law even though there was greater will against it.

The inputs can be based on the selfish good rather than the social good. If government is to provide the social good there is no reason to expect that based on inputs that are based on selfish votes. There is no obvious reason to expect people to vote altruistically than act selfishly.

Economics predicts that the quality of those inputs will be very low in a democracy. The costs of casting a rational, informed vote are all on the individual, the effects of the vote are almost entirely on others.

6. Is government inherently evil?

Yes. Government derives and preserves its power from the credible threat of violence against peaceful people. That is inherently evil. The social contract does not exist. Maybe we can talk about it some time.

7. Sometimes to protect the greater liberty you have to do things like form an army, or gather a group together to build a wall or levy.

Yeah, but I’m not one of these “we need liberty for the sake of liberty” kind of libertarians. See the answer to question one for my affirmation that a little liberty can be traded off for more liberty.

8. As soon as you've built an army, you've now said government isn't always inherently evil because we need it to help us sometimes, so now.. it's that old joke: Would you sleep with me for a million dollars? How about a dollar? -Who do you think I am?- We already decided who you are, now we're just negotiating.

Government can be immoral while creating more liberty.

9. You say: government which governs least governments best. But that were the Articles of Confederation. We tried that for 8 years, it didn't work, and went to the Constitution.

The fact that it happened doesn’t mean it was good. Institutions are not like a person where one experiments until something works. Institutions are capable of negative changes that stick. People have different ideas about what “working” means, and it is very unclear what is causing the system to work or not work.

Was there some kind of spectacular outcome that occurred right after the switch? The Articles served as a check for American aggression against native Americans. With The Articles, the United States would probably have also seen a much earlier and more peaceful abolishment of slavery.

The point is, it is not obvious how great the constitution was in lieu of the articles because the counterfactual is unobservable.

10. You give money to the IRS because you think they're gonna hire a bunch of people, that if your house catches on fire, will come there with water.

America did not have public fire stations until about the time of the Civil War. Include the general economic growth from that time and the additional technology, and there is no reason to believe that we can’t have robust private sector fire stations.

AAA comes to my rescue when I get a flat tire, there can just as well be a fire emergency equivalent. It is not clear that fire stations are a public good.

Some poor people might decide to take the risk. But risk reductions are a good like any other good that we can’t value at infinity.

11. Why is it that libertarians trust a corporation, in certain matters, more than they trust representatives that are accountable to voters? The idea that I would give up my liberty to an insurance company, as opposed to my representative, seems insane.

Exclude the sentiments toward the villainy of insurance companies – it is unclear why Jon Stewart would want any market mechanisms when he has politicians which are perfect, or at least very good manifestations of the public will. He doesn’t deal with what matters, instead he frames things as good guys and bad guys and then asks you to interpret what “seems” to be. What matters is why insurance company profit is so bad for consumers but profit in other sectors is so good?

Besides, Corporations are legally invented institutions.

12. Why is it that with competition, we have such difficulty with our health care system? ..and there are choices within the educational system.

Well for starters health care expenditures are paid 48% by government, 32% by private insurance which is subsidized through government tax policies, and only 12% by the consumer. The excessive consumption that results form third party payments bids the price up, and anybody who can’t get access to the funds from one of these third parties has to deal with the absurdly high prices without the help.

On the supply side, medical licensing ensures that consumers have to pay and wait for highly qualified doctors even for the simplest of problems.

As for education… Does Jon Steward think that education is great? There are choices if you’ve got money, a lot like health care.

13. Would you go back to 1890?

No. 1890 was much worst than today. The institutions of 1890 versus today reflects to some degree the rate of growth, not the level of standard of living. The difference in absolute standard of living between 1890 and today comes from 100+ years of general economic growth.

14. If we didn't have government, we'd all be in hovercrafts, and nobody would have cancer, and broccoli would be ice-cream?

Nope.

Suppose that in 50 years we have hovercrafts, a cure for cancer, and broccoli ice cream. Would you expect they came from the private sector or the public sector?

15. Unregulated markets have been tried. The 80’s and the 90’s were the robber baron age. These regulations didn't come out of an interest in restricting liberty. What they did is came out of an interest in helping those that had been victimized by a system that they couldn't fight back against.

Again, there is a difference between growth and absolute standard of living. The poor weren’t poor because of the robber barons, they were poor because the stuff they needed did not exist. GDP per capita back then was a couple thousand dollars. The best you can do if you spread all the wealth of the robber barons equally was give everybody $3,000 a year to live on.

Economists distinguish between natural monopolies and legal monopolies. Natural monopolies arise under a particular set of conditions. Markets naturally tend toward competition not monopoly. It is not clear how much of the robber baron’s monopoly power came from legal forces vs. natural forces. Railroads for example were heavily subsidized by government, either financially or by granting very generous property rights.

Contrary to popular sentiment, monopolies are not bad per se. It is the use of monopoly power to restrict supply and raise prices that causes economic harm. Simply putting competitors out of business by offering a better product for a lower prices is a market virtue. It increases standards of living for the many consumers, while the few competing producers go find other things to do. It is not obvious that Rockefeller, for example, engaged in monopolistic restrictions in supply. On the contrary, some claim that he lowered the price of oil and kept it low even after his competitors exited the market, which would be spectacular for poor people.

Interests are not outcomes. Most libertarians want a more libertarian world out of interest for those who are needy. Ask a libertarian why they oppose minimum wage. They usually don’t even mention liberty, they mention that your pricing poor people out of the job market.

16. Why do you think workers that worked in the mines unionized?

Presumably because they wanted a higher standard of living. Here’s the problem, one can’t improve the general standard of living by targeting workers because labor is in input. Policies that target consumers on the other hand effect total outputs, effectively raising wages. That surplus compensation can be taken in the form of cleaner, safer, more enjoyable jobs through compensating differentials. With wage increases through economic growth, workers can afford to discriminate against unpleasant working conditions.

17. Without the government there are no labor unions, because they would be smashed by Pinkerton agencies or people hired, or even sometimes the government.

Maybe. Most workers are not unionized (something like 88% last time I checked). And yet wages and working conditions for non-unionized workers is far above that of the past. You might think that those government working condition standards are keeping your nightmares from becoming reality, but virtually every employer exceeds them. In most states employers are not required to give breaks to anyone but minors, and yet breaks are the norm.

When it is clear that normal market forces rather than legislation is what is protecting 95% of the workers -- because the legislation does not even apply to 95% of workers -- then why is there this fear that if government didn’t protect the other 5% then standards would immediately revert back to that of the 18th and 19th centuries?

18. Would the free market have desegregated restaurants in the South, or would the free market have done away with miscegenation, if it had been allowed to? Would Marten Luther King have been less effective than the free market? Those laws sprung up out of a majority sense of, in that time, that blacks should not.. The free market there would not have supported integrated lunch counters.

Legislation can change actions, but it didn’t change minds. The biggest difference between the 60s and now is that minds have changed. Don’t think so? The fact that discriminators have to keep to the shadows is evidence that discrimination is not as popular as it once was.

Black employment doubled the decade before the civil rights act was passed. People were already changing before legislation. Then the legislation passed, and it is treated like it is the only possible explanation for the continued decline in discrimination. Decline in discrimination had to already be occurring for the legislation to become viable.

Discrimination is not profitable. Hiring based on race rather than productivity is not profitable. Turning down customers who are willing to pay is not a profitable strategy. Markets discourage discrimination, not reinforce it. One of the reasons discrimination was already on the decline.

I would much rather be discriminated against than give my money to someone who would discriminate against me if it weren’t for the legislation. Laws camouflage discriminators, leaving me unable to discriminate against the discriminators.

19. Government is necessary but must be held accountable for its decisions.

Accountability is not a realistic expectation when it is extremely unclear what policies lead to what outcomes. Also, accountable to who’s ends? Accountable to which political party’s means? “The people” don’t have a single will. They have a whole cascade of different means which they think will lead to their cascade of different ends.

There is no reason to expect the people who are supposed to be holding government accountable to know what they’re talking about (see question #5).

Suppose government weren’t necessary -- people are so superstitious about government that almost nobody would realize it.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Doug Wilson on being a “Food Libertarian”

Doug Wilson is a “Food Libertarian”. He explains why here.

He concedes some role for government to play referee. He assesses that government should make food producers liable for the harm they do, and this is right after he says that consumers ought to take their own risks.

I believe he is separating two different kinds of risk that don’t need to be separated. One is risk in food preparation and the other is risk in the food itself. He seems to think that risk in food preparation requires some sort of tort law, but for risks in the food itself like unpasteurized milk, “people know what they’re getting”. Actually, in either case they don’t know what they’re getting. Maybe unpasteurized milk will get you sick and maybe a particular restaurant will get you sick. Either way risks are being taken and risk reductions will cost the consumer whether it is from legislation or market demand.

I commented,

“Very good thinking, but I think you missed something.

I don't see any reason for government to play the referee. If the risk is already internalized in the price of the meal, then there is no reason to make the producer liable for damages. By adding in the price of liability to the price of risk, your making food too safe. You're in effect making consumers pay twice the premium for risk reductions than they demand.

It is unlike tort law because the damages are agreed to. The person who got sick agreed to getting sick because they agreed to bare the risk of getting sick. It has already been paid for. The price is right. With, say, pollution the externalized costs are on parties which did not consent.

It seems to me that if there is a market failure it is the other way around. Consumers respond irrationally when a few people dying from a gordita or there is a "scare" of some kind. Psychologists call it an availability heuristic. People overrate the odds of events they hear about frequently. Market forces respond to this with excessive safety standards. Producers are scared to death that they'll be the subject of the big news disaster story, even if the victims of such a story won the negative lottery.

So we're both food libertarians. You might like Tyler Cowen's book, An Economist gets Lunch.”

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Amia Srinivasan of New York Times Questions for Free Market Ethics

I came across this article from the New York Times which calls the moral intuitions of free market ethicists into question. To be honest, this is the kind of fake intellectualism that New York Times readers go for but wouldn’t pass an ideological turing test by a long-shot.

These are the four free market moral intuitions she calls into question followed by my brief responses.

1. “Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?”

It doesn’t matter what you call it. Call it free or don’t. Just to be nice lets call it not free. What happens when we “free” a woman from having to prostitute herself or sell her organs by prohibiting the only way she can feed herself? She starves. She’s choosing her only alternative to starvation and prohibiting it starves her. Moral intuitions change when we come to a better understanding of outcomes.

There is a very real difference between coercion and -- let's call them extreme vulnerability examples. The option that one is being coerced into is less than their best option, or else coercion isn’t needed. On the other hand, in the extreme vulnerability examples they’re choosing the best option available, even if it is not very good. Prohibiting the best option available opens up weaker alternatives, while prohibiting coercion opens up stronger alternatives.

So yes, I would call it free, it is morally permissible, and even desirable to allow people to sell their organs or prostitute themselves if they’re extremely vulnerable. Preventing poor people and sick people trade money for organs keep the poor poor and the sick sick.

2. "Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?”

The answer to this is actually no. Minimally, I don’t think it is morally permissible to sell drugs to a drug addict. I do find it morally permissible to offer a worker $1 a year to work on a farm you inherited. Why would he take $1 if it weren’t the best of his available alternatives? Would it be better for me not to give him the job if his alternatives are starvation, prostitution, or a $.99 a day job? Nobody else offers him better alternatives, so the fact that I pay him a dollar cannot come packaged with the moral responsibility to pay him more than a dollar.

The question at hand breaks through at least one libertarian barrier. Some exchanges are not morally permissible. However, in order to justify government force one has to also show that 1) violence is an appropriate way to respond to this moral impermissibility (by appropriate I mean both morally permissible and constructive) And 2) that realistic government uses its power in such cases without corresponding uses in cases where violence is not permissible.

I think the author falls into the trap of assuming that if the non-government sector is imperfect, then that justifies the use of the government sector. That morally impermissible things can happen, and probably will happen under market conditions does not justify the permissibility of the government sector.

By the way, general economic growth ensures that these grim situations don’t happen. The standard of living could not be increased from the level of year 1800 poor to the level of the poor of today through legislation. The standard of living for the poor of today is drastically higher, and there is no plausible argument for why  legislation directed at distribution were the cause.

3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?

No. But I anticipate that I do a lot less asserting off the top of my head what CEOs, teachers, and McDonalds workers “deserve”. I have no mechanism to identify how deserved each person’s lot is. I do have efficiency to go off of though, and I find it unlikely that boards of directors are paying more than what is efficient for CEOs.

The author explains that if the rich keep giving their money to their kids, then money stays in the hands of the few. This is fuel for the “they don’t deserve it” emotions. The fallacy is in what economists call the money illusion. People incorrectly think of money in nominal, rather than real, terms. So the rich all get together at the Republican party meeting and chant, “buahahaha, now we have all the green pieces of paper and all the poor people get stuck with those lousy goods and services.” People are giving them little green pieces of paper because they’re providing wealth, and when one of them creates ways to divert those little green pieces of paper in their direction, the value of those little green pieces of paper goes up.

What about inheritance? Well when a rich person gives their money to a poor person, that isn’t morally repugnant. That doesn’t change if the poor person happens to be their offspring. The children of the wealthy didn’t do anything to earn their inheritance, but neither did the pauper who happened upon a large sum of money but when people hear about that they think it’s just dandy. Besides that, parents tend to be more productive when they can pass on their wealth to their children, and their children tend to inherit the intelligence and conscientiousness that helps put that money to good use anyway.

People’s capacity to produce wealth differs, but the extent that it is luck is a lottery is exaggerated. It is largely an extent of choices. My observation of my co-workers is that they either chronically made bad choices, did not value money very much because not everyone is racing to the same get rich finish line, or they were young and went off to better things. There were few who were there as a result of something other than decisions. Most people think they’re being good people by never questioning the poor’s presumptive status as victims, but are they being intellectually honest? I would prefer they turn their attention to people who are actually poor or can’t help themselves. That means people from poor countries, the homeless, the disabled, and children. That excludes McDonald’s workers and their equivalents.

Reductions in welfare cannot be a contributor to median income stagnation. Welfare is targeted at the lowest economic bracket, and unless you think it is boosting them up to $50,000 a year, welfare does not change median income.

The magnitude of funds which the lottery (economy) is capable of dishing out is a function of production, which is a function of capital, which is a function of profit.

The idea that government would be able to anticipate that consumers would one day value Edgar Allen Poe’s work treats government like it is omniscient. Again, it isn’t market versus perfection. It is market versus government relative to perfection.

4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?

No. But no libertarians I’ve ever met believes that. No libertarians I have ever heard of believe that all free choices are moral. Is the author thinking of libertines?

People still have moral obligations if they don’t have government. Does the author think that if libertarianism doesn’t cleanse the world of immorality then it is false? The entire critique if filled with that assumption.