Some time back I saw a bumper sticker that, no pun intended, stuck with me. It said: There is no left or right. There is freedom or control.
I really liked it. Too often we get embroiled in arguments of liberal/progressive vs. conservative/libertarian and what I’ve been trying to do is filter the hot topics of the day not through those prisms, but through the idea of freedom vs. control.
Does ObamaCare make us more or less free? Does Cap and Trade make us more or less free? Did the stimulus bill make us more or less free?
I’m interested in your thoughts. Define your position on these topics, or whatever you wish to opine about, in the comments below within the framework of freedom vs. control. Are we more free or less free?
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A good axis to be sure, but it’s a biased axis. “Freedom” is a concept we all, no matter who we are, tend to associate with “good”, and likewise “control” with “bad”. Thus you’re casting a potentially balanced discussion into one that’s prematurely weighted.
Someone who’s in favor of those things you list might offer their own bumper sticker that says there’s no left or right, there’s only security or chaos.
I’ll grant that. Sure.
Then I want to see how the things I listed above make us more free.
I don’t see the security/chaos thing, how they’re opposites of one another, though.
But is the axis is biased toward freedom, then I’m doing everyone a favor, am I not? Let everyone cast their position as freeing and defend it as such.
why would i want to impose a bias on ideas this way? “doing everyone a favor” – hardly – you’re forcing a recast of complex policies into simplistic terms, and you’re still insisting freedom = good, control = bad, a dichotomy which doesn’t always apply.
that said i do define my liberalism as a liberating force in response to tyrannical forces. But while i agree with conservatives that governments can be tyrannical, and religions, I also grant that they can be liberating forces as well. And I also recognize other forces of tyranny that conservatives don’t, such as economics, poverty, and health.
the constitution is not my foundation document here, though it is fully consistent in my view with these ideas. the root principle i adhere to is indeed a libertarian sort of ethos – “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” if you like. But I also believe in the Tragedy of the Commons and the responsibility of all to ensure its vitality.
and, uh, welcome back, Kev :)
Thanks, Aziz!
Dean and I kissed and made up. Dean used tongue and I’m a little agitated about that but, hey, he’s a pretty man so I can’t get too mad.
The problem I see with it is that you wind up having to ask: freedom in WHAT AREA?
Most people are for freedom, and most people are for control. In my experience. It’s a question of where they want control and where they want freedom.
For example, liberals talk a good game about personal freedom but watch them start stammering when you ask about the freedom to work for whatever wages you want or to spend whatever money you accumulate in whatever way you see fit instead of having to give it to the state.
HOWEVER, for all their talk of freedom, watch conservatives furiously explain why I can’t hire illegal immigrants, or why there should even BE such a thing as “illegal” immigrants. Or why I can’t smoke crack. Or, in extreme cases, why homosexual acts shouldn’t be legal. Then it tends to become “obvious” to them that those are areas of freedom we should not have, or that those aren’t “freedom” somehow. Obvious to them, but not everyone else.
A more useful approach is usually a two-axis approach. A lot of people have used the two-axis system, and there are a lot of them out there (one of them, very popular with libertarians, makes just about everyone look libertarian). The best is probably the original: This one by Jerry Pournelle.
To paraphrase my favorite politician “Some might say that we need to reduce control to gain freedom, but I say this is a false choice.”
It is a false choice. Freedom implies control. But Control does not imply freedom.
Civilization itself is the process of giving up freedoms in order to allow humans to live together. You are free to swing your fist until my nose gets in the way. Without control over people’s actions, you have chaos and once you have chaos, the only people who will be free are those who are powerful enough to do what they want at the cost of other people’s freedom.
The real question is not freedom vs. control as it is liberty vs. security. That’s a far more accurate way to describe where Left and Right tend to collide, and because people have different tolerances for what liberty they are willing to give up to gain security, you end up with a pretty wide spectrum of ideological perspectives.
When someone says “people should be forced to pay for other people’s health care” they are choosing security over liberty. When someone says “The government has no business searching me just because I want to fly in an airplane” they are choosing liberty over security.
Liberty is a good thing. But so is security. Neither is “better” than the other, because without liberty life isn’t worth living, but without security living itself is problematic.
Now, even understanding that there is an unavoidable trade-off between security and liberty, that doesn’t mean that we can’t identify some basic principles, which is where people start getting crosswise with each other.
It’s all well and good to talk about “security” as a good thing, and insofar as I have to give up some of my liberty to gain an acceptable level of security, it’s a whole different thing to some (most) people when you say that I have to give up some of my liberty so that you can gain what you consider to be an acceptable level of security. I might not agree with your definition of security, and I damn sure might not agree that I’m willing to give up more of my liberty in order for you to achieve what you consider to be your acceptable level of security.
And that’s where we are with this health care debacle, in a nutshell.
Individual control vs. government control is a better division. After all, what most people think of as freedom is individual control. And Aziz can still make a poor argument about why we need more government control and less individual control without getting his panties in a bunch.
FWIW, all libertarians agree that 0% government control is not the answer, or else we would simply be anarchists. We do, however, think that percentage number should be as low as we can possibly get it without all ended up dead.
And Dean, I’m for everything you asked about. End the government entitlements and fussy regulations, and there’s no reason to not have a completely open border.
I think it goes something like this. I may be oversimplifying, or overlooking all kinds of intricacies like the ones in Pournelle’s axes, but this is how I see it at a glance:
http://www.grotto11.com/blog/axes-1.png
Axis 1 is between Liberty and Control, and Axis 2 is between Security and Chaos.
Now, we all want (presumably) to live in the quadrant of Liberty and Security. But that sounds like a pipe dream, doesn’t it? Just like the opposite quadrant, Control and Chaos, is like a vision of hell on earth.
The problem is that the axes are really not orthogonal to each other, conceptually; in practice, they’re a lot closer to parallel. So it looks more like this:
http://www.grotto11.com/blog/axes-2.png
Moving left to right along these axes, we get lots of outcomes that sit in the Liberty/Chaos (e.g. Libertarian) quadrant, and lots in the Security/Control (e.g. totalitarian) quadrant, but not in the other two. That’s because we travel along those two axes, and they’re really hard to break away from. When you go for more security, you inevitably get more control. And when you go for more liberty, you tend to get more chaos too. It’s really difficult to arrive at a stable solution that veers very far from either of the two axes and gets into either of the two other quadrants.
Phelps: Fair enough, but an unstated assumption in your view is that large pools of economic wealth are, somehow, not also large pools of power. But in a very-low-government situation we already know that’s what tends to happen: an elite few wind up with most of the money and thus most of the power.
Thus, the argument would go, that your “less government” advocacy actually ends up with less power for most individuals, and more power for a tiny handful. Intent or not, that’s what a lot of us are convinced is true.
So I’m sorry but to me the distinction of individual vs. government control doesn’t work. I view government as a strong safeguard for individual control, on economic matters more than anything, because the “free market” is and always has been a myth (all markets are always regulated by something or someone, and I do not mean an “invisible hand”) and true lassez-faire means LESS control for most individuals and MORE control for a tiny handful.
And that’s not an argument between control and freedom; that’s an argument about where control really resides. My change of point of view of economics–I really, REALLY think libertarians are wrong on very, very important things–has much to do with that. I believe you guys are advocating what you think will give you better control but will in the end give almost everybody way less.
Control and Chaos
I thought that was Somalia, or the Sudan, or what Afghanistan used to be. Both “control and chaos” and “hell on earth” since they have unaccountable tribal and religious warlords “controlling” everything and creating “chaos” for everyone but themselves.
That would be more convincing if there was a shred of historical evidence pointing to it, but I’m not aware of any, from the Macedonians to the Victorians to the Robber Barons. At every point, it was using that money to foster government regulation that caused the imbalance. There is no such thing as a monopoly without government coercion — even patents and IP are a government manipulation of the market.
Contract enforcement and a prohibition of initiating violence — that’s all I want from government.
Well there we go. I don’t know what you’re referencing regarding the Macedonians, but on everything else, I think the historical record is very clear that the trend is for wealth–and thus, POWER and CONTROL–to gravitate into a few small hands, disempowering the individual and allowing an elite or an oligarchy to have maximum freedom and the vast majority to have their freedom minimized. And I think that’s exactly what “lassez-faire” economics usually results in, which is why it inexorably leads to more control by a few and less freedom for the many. And which is why a democratic government can alleviate this by proper regulation of markets and proper wealth redistribution, because wealth (i.e. POWER) will otherwise, like water in a swamp, pool and accumulate unevenly, granting some individuals far more freedom and most others far less.
As for monopolies only happening because of government: before government regulation of monopolies, and anti-trust legislation, “the market” gave us a ton of monopolies. Because the “lassez-faire” approach made it possible for those with wealth to dominate a market and destroy competition, buying up all available resources and even undercutting smaller competitors by taking a loss until the smaller competitors were driven out of business.
I think history shows clearly that “the market” left to its own devices will inevitably drive us toward more control by a few and less freedom for the many. Fortunately, we have democratic government to help us address that. Not always as effectively as we would like, but…
And throughout history, they have done that by securing control over the monopoly on force (i.e. the government). That was my point.
Monarchy: One person with all the wealth
Oligarchy: Small group with all the wealth
Feudalism: Small group with most of the wealth
Republic: Small group with a lot of the wealth
Straight democracy: No one with any wealth to speak of (once the people vote to “redistribute” it all.)
It’s not hard to figure out where on that continuum I think is “as good as it gets”.
Name three that didn’t rely on government interference. Since there’s a “ton” of them, that shouldn’t be difficult.
Phelps,
> Name three that didn’t rely on government interference. Since there’s a “ton” of them, that shouldn’t be difficult.
I’d like to hear his list as well.
Here’s the list that comes to mind:
Standard Oil.
U.S. Steel
American Tobacco Company
I cheated by looking here.
Of course by Dean’s usual logic, these don’t count, since they are corporations, which are a government creation. But I think they would exist without government intervention, so I’m cool with the list. Of course it could be they were only feasible because of limited liability, which is purely a government creation.
I’m sure Ayn Rand would disagree with Dean’s notions about market created monopolies. And the Cato Institute has something to say, of course.
Yours,
Tom
If you take away trusts/corporations–which can indeed only exist because the state created the very concept of these paper entities, and sustains them through the force of law–then monopolies would indeed be much, much harder to create. Because then you’d require individuals to do all this stuff, or at least families. And individuals die or have problems, and families and partnerships quarrel and schism.
But the entire concept of monopolies came about through government efforts to regulate and limit the influence of trusts and corporations that were behaving exactly as I describe: intentionally buying up all or most of a certain resource, and relentlessly squeezing out all competition.
Now, there are those who argue that natural (“unregulated”) monopolies are a good thing, but historically when they actually existed people hated them, which is why we got anti-trust laws.
As for Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand (whose general philosophy I reject, but that’s not important here) opposed collectivism. Her first big novel, The Fountainhead, wasn’t Howard Roarke vs. Government, it was Howard Roarke vs. Corporations. She doesn’t spell it out that way but just look at who virtually all the antagonists are–and look at the architecture firm. You know, the one that altered Howard Roarke’s design, so he blew it up? Yeah. A corporation fucked with his design, and so he blew it up in a terrorist act and then ranted about the evils of collectivism. It was an anti-corporate manifesto. I’m weirded out how many of her fans simply don’t see this.
Historically, people have hated gays and ethic minorities, but that doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not they should be allowed in society.
> If you take away trusts/corporations–which can indeed only exist because the state created the very concept of these paper entities, and sustains them through the force of law–then monopolies would indeed be much, much harder to create.
You keep asserting this. I have seen no evidence or argument. Have I missed this in the archives?
I see no reason to believe this is true, and many reasons to believe it is not. As an example, various guilds lasted longer than their members, accepted new members and monopolized various economic activities without being a creation of the state. The state has created the concept of limited liability, but even absent that you can simply draw up a set of contracts and create a corporation without any state involvement at all – just like you can create a neighborhood association or even that oldest of corporations, a monastery.
People have been creating long lasting organizations without state assistance for a very long time. Even contracts have been enforced without state assistance.
Perhaps the most interesting examples I can give of organizations operating under a rule without government are pirates. Pirates operated using shares – and the captain has more shares. Pirates had rather sophisticates rules to prevent the captain from abusing the crew. And the rules were designed to handle the deaths of the principles as a very obvious necessity.
I have given examples from the most to the least saintly. Frankly, I don’t think you have thought this through, Dean.
Yours,
Tom
Guilds were certainly a powerful force in history prior to corporations, and they, too, derived enormous power from the state. If the King didn’t recognize your guild, guess what? Although a guild could still exert pressure outside the kingdom, in truth without the support of the Crown they could do little.
You could say similar things about the church. And in both cases, you could argue that these were proto-corporations.
But it was the state that came along and approved the idea that you would have this organization, granted by charter, which would exist by selling shares, with voting by shares. That is a state creation, and even now, to create a corporation, you have to file paperwork with the state and it has to operate by state rules. It is the state that also came along and said that these corporations are “persons” and have “rights” of their own. And it was and is the state that made it so very, very easy to form one; good luck forming your own guild 200 years ago, that had to happen through a whole host of organic processes and not just by someone filing some paperwork.
All of that stuff which defines a modern corporation is stuff that came about as an outgrowth of things the British and other European governments specifically did as acts of public policy. And in this country, they came along later and were viewed with great suspicion, especially by conservatives. Because once they got large enough, they were essentially headless. Adam Smith himself warned about this, he would have called it “absentee ownership,” which is something he railed against. He loved the individual businessman and partnership, but only insofar as those running the business were actually part of the community and actually part of running it.
Your example of the pirates is the strongest example I think, but even then, not really; what you had in that case were partnerships with a lot of partners, and if the partnership dissolved it would just do so. The corporation is an actual piece of property with a deed and owners and such.
No, there’s far more to the modern corporation than any of those other bodies and just about everything that defines the modern corporation that is different from those other entities you mention is that the state came along and set those rules. And continues to sustain those rules.
I really don’t know how this isn’t obvious. I’m at a loss.
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