Underdogs, Secession, and Puns About Fundament
Over at Strike The Root, Stewart Browne writes:
In the battle between libertarians and statists, there is no question who is David and who is Goliath. There also is no question regarding who continues to win…Just as the rules of basketball favor those who are tall, strong, and have a good jump shot, the rules of democracy favor those who want to grow the government. For decades, we have been playing by Goliath’s rules, the very rules that allowed Goliath to rise to power in the first place.
The only way we can play away from our weakness is to get out of the electoral politics game altogether.
The article covers some of the recent buzz about secession, including a great quote from Ron Paul:
[Perry] “really stirred some of the liberal media, where they started screaming about: ‘what is going on here, this is un-American.’ I heard one individual say ‘this is treasonous to even talk about it.’ Well, they don’t know their history very well, because when you think about it… it is very American to talk about secession. That’s how we came in being. Thirteen colonies seceded from the British and established a new country. So secession is a very much American principle. What about all the strong endorsements we have given the past decade or two to all the republics that seceded from the Soviet system? We were delighted about it.”
But…but…they were seceding from that bad communist government. That makes them freedom fighters. Trying to secede from a good democratic government like the US, that sounds like terrorism.
Stewart then points out:
Six months ago, secession was a pipe dream. Now it’s a topic of conversation. And we haven’t even tried to push it yet.
Some of you might protest that last sentence. Some of you have been pushing secession all your life.
Good job to you. Keep it up.
But the vast majority of Americans who want smaller government are trying to accomplish it from within the system. It is to these Americans I speak. We need you to stop banging your head against the door and start trying to open it.
Whether it be Seasteading, Freestating, Cambrian Exploding, Panarchy Chasing, or just gold old fashioned Seceding, if we fully abandon our strategy of getting in and instead focus all that wasted energy on dropping out, we’ll be playing our own game rather than Goliath’s.
He cleverly suggests that we use the massive current tax burden as leverage – encourage people to get out of the pyramid scheme before it crashes down:
In addition to the massive tax burden we have always paid, each one of us is also on the hook for about $200,000 in future debt (or by other numbers, well over $300,000 per person).
It was this explosion of new debt more than anything else that caused growing anger at government to boil over into last month’s Tea Parties, where half a million Americans gathered to scream, Who is going to pay for this?
Secessionists are the only ones with a viable answer to that question. Secessionists can answer, “Not me.”
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What if some of the energy and money that in the past went towards winning our place in Washington instead went to spreading the word that anyone who wants out of this ridiculous downward cycle of national debt can get out if they join us in secession?
While I like the idea of using anger at the current massive borrowing to subsidize bad bankers, I am a bit more skeptical of the positive feedback loop he envisages:
As the strength of our position grows through steps 1 (abstain from voting) & 2 (public support of secession), an increasingly threatened state will lash out at us, but we will remain peaceful. The nature of Washington will be laid bare for all to see, our position will grow stronger, and the number of people willing to engage in Step 1 will grow.
As with all positive feedback loops, all it takes is enough energy on our part to get it started. Eventually, it will have enough momentum that it can’t be stopped. In the Soviet Union , it took less than a decade to go from a tyrannical central state to widespread, successful secession.
And whether the first big leap to freedom happens in New Hampshire, in San Francisco Bay , or outside of any geographical boundary, once the first group secedes, it will be much easier for others to follow. We shouldn’t worry if the first step is less than perfect (say, if Medicare is replaced with “Texicare”). If any single group in America pulls off real secession, the game is permanently changed. Secession is the great equalizer that counterbalances the dreadful incentives in a democracy. It’s been against the rules for 150 years. We need to put it back into play.
The phrase “The nature of Washington will be laid bare for all to see” sounds a bit like a common fallacy – that if we can expose the corrupt nature of the system, people will revolt. This viewpoint has numerous problems: many people don’t see the system as corrupt and never will, they don’t see alternatives as credible, and those in power are good at holding onto it, including dealing with the occasional bad PR. This is why I see the Agorist strategy of vague hope that the corrupt system will collapse as absurd – contrary to our intuitions about justice, a system can be completely corrupt yet totally stable.
But let’s not dismiss this argument completely. Showing the nature of the system may be hopeless, but showing alternatives through competition is quite another matter. Stewart is completely right that a single secession could start a powerful trend. If secession is a credible threat (and that’s a big if), states will have much greater negotiating power, and may be able to win enough concessions that seceding is unnecessary.
On the gripping hand though, while I’m certainly in favor of secession and the shrinkage of political units, I think it is wrong to treat seasteading and secession movements as identical. There are two important differences:
1) Leaving vs. Taking. Creating a floating city in international waters is using the existing exit rights of emigration and movement of capital. It operates on no-man’s land which is largely unusued and unclaimed. Seceding, on the other hand, is taking away land currently controlled by the largest military in the world and claiming it for a new political entity with far less military strength. Yes, it’s historically justified – but politics is a consensual creation of the human mind, and psychologically it feels very different and is far more likely to be stopped with violence. We had this argument 150 years ago, and the anti-secessionists won.
2) As I argue in my dynamic geography paper, the ocean is a different medium from land, and one which is fundamentally more conducive to liberty and diversity in government. Secession has the enormous short-term advantage of not requiring us to rebuild civilization someplace new. It has the enormous long-term disadvantage of being built on terrain with fixed geography which naturally leads to borders and exploitation of trapped citizens. Bad government has powerful systemic advantages, and to beat it, we need to change the rules of the game. I believe that moving to the oceans does this more fundamentally than secession (literally!), although admittedly at high cost.
Still (to continue my waffling), I find secession far more promising than folk activism, and I hope these ideas continue to spread. There is no sure route to better government, and so we need a diverse portfolio of strategies. Secession increases competition among governments, and that’s our best chance for a better world.
People Will Migrate to Avoid Onerous State Taxes
Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore report in today’s WSJ:
…the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, “Rich States, Poor States,” published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.
Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.
Billionaire Leaves New York for the Sunshine State
From the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle:
Rochester-area billionaire Tom Golisano said he’s had enough of New York’s high taxes and is changing his residency to Florida — where he figures he’ll save a stunning $13,800 each day in personal income taxes.
“I can put that money to a lot better use, whether it be charitable contributions or even to try to change the system,” the Paychex Inc. founder and three-time gubernatorial candidate told reporters after delivering a speech Thursday at the Hyatt Regency.
Golisano, 67, owns a home in Naples, Fla., where he already spends three or four months a year, and said he had considered changing his residency for some time. But after the new state budget increased income taxes on the wealthy, “It was a very quick decision.”
Changing his residency to Florida, one of seven states with no personal income tax, will save him at least $5 million a year, he said. Forbes magazine last year listed Golisano’s wealth at $1.7 billion.
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New York has the highest combined local and state taxes in the nation. Golisano said he expects other wealthy New Yorkers to leave.”The state has to develop a spending attitude that will make it competitive with the rest of the country,” he said.
Do Economists Believe American Democracy Is Working?
Not really–so say 302 members of the American Economic Association in a survey conducted by William Davis and Bob Figgins. Their results are presented in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch. The weird upshot is that, despite being cynical about the political process and its stupendous misfires, economists suffer from a status quo bias with respect to policy proposal. Dramatic institutional reforms are rarely, if ever, considered. Given the survey results–that even economists who vote for Democrats are skeptics–the authors suggest this preference for orthodox policy proposals must come from somewhere other than a deep abiding faith in the democratic process. Explanations range from focal point bias to institutional conservatism, among others. (Folk Activism, anyone?)
Davis and Figgins write:
On every pertinent issue in the survey, a majority (again, usually a large majority) of economists who identify themselves as Democrats express what can only be described as a cynical view of the political process. This finding certainly goes against the suggestion that economists, because they are social democrats, have confidence in America’s political process to improve social welfare. An appropriate story line for describing the survey results might read as follows—
Politics in America: A place where special interest groups exert influence over politicians who use creative public discourse with economically incompetent or ignorant voters in an effort to be re-elected, and where the eventual policy consequences are often not beneficial, except to special interests and politicians.
Now Davis and Figgins conducted the survey in 2006, well before crisis, stimulus, and bailout, and yet (and yet!), even in those halcyon days of Dow 11,000, economists of all political views were not impressed with American style democracy. All agreed one bad policy follows another. One wonders how they would update their beliefs in the age of turbulence. Perhaps the more democratically minded participants would sing a more optimistic tune now that BO is in office. Who knows. But here, far away from platitudes to the wonders of democracy, I take this as evidence in favor of dramatic reform. Here, we try to cure the disease. This survey tells a strange story…It is as if doctors diagnosed a disease and then refused to offer a beneficial prescription lest they insult some sensitive soul.
Choosing the Non-Libertarian Good Life
Michael Strong notes below that a Cambrian explosion in governments might yield “non-libertarian” communities. I’m reminded of a documentary I watched many years ago on the divisions in Israel between secular and Orthodox Jews. There was a political power struggle being fought over what rules ought to apply in public places on the Sabbath. The Orthodox Jews wanted no driving along certain roads whereas the secular Jews held the opposite view. In the end, the secular Jews won. The last statement made in the documentary was by an elderly Orthodox gentleman who asked, “Can there not be a single place in the world in which the Sabbath is rightly observed?”
(I might have gotten some of the details wrong since I’m going from memory.)
That question really resonated with me. Sure, he was supporting a very restrictive policy, something I would probably oppose if I lived in Israel. But in this wide world of ours, he had no place he could call home and truly live the good life, not in the way he defined it. He was forced to accept the outcome of a political struggle, and this political struggle is venerated in this modern age as a progressive institution. Doesn’t this seem, at least somewhat, less than ideal? Shouldn’t there be a place somewhere on this giant rock of ours where the Sabbath is observed according to ancient customs no matter how superstitious they may appear to the rest of us?
Instead of voting in a majority-take-all decision, doesn’t it make more sense to simply draw a line in the sand and say, “You all who want it done this way, come on this side of the line; everyone who wants it done the other way, go to the other side of the line”?
Strong’s earlier post on the subject can be found here–Editor
Some libertarians seem to believe that once they have the right to smoke pot and not pay taxes, they’ll have all the happiness they need. And for some individuals, that may be true. But the most profound benefits of a Cambrian explosion in government will be that not only their preferences, but also the preferences of Mormons, fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, and others will be allowed their most complete fulfillment.
Of course, mentioning fundamentalist Muslims is apt to trigger the deepest fears of many. As we develop a Cambrian explosion in government we will need to work within a framework in which the initiation of violence is not allowed by other entities in the global system. In theory, this rule applies to the existing anarcho-nationalism that we see in today’s world. But there is reason to believe that there may well be less of a propensity to initiate violence in an anarcho-entrepreneurial world than in the present anarcho-nationalist world.
To begin with, the entrepreneurial creation of governments, with free entry and exit, would allow for a rapid increase in opportunity and a rapid decrease in poverty around the world. Insofar as hatred and violence feeds on a poverty and a lack of opportunity, thousands of new entrepreneurial legal systems will allow millions, and if needed billions, of human beings to migrate to places where they can get a life. Gracia Burnham, an American missionary who spent 377 days in captivity with Abu Sayyaf, an Al-Queda-related terrorist group in the Phillippines, said of the terrorists she knew so intimately:
So many of the kids weren’t bent on jihad . . . [in a world of extreme poverty, Abu Sayyaf was] . . . a career move. . . . whether they were bent on jihad or not, all those guys wanted was to die in a gun battle so they could bypass the judgment of God and go straight to paradise. If they couldn’t die in jihad, their next choice was to go to America and get a good job. (As quoted in Eliza Griswold, “The Believers,” The New Republic, June 4,2007)
Wealth and opportunity for all won’t instantly eliminate all terrorism, but there is reason to believe that it will dramatically reduce terrorism. Richard Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map:
Pentagon's New Map
Pretty much identifies present and future terrorism hotspots, from the U.S. Pentagon’s perspective, as those nations that are disconnected from global economic progress. Moroever, as Fred Turner’s clever article argues, really the solution to pretty much all problems is to Make Everybody Rich. A market in legal systems would allow us to do so relatively easily.
In addition, a market in legal systems will result in, among other things, educational systems that are optimized for diverse cultural backgrounds. Legal system entrepreneurs will want to attract the best human capital, but quickly they will want to develop optimal systems for the development of human capital. Entrepreneurial legal system creation will thus lead to the development of a global “Silicon Valley of Education.”
Education has been pretty much a government monopoly around the world since the beginning of the 20th century. Yes, one can start a private school, in some states with minimal regulations, but one is competing with a coercively financed system that is connected with various coercive barriers to entry. Some public schools have refused to accept transcripts from private schools that do not adhere to the system of curriculum and credits that is the norm in government schools, thus enforcing a de facto educational “operating system” standard with a much larger market share than Microsoft ever had. Over the last thirty years homeschoolers have had to fight for the right for their children to attend universities without receiving a conventional high school diploma, and numerous careers require legal certifications that are only available to those who have taken university courses. If Microsoft were government financed and, in some cases, the only legally acceptable operating system, and if “competing” operating systems were required to adhere to certain Microsoft-defined standards, in a legal environment in which at any time the government might increase the scope of legally-required adherence to Microsoft-defined standards, we would expect almost all “competing” operating systems to look more or less like the current Microsoft OS, with a small tweak here or there. There might be the small Linux hobbyist here or there doing weird stuff in isolation, with no expectation or hope of obtaining significant market share. This is pretty much the extent to which we have a “free market” in education, either K-12 or university.
But in a world in which each group or culture has an opportunity to develop its own educational approach, and it becomes obvious that some approaches are dramatically more effective than others, people will focus less on centuries-old resentments based on inequalities, and more on opportunities.
I’ll expand later on diverse ways in which an innovative global market in legal systems is likely to increase human happiness and well-being, in addition to eliminating poverty and creating a more peaceful world.
Innovation and Letting a Thousand Nations Bloom
We welcome back Michael Strong as a guest blogger for a series of posts. He is the CEO and Chief Visionary Officer of FLOW, Inc., and the author of Be The Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All The World’s Problems.–Editor
The primary reason that I was converted from left-liberalism to libertarianism was due to the unambiguous superiority of, in Hayek’s terms, “the creative powers of a free civilization” as compared to the public choice process. Once I learned to see how the cumulative effects of countless innovations takes place by means of a massive selection process, and that the necessarily cumbersome public choice process couldn’t possibly create the fantastic cumulative innovations that we see taking place through free enterprise, then “libertarianism” became a no-brainer, a necessary moral cause.
My favorite example of the comparison is the fact that by the mid-1980s a University of Chicago computer scientist could point out that any decent university in the U.S. had more computing power than did the entire Soviet Union, despite the fact that the Soviet Union had some of the best mathematicians on earth and had dedicated significant government resources towards developing a supercomputer to compete with the Cray. When one thinks of the thousands and thousands of incremental innovations that resulted in the U.S. IT industry, each of which not only required a scientific and engineering innovation, but also an entrepreneurial innovation to create low-cost, high quality components at scale, one realizes that it is absurd to expect teams of smart, frightened mathematicians in Soviet labs to compete with the U.S. entrepreneurial innovation machine. They didn’t stand a chance, and their obvious failure was not because they weren’t smart enough, but it was because there is no way that one deliberate government-mandated initiative (or four, or five, or twenty, or fifty government-mandated initiatives) can compete over time with a rich, diverse, open entrepreneurial ecosystem.
It is from this perspective that I am most excited by this blog’s concept of “Letting a Thousand Nations Bloom” and, even more so, by the concept of “Towards a Cambrian Explosion in Government.” To date, most critics of this blog seem to be missing this key conceptual frame. The point is not so much whether or not libertarians should give up entirely on electoral politics, or whether or not a “libertarian” state will remain “libertarian,” both of which have been debated here. The real point is more along the lines of “What kinds of legal system innovation will we see once we have a Cambrian explosion in government?” And based on the analogy with the IT industry given above, my bet is the over time, if we truly had a “Cambrian explosion,” we would see truly extraordinary innovations in legal system creation that would result in something analogous to Moore’s law in human happiness and well-being. Moreover, I predict that we will be as poor at predicting these outcomes as an intelligent observer in 1900 could have predicted the technological achievements of the 20th century.
Once entrepreneurial forces are released, we will see improvements in legal system innovation that compare in significance to improvements in technological innovation. Not all of these innovations will be in the direction of greater freedom; in many cases we may find that groups of people choose to have combinations of “freedom” and “constraint” that are completely unlike the combinations that we see in the world today. Even the terms “freedom” and “constraint” may come to seem as obsolete as “phlogiston” and “calx” today; we don’t even know if our existing categories will be useful once we see a massive explosion in legal system innovation.
I often describe myself as a “communitarian libertarian” because, unlike most “libertarians,” I’m all for social constraints, as long as people choose them voluntarily. As an educator, I used to believe that there was one right kind of education that everyone ought to have, but over the years I’ve seen individual students who were happiest (and got the best education for them) in military schools, religious schools, Sudbury Valley schools, Montessori schools, Waldorf schools, all male schools, all female schools, regular public schools, and more. Imelda Marcos had 4000 pairs of shoes; why shouldn’t we have more than 4000 different kinds of schools? Some of these schools tightly constrain behavior, and would in no sense be described as “libertarian” with respect to their internal functioning. But as long as the family (in elementary school) or the student (in secondary school) chose the school, and the school seemed to be a good fit, why should any of us criticize the choice any more than we should criticize what beverage someone drinks or what music someone listens to?
There is a booming industry in private communities in the U.S., and in many cases those private communities are highly prescriptive, providing less freedom of choice with respect to how one’s lawn looks, how one paints one’s house, etc. than is the case in non-private communities. It turns out that many people have preferences for community which include some type of uniform norms with respect to the appearance of the community. Again, if we believe that people should be allowed to choose their own intoxicants, why can’t we allow people to pick their restrictive covenants?
Likewise, if we allow a Cambrian explosion in government, we are likely to find many highly restrictive “non-libertarian” communities coming into being – AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE SHOULD BE HOPING FOR. As long as people are free to enter and exit a community, as long as they are not prisoners, then we should support the creation of radical diversity in legal system creation.
Compare a world in which all the world’s people had access to a significant market in government services with the world in which we live today. At present, the vast majority of the world’s population are, in essence, prisoners of their nation-state. If they are fortunate, they are born into a nation-state that has enough economic freedom to allow them access to a comfortable standard of living. But most of the world’s population are born in nations in which they may expect to be poor (though the booms in India and China are beginning to change that). Only a tiny percentage of the world’s population is really free to reside in the nation-state of their choice; that option is, in some ways, one of the ultimate luxury goods, but even there, the available set of options is remarkably limited.
Moreover, because the barriers to entry are extraordinary, at present the entrepreneurial creation of government is almost impossible (most of the interesting partial exceptions having been noted already at this blog). But just as the great IT innovations did not take place with the first developments in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, so too we will not see the order-of-magnitude improvements in human well-being until we have had a Cambrian explosion in government over several decades.
Hayek famously noted that the Left won because they dared to be utopian. Robert Nozick famously envisioned a libertarian Utopia of Utopias, a vision that libertarians have rarely developed. This blog is the first systematic context in which we have an opportunity to develop such a vision.
Federalism Resurgent
The United States was formed as a federation of preexisting states, and the intent of the Constitution was clearly to retain much power for those states. After the Civil War, however, the federal government increased rapidly in size and influence, and after The Great Depression the trend intensified further.
Recently, however, there has been a resurgence in certain quarters attempting to promote states rights, a tactic we support. A shift in power from the federal to state government in the US would be a structural change promoting competition between governments – it would Let Fifty States Bloom And Fifty Schools Of Thought Contend, one might say :).
One example is the Free State Project, which aims to concentrate libertarians in the state of New Hampshire. A 2004 interview with founder Jason Sorens makes clear the connection:
Jason Sorens: Another factor that caused this idea to occur to me was my own research on autonomous movements around the world. The fact that the regional or state level is becoming more important worldwide seemed to indicate that the same trend may happen in the U.S. — that the state level may be the level at which important political action takes place in the future..In the U.S. we’ve seen increasing centralization over time, but if other countries are any indication, the decentralization trend should come to our shores as well.
TA: With our federal government as far-reaching in scope as it is, how is it possible to make significant changes at the state level?
Sorens: Simply at the state and local level, many reforms can be accomplished — everything from privatization of education, to deregulation of utilities, to ending abuses of eminent domain and asset forfeiture.
But even further than that, we can begin to rein in federal power by using the state to challenge the federal government’s authority in many areas, from pursuing tenth amendment lawsuits, to passing state laws that render federal laws somewhat ineffective, to the more extreme possibilities of outright nullification or some kind of unilateral declaration of sovereignty.
TA: Do you think the Project has the potential to change things indirectly at the national level as well?
Sorens: I think so, for a couple of reasons. Most obviously we would have some federal representation and we may hold the balance of power on some issues. Also, when other states see that our reforms are drawing individuals and businesses, they may be forced to pursue those same policies in order to keep their tax base intact. And finally, I think there will certainly be a demonstration effect — that libertarian policies will create desirable outcomes, and citizens in other states will demand those same policies for their own governments.
Living freedom sooner, promoting competition, and converting people by example – that’s our kind of activism!
And more recently in a movement somewhat related to Ron Paul’s back-to-the-Constitution movement, we have seen states proposing (and in a few cases passing) sovereignty resolutions, reaffirming their rights as states under the Constitution.
While these resolutions are only of symbolic value (and had no effect when similar resolutions were passed in the 90’s), they do indicate a cultural trend. And Randy Barnett, a constitutional law professor, has pointed out in the Wall Street Journal that the states could call for a Constitutional Convention to add a Federalism Amendment to the Constitution:
In response to an unprecedented expansion of federal power, citizens have held hundreds of “tea party” rallies around the country, and various states are considering “sovereignty resolutions” invoking the Constitution’s Ninth and Tenth Amendments. For example, Michigan’s proposal urges “the federal government to halt its practice of imposing mandates upon the states for purposes not enumerated by the Constitution of the United States.”
While well-intentioned, such symbolic resolutions are not likely to have the slightest impact on the federal courts, which long ago adopted a virtually unlimited construction of Congressional power. But state legislatures have a real power under the Constitution by which to resist the growth of federal power: They can petition Congress for a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution.
The fists of Washington DC have a tight grip on the reins of power, so we are somewhat skeptical about whether they can be pried loose. But at least this strategy (unlike trying to take over the federal government) is built on a firm basis of increasing competition between governments.
The Middle-class vs. Democracy
Bryan Caplan at EconLog points us at a piece by Joshua Kurlantzick in Foreign Policy – The Bourgeois Revolution:How the global middle class declared war on democracy.
For years, political theorists have argued that developing a healthy middle class is the key to any country’s democratization. To paraphrase the late political scientist Samuel Huntington: Economic growth and industrialization usually lead to the creation of a middle class. As its members become wealthier and more educated, the middle class turns increasingly vocal, demanding more rights to protect its economic gains.
But over the past decade, the antidemocratic behavior of the middle class in many countries has threatened to undermine this conventional wisdom. Although many developing countries have created trappings of democracy, such as regular elections, they often failed to build strong institutions, including independent courts, impartial election monitoring, and a truly free press and civil society.
The middle class’s newfound disdain for democracy is counterintuitive. After all, as political and economic freedoms increase, its members often prosper because they are allowed more freedom to do business. But, paradoxically, as democracy gets stronger and the middle class grows richer, it can realize it has more to lose than gain from a real enfranchisement of society.
Soon after acquiring democracy, urban middle classes often grasp the frustrating reality that political change costs them power. Outnumbered at the ballot box, the middle class cannot stop populists such as Thaksin or Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Once the middle class realizes it cannot stop the elected tyrants, it also comes to another, shattering realization: If urban elites can no longer control elections, all of their privileges — social, economic, cultural — could be threatened.
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This cycle of protest and counterprotest, then, could be the most damaging blow inflicted by the middle class. Where rich and poor once worked together in fighting for democracy, they now wind up pitted against each other, leaving a permanent rift in society and an ominous cloud over their country’s democratic future — and over the future of democracy-building efforts around the world, as we struggle to come up with a new blueprint for making democracy work.
Rule by the ballot box tends to work better than rule by aristocratic or religious elites, but there is no guarantee that the majority will not exploit its power. While a return to monarchy or military rule will usually end up being a step backwards, I’m certainly sympathetic to the dissatisfaction that drives it.
Grow The Niche Or Create A Market?
Suppose I live in a country with a monopolized public education system. Local property taxes go to pay for local public schools, and private schools are illegal. Public schools educate students using methods and addressing topics which the majority approves of.
Unfortunately, I am not part of the majority. Perhaps I’m a Catholic or an un-schooler – I am part of a substantial minority with strong beliefs which are different from the norm about the appropriate subjects and techniques for grade-school education. Primarily, I want my own children to be educated according to my beliefs, but I also believe that most other children would do better under my educational system than the common one.
Now, there are several different routes I can take to address this issue:
- Try to convince enough other people in society of the merits of my educational beliefs to get a majority.
- Move to someplace where my beliefs are the majority.
- Advocate for a voucher system, charter schools, or some other system that offers more choice.
While (1) is certainly an option, it seems quite problematic. It requires a long, drawn-out battle before achieving any results. And it doesn’t end the monopoly system that is the real root of the problem – it just inflicts a different one-size-fits-all solution on everyone, which will get entrenched and be hard to change if new educational methods come along or preferences change again. (2) is clearly the most effective immediate solution, and (3) the best long-term solution, since it creates a market for education that will serve a variety of niches and change with the times.
So why is it that when it comes to improving government, libertarians are so obsessed with solution (1)? After all, we’re in an analogous situation. We have political beliefs with a following that is substantial, but far from a majority. Because we live under a winner-take-all political system, our substantial minority nets us no political power. Yet rather than advocating for a system which would give niche groups like us the government we want, most libertarians instead focus on trying to grow our niche until our preferences are the majority.
If you think about this in the context of any other industry, this is a ridiculous strategy. I’m unusual in wanting to drive a convertible, but I can buy one because there is a market for cars. If there was a single car produced for the entire country, wouldn’t it do me far more good to end that monopoly than to try to convince everyone of the joys of driving with the top down?
It’s like we’re so trapped in this winner-take-all system that the only way we can imagine getting a libertarian government is by becoming the winner. The virtues of markets over monopolies that we advocate in every other context get lost, and we forget that the point of a market is that everyone wins. We don’t worry about whether our preferences for restaurants, blogs, or wines are common, because it doesn’t matter – they get catered to anyway.
Libertarians need to remember the power of markets, and realize that we don’t need to ideologically conquer the world. We just need a market for government.
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom 