Me, Gilens, and Salon

Since when are the rich libertarian? Apart from a few pockets of idealism like Hollywood or rare individuals like Bill Gates, their policy preferences generally reek of rent-seeking and lobbying for state power to set up barriers to entry for competitors. Libertarianism is just convenient rhetorical cover for them.

@Fazal Majid,

Caplan’s argument is not that the rich are libertarian, just they are more libertarian than anyone else. Really his more specific focus in Myth of the Rational Voter was on the educated which is closely correlated with wealth in the modern developed world. Education leads to greater support for social liberalism and efficient economic policies than the general public. That’s not really saying much. Whatever rent seeking behavior you see among the rich is reinforced and goes even further among the less educated masses. Myth of the Rational Voter goes into these issues in a lot of detail so I do recommend it.

@Maniel

The landed gentry are not the exact same group as the modern rich and educated. The industrial (and now post-industrial) bourgeoisie are in many ways a different class. Also while there are plenty of things to complain about nowadays, don’t fall for that pessimistic bias Caplan worries about. When aristocrats and landed gentry were solely in charge, serfdom and slavery were common while laws viewed women as little more than property of the males in their lives. In the 19th century voting rights expanded and so did economic freedom. The public did screw up some things (wealthy industrialists were against Southern Jim Crow laws while poor whites and the old Southern landed gentry were in favor), but it’s far better to be a citizen of a modern liberal democracy than a subject of most early-to-mid 19th century or earlier governments.

Bryan, I thought you were pretty clear in previous posts that the rich are *not* voting in a self-interested manner (and in fact no one seems to). They simply vote in a more libertarian matter.

Your critics seem to have missed your whole point.

Well, he might have obscured or omitted an awful lot, and his analysis seemed pretty superficial, but at least somebody at Salon read some of your old blog posts and thought about them long enough to craft a hit piece out of it.

@Chris H
Thanks for the response. Yes, of course, we’ve seen evolution in our morality and in many of our freedoms. I question whether the expansion of voting rights – admittedly, necessary to a “free” society – has been cause or effect. And, since you brought it up, the bills for some of our progress have been steep. Take for example, the necessary (and I submit, inevitable) end to slavery. Today we lament (and rightly so) our involvement in discretionary foreign wars. However, our own “War Between the States” (to use the southern nomenclature) was a catastrophe that we, at our computer screens, can scarcely imagine. If I draw a rough equivalence between the Bourgeoisie and today’s Libertarians, I would imagine that many Northern leaders would have chosen to let the Southern states secede; you can write your own ending to that scenario, but we’re still paying the price for the Civil War. Moreover, the minor inconvenience of indigenous Americans was “solved” primarily through slaughter, eviction, and concentration camps; their 21st Century revenge – casinos – has been proof by exception.
One source of my original (sarcastic) comment is government programs, supported by “the masses,” that transfer money from working young to non-working elderly, from productive to unproductive, and from healthy to unhealthy with little provision for market incentives to reduce costs. Another source is programs like the war on the poor (e.g., the minimum wage) and the war on drugs which drive so many of our unskilled young out of the job market and into our prisons.
Good discussion – have a great day!

Caplan’s Tolerability Principle is an important contribution to the admittedly meager body of libertarian political thought, because it allows libertarians to qualify their rejection of democracy — even as it allows them to continue to favor “libertarian” dictatorships over non-libertarian democracies. If in the spirit of Caplanism we divide regimes into democracies and autocracies, and further divide each category into “tolerable” and “intolerable” versions, then we get four kinds of regimes:

Tolerable democracies, in which public policy responds to the preferences of the rich, rather than the majority;

Tolerable autocracies, in which public policy responds to the preferences of the rich, rather than other groups;

Intolerable democracies, in which public policy reflects the preferences of the majority, rather than the rich;

Intolerable autocracies, in which public policy reflects the preferences of groups other than the rich.

Did Lind just put words in your mouth? I would hope that you respond to this in a separate blog post or with a letter to Salon.

What a believe you advocate for is something so much more rich [pun intended]; you advocate for choice & liberty…individual preferences that are free from government meddling as long as the NAP applies. And if that’s not what’s being offered, that’s what’s intolerable.

@lowcountryjoe

If I were in Bryan’s position, I don’t know that I’d be grateful per se, but I certainly wouldn’t be worried about any article like this. Firstly and primarily, because the article is unlikely to persuade anyone of much – if it were written with the aim of actually persuading libertarians and undecided that libertarianism is wrong, then it would avoid the needless insults (e.g. suggesting that libertarian thought is an oxymoron) and smears of other notable libertarians, provide arguments rather than mere assertions that Bryan’s views are wrong, and be a lot more careful with facts (e.g. Nozick moved slightly away from the views expressed in Anarchy, State and Utopia but in no way did he reject libertarianism). This is plain jeering, aimed not at opening the minds of libertarians but at closing the minds of those who are opposed to libertarianism.

And secondly, even if it did persuade people, what political difference would it make if politics is indeed dominated by the views of the wealthy?

The malicious left need state democracy as the only tool left for them to violently impose their will and expropriation against the peaceful unwilling, now that the left’s traditional preference, absolute autocracy, is almost universally despised in the Western world.

So if you criticize that tool, as any consistent defender of individual autonomy must, you leave leftists with only free market means, friendly persuasion, which is wholly inadequate to their devisive zero sum game ends. When you attack state democracy, you threaten to strip the modern statist of all power.

And as you can see, the prospect of losing their last tool of violent oppression tends to make them a little hot under the collar, and more than a little careless.

Keep up the good work.

Professor Caplan’s hostility to democracy and preference for plutocracy is refreshingly candid. But there is a reason Lind doesn’t feel a need to aruge against it, and just presents it as a reductio of libertarianism. That reason is that most of his readers will recognize that if the rich have the effective political power, their interests will prevail at the expense of the non-rich. Of course, most of the non-rich don’t like that result, and will therefore take it as a reason to reject Professor Caplan’s utopia.

This does not involve a fallacious assumption that people vote out of self-interest, as opposed to self-expression. People vote their sincere beliefs about what will benefit the polity. But motivated reasoning as a cognitive bias ensures that we tend to think that what benefits us will benefit the country. That belief is *sincere*, but it is a motivated sincerity.

So the fact that the rich are “relatively libertarian” counts as some evidence that relative libertarianism benefits the rich more than the non-rich. Since positional goods are zero-sum, that means that to the extent positional goods are in play, libertarianism is bad for the non-rich (and worse for the actually poor).

Libertarians tend to believe that positional goods are unimportant, but that’s motivated reasoning. If they were unimportant, libertarianism would make sense.

Caplan never claimed most rich people (which is a broad demographic including far more than just the top entrepeneurs and corporate managers) are libertarian; he claimed (with considerable empirical verification, though the tie may be more to education and/or IQ than wealth) that the rich are *more* libertarian than the general public.

Churchill, like most modern day political scientists, doesn’t seem to have accounted for pre-WWI monarchical government/American republicanism and other such forms. Furthermore, the actual effect of individual votes is utterly insignificant, and even that ignores the fact that (for various reasons) virtually all mainstream Western political parties advocate a social-democratic ideology with primarily rhetorical variations. This is even more true in Europe than in the United States.

And even that is discounting the true power centers in the civil service bureaucracy, academics and media; while I realise Professor Caplan may differ from me here (though I agree with him a more democratic government would be even worse than the status quo), the elected officials do not direct or control the vast majority of policies within the United States, much less the even more leftist and bureaucratized EU and other Western countries. What exactly did Bush do that Gore wouldn’t have? Iraq?

Further, while prosperity has risen, the real question is whether this has risen because or in spite of the political developments in question; modern Russia is a lot richer than Tsarist Russia, but I think it would be orders of magnitude richer still had it remained under the Tsar. As for freedom, you might want to read Hans-Hermann Hoppe; the tax rates (and rates of overall legislation, including in non-fiscal areas) of even the most “absolute” or largest monarchies are miniscule by comparison to the modern democratic state. Pre-WWI Britain and America (even after the Progressive Era and its equivalents in the UK) hovered around 20% of GDP. I’d argue the non-fiscal gap is even more dramatic; there is nothing remotely on the scale of modern bureaucratic managerialism in pre-WWI societies (smoking bans, affirmative action, government control of education).

Also, whether or not autocracies believe in freedom is 1: Besides the point; the belief or lack thereof of autocracies has no bearing to whether democracies believe in such; they may believe more or less in it, but there is no necessary causal relationship between their two perspectives and 2: A vast overgeneralization. Read Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (particularily his excellent Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time) and the aforementioned Hoppe for details on these policies.

An autocrat, as both Moldbug and Hoppe have pointed out, would not necessarily have to have a libertarian or quasilibertarian ideology to pursue libertarian or relatively libertarian policies; why would a tyrant care about people saying racist things in public or want to blow money on much beyond keeping himself afloat? That’s an extreme and somewhat caricatured example, but there are historical and modern day cases; the latter include Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Liechtenstein (admittedly, Liechtenstein is Swiss-Republican in some ways, but the monarch is still far more powerful than in the pseudo-monarchic social democracies in the rest of Europe).

So to extend this principle, the USA is the richest nation and is literally full of rich people, so that therefore explains the tendency of the USA to vote more libertarianish policy-wise than the rest of the first world?

I think there is still a correlation/causation issue here, though. Is the USA the richest because it’s been the most libertarian (i.e. classical liberal) over an extended period of time, or is it the most libertarian because it’s been the richest?

I suppose noting that it wasn’t the richest for the first 100 years or so of it’s history might lead you to believe the more libertarian leanings are the cause, but perhaps annual economic growth rates during even those earlier years would provide evidence for the reverse again?

I agree that a substantial fraction of intelligent, educated people, left, right, or libertarian, are opposed to unfettered democracy. Nonetheless (as you partly point out), they often do this in vague and downright comically ridiculous terms, like confusing democracy with liberty or saying that “democracy requires officials insulated from politics” (i.e. Judges); while I actually agree that this is sometimes a better idea (and almost always a good one in non-demotist political structures), politics, as Moldbug has noted, *is* democracy.

If democracy is to mean anything coherent at all, it is to mean control of the political apparatus by public opinion. If you want a non-partisan civil service, then congratulations, you are one step down the anti-democratic path. While I personally think Dawkins is a clown for a variety of reasons, I’m reminded of this statement that atheists simply believe in one less deity than monotheists do.

The United States is wealthier than other nations for many reasons, primarily the following (in no particular order);

1: The better aspects of the American Revolution (skeptical accounts of which I’d quite live to see Professor Caplan delve into; if he can reject Columbus, surely he can do the same to Thomas Jefferson) resulting in decreased centralization and increased liberty, and thus greater economic and social (in the sense of social capital) growth. I suspect religion and the influence of Medieval Germanic cultures played a notable role too.

2: The massive and abundant natural resources of the bulk of the North American continent, the vast majority of which lie within the United States and far exceed any single nation in Europe, even leaving aside the millenia of depletion these resources had gone through.

3: The militarily and existing economic superiority and independence of the United States throughout the 20th century, resulting in favorable diplomatic and economic conditions from other countries.

You’re getting into a good point, Mark, when you note the obsession of upper-middle classers for nanny statism; this is one of the many reasons I think it’s simply a myth that the left is more libertarian than the right on civil liberties. My own position on the matter is a mix of Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Kinsella. Nevertheless, I think you have to keep in mind two things;

1: The rich, as I noted earlier, are an extremely broad strata; it includes doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, millionaries and billionaries, celebrities and Wall Street CEOs. The rich who support the policies you’ve mentioned are largely Blue State billionaries (Bloomberg, for example, though he’s far from the only case) or upper middle class academics/bureaucrats/journalists.

Further, one of Caplan’s points (which is indirectly alluded to in this very article), is that the rich (or educated, there is a very high degree of correlation up to a certain point) are more libertarian than the general public, and that the general public wants policies even less libertarian than that of the status-quo. Because the rich have greater influence than the rest, this trebles American (and presumably European and other Western) policy in a direction more libertarian than a more democratic level of influence would yield.

Lastly, I believe the empirical evidence in question is found in The Myth Of The Rational Voter, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of third party verification of it both pre and post-Caplan.