I occasionally find myself pondering how libertarians agree and disagree with non-libertarians. How much disagreement is due to a deep divide in values, and how much is due to different ideas on how to pursue similar values? Of course, there is no single answer to this question, but broad trends can be noticed.
I’ve noticed one area where libertarians and leftist (broadly) agree on the nature of a problem, but come to very different conclusions on the best way to respond to that problem. I’m thinking of how the state tends to favor powerful and entrenched interests over the interests of the less powerful. Leftists usually describe this with phrases like “we live in a corporatist state, and corporations control the government,” while libertarians are more likely to use phrases like “regulatory capture causes the state to serve the interests of the regulated industry over the public interest,” but both sides are describing the same phenomenon here.
As an aside, I think leftists underappreciate how much libertarians share their concerns on this front. Those on the left will suggest libertarians advocate free markets and oppose economic regulation out of some kind of loyalty to or fondness of big corporations, but this is very far from the truth. For one, big companies don’t want an unregulated free market – they want the market to be regulated in their favor. Second, the more regulatory power the state possesses, the more incentive companies have to ensure that power is used in their favor. And third, the nature of politics ensures this is almost certainly how regulation will be used in practice. Milton Friedman expressed this well in the first episode of his Free to Choose TV series:
I do not believe it’s proper to put the situation in terms of industrialist versus government. On the contrary, one of the reasons why I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government industrialists take it over, and the two together form a coalition against the ordinary worker and the ordinary consumer.
Where libertarians and leftists disagree is in how to deal with the problem of this coalition between the state and corporations. Libertarians see this coalition as a strong reason to decrease the regulatory powers of the state – leftists disagree. Obviously, I think the libertarian approach makes more sense – and to illustrate why, let’s indulge in a nerdy sci-fi thought experiment.
Imagine Earth was being slowly invaded by body-snatching aliens, who replaced humans with identical looking alien agents who worked behind the scenes to advance the aliens’ sinister agenda. Let’s say the government has tasked the NSA with countering this alien threat. Unsurprisingly, aliens begin to body-snatch their way into control of the NSA.
What’s the best way to respond to this? One approach we should definitely not take is to say “Body-snatchers have taken over the NSA, therefore we need to increase the powers of the NSA so they can better protect us from the body-snatchers.” That would be a terrible idea – if the body-snatchers have already taken over the NSA, then increasing the NSA’s powers will only play into the body-snatchers’ hand. QED.
Leftists who believe we live in a corporatist state, and advocate for greater state control of the economy as a counterweight to this concern, are making the same mistake. Their position amounts to saying “Corporations control the government, so we need to increase the powers of the government so they can protect us from the corporations who control the government.”
Kevin Corcoran is a Marine Corps veteran and a consultant in healthcare economics and analytics and holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from George Mason University.
READER COMMENTS
robc
Oct 24 2022 at 10:35am
I have noticed this as very common. I think leftists and libertarians often agree on the nature of the problem (as you said, broadly), but their solutions are…well, I can’t describe it properly without using words this site doesn’t approve of.
I guess I should say “solutions” as they would generally make things worse.
nobody.really
Oct 24 2022 at 11:54am
Uh … QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum, or “which has been demonstrated.” The question posed is “What’s the best way to respond to this [alien body snatchers]?” I see no answer demonstrated. Yes, you correctly identify challenges with using government as a countervailing force. What you do NOT do is identify a better strategy.
I could readily demonstrate the police and courts are imperfect, and even systemically so. It is far from clear to me that we’d be better off without them.
Libertarians are great at point out how government falls short of perfection. But if libertarianism provides a superior alternative, wouldn’t we expect to observe libertarian nations dominating the globe (or at least global trade) by now? As I gaze around the globe for these dominant libertarian powers, I’m reminded of the (perhaps apocryphal) words of Enrico Fermi: “Where is everybody?”
Yet I observe few libertarian nations. Maybe that tells us something about the practical shortcomings of libertarianism as an alternative. QED.
Jon Murphy
Oct 24 2022 at 12:55pm
I don’t think that argument is as strong as many think it is. Most who make it are thinking in terms of level as opposed to tendency:
In general, the world has been moving in a liberal direction for much of the past 400 years. There have been hiccups, of course, but they tend to be relatively short-lived. Things have been moving in the liberal direction. Just because there still improvements to be made doesn’t imply the direction has failed.
Consider, by way of analogy, medicine. A goal of medicine is to cure diseases. One would be amiss to say “if medicine was so great, why do diseases still exist?” The problem with that statement is obvious: our medical knowledge is constantly improving (and suffering setbacks!). We’ve gotten much healthier along many margins. Just because we’ve not reached an ideal doesn’t imply no advancement has been made.
So, rather than a lack of liberal nations in the world, I think we see a relative abundance.
nobody.really
Oct 24 2022 at 2:36pm
I like the medicine metaphor.
We all recognize that physicians are corrupt. They use their powers to limit entry into the medical profession. Big Pharma buys their endorsement of medications such as Oxycodone. Yet, somehow, I rarely hear people advocating that we abandon the use of physicians. Reform, sure, but not abandon.
Thus, I find the body-snatcher metaphor simple-minded.
The US has long had problems with organized crime, and with hostile convert foreign agents. Indeed, there are countless examples of these hostile entities infiltrating or corrupting government agents. What to do? Corcoran assures us that the LAST thing we’d want to do is strengthen law enforcement and covert operations. But, rightly or wrongly, that was precisely what the US has done. It appears to have worked (though, given that we’re talking about the actions of covert agents, it’s hard to know for sure).
In his speech to the House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947, Winston Churchill said “Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all those others that have been tried.” Ultimately, the benefit of ANY strategy must be measured not against perfection, but against the alternatives. For the body-snatcher metaphor to work, we need not merely to find fault with the proposal to enhance/reform government; we need a BETTER solution. In the absence of a better solution, this just reads like conventional whining.
Jon Murphy
Oct 24 2022 at 2:45pm
Sure, but who is advocating abandoning? Kevin may or may not be an anarchist, but this post has nothing to do with anarchy. He is exploring regulatory capture and a proposed method for dealing with it.
Kevin Corcoran
Oct 24 2022 at 3:02pm
For the curious, on this topic I like Michael Huemer’s distinction between philosophical anarchism and political anarchism, as he laid out in his book The Problem of Political Authority. Philosophical anarchists hold that arguments for state authority fail and that the state holds no political authority, political anarchists hold that the state ought to be abolished. But philosophical anarchism does not by itself imply political anarchism. As he puts it:
Huemer’s book persuaded me on the issue of philosophical anarchism, but he didn’t persuade me about political anarchism. You’re right, of course, that this post had nothing to do with that particular topic (something I thought was clear) but it’s still an interesting topic nonetheless. But by most people’s lights, I’m not an anarchist because I don’t advocate abolishing the state.
Kevin Corcoran
Oct 24 2022 at 3:19pm
Perhaps you read through the post too quickly, or perhaps my reference was too brief, but I did, in fact, suggest (again, briefly) what a better solution would be. If you look back at the fifth paragraph, you’ll notice I said:
That is, when the power of the state has been taken over by the industry it’s meant to control, and it uses those powers, as Friedman suggests, “against the ordinary worker and the ordinary consumer,” then reducing the regulatory power of the state is a better solution to this problem than increasing it. Granted, I didn’t expand into great detail about why that will be a better solution in practice, but there’s only so much one can do in a single blog post! Still, your claim that I didn’t propose a solution is simply false.
Kevin Corcoran
Oct 24 2022 at 1:25pm
The point being demonstrated was not “what’s the best way to respond to alien body snatchers.” The point being demonstrated was why one particular method of attempting to respond to alien body snatchers, the method of increasing the power of agency the body snatchers control, would be counterproductive. I thought that was pretty obvious from the fact that the statement starts with “One approach we should definitely not take is…” but I guess that wasn’t as clear as I thought.
I agree! But I hope you don’t mean to suggest that libertarians merely point out the imperfections of government and just leave it at that? Because for all kinds of issues with government intervention – economic regulation, health care, police, courts, etc – libertarians don’t merely point out how the current system is merely less than perfect. On all these issues, libertarians have written countless essays, articles, and books proposing specific reforms and alternatives, and providing specific arguments for why these alternatives would work better than the current system. If you’re unaware of all of that, I can only attribute that to sheer lack of effort on your part. But if you are aware of all of that, I can’t fathom what you were trying to illustrate with that comment.
I don’t see why we should expect that? As a general argument, “If X is superior we’d already be observing it” is pretty weak. I’m sure as democracy was spreading, there were people who made that exact argument, and thought it was very clever (sadly, this would have been too early for them to have mics on hand to dramatically drop). Maybe if one was arguing according to very Panglossian version of the Whig theory of history, holding that history is an inevitable march of progress towards better and more enlightened systems, and also held that we are currently living at the culmination of that process, then you’d be making a pretty compelling point. But none of that appears to be the case to me.
nobody.really
Oct 24 2022 at 3:18pm
Great. And likewise, the entire fields of Antitrust, Industrial Organization, and Welfare Economics are dedicated to illustrating how, left to their own devices, unregulated markets FAIL to produce optimal results. If you are unaware of all of that, I can only attribute that to sheer lack of effort on your part.
Perhaps our differences of perspective simply reflect differences of lived experiences. Where I live, government regulates the price of electricity, natural gas, and water. Corcoran assures me that these regulators have been utterly captured by the relevant industries, and therefore each of these regulators must be authorizing monopoly rates at the behest of their masters.
If Corcoran lives in such a jurisdiction, I pity him. I don’t live in such a jurisdiction; my regulated utilities could charge me much more and I’d continue to pay with little reduction in consumption, as my demand is fairly inelastic.
(In fairness, if prices got high enough, I might finally get off my butt and investigate solar panels. So there’s a hat-tip to a bit of a libertarian remedy. But then, the ability to interconnect my solar panels to the rest of the electric utility’s grid is inexplicably authorized by government regulations. Why would the electric utility direct regulators to authorize such a practice? The overlords work in mysterious ways….)
Kevin Corcoran
Oct 24 2022 at 3:27pm
I am indeed aware of all that – but I never claimed that no such arguments exist, or that proponents of economic regulation never propose any such arguments, or anything like that. I do think the argument used in those fields fails to justify most of the conclusions they are often invoked in favor of (in large part because the often fail to account for public choice and regulatory capture arguments!), but that’s a separate issue. By contrast, you did suggest that libertarians only talk about imperfect government and don’t provide arguments for better solutions, which is just false.
Um…no, I didn’t assure you of that. That’s not even close to what I said. It’s so far removed from what I actually said, that the only things I can think of is that I’m either completely inarticulate when attempting to describe my views (always a possibility!) or you’re simply bending over backwards to misunderstand me and attribute views to me which I do not hold and have never advocated. In either case, this is a problem I don’t know how to solve.
nobody.really
Oct 25 2022 at 2:23pm
Great–and apologies for misunderstanding you.
To clarify: Do I correctly understand that you are NOT arguing that government agents are necessarily captured by outside interests, nor uniformly precluded from pursuing “the public interest” as they understand it?
Jon Murphy
Oct 24 2022 at 3:50pm
You do realize that the literature Kevin is referring to discusses the very problems with that claim? Indeed, there was a massive revolution in economic thinking that overturned those very results (starting with Coase in 1960 and including Buchanan, Tullock, Posner, Friedman, Director, Demsetz, Alchian, and many, many more).
nobody.really
Oct 24 2022 at 10:40pm
Uh … no–except that I have a passing acquaintance with the Coase Theorem. So perhaps Cochran is justified in concluding that I’ve failed to exercise sufficient effort to keep up on the literature. Lemieux keeps exhorting us all to read Buchanan–but I haven’t found any audiobooks of his yet. Plus, Lemieux keeps making Hayek sound so compelling, it’s hard to imagine when I’d get around to reading any of the rest.
Nevertheless, while I believe that there is a DEGREE of regulatory capture in all kinds of circumstances–surely judges come to identify with the attorneys they see on a regular basis, too–this does not lead me to abandon government. It merely becomes one more factor to weigh in the balance. Perhaps reading all these other scholars would lead me to a different conclusion–but reading all these other scholars doesn’t strike me as an especially likely scenario; I have no exemption from the laws of rational ignorance.
Jon Murphy
Oct 24 2022 at 3:55pm
nobody.really-
I think you’ve misunderstood the post. Kevin is talking about one particular proposed solution to the problem of regulatory capture. He has not claimed “regulators have been utterly captured by the relevant industries” nor has he claimed abandoning government.
Kevin Corcoran
Oct 24 2022 at 4:01pm
You are correct, of course. What nobody.really has been going on about is so completely disconnected from what I actually said that I have to second guess my ability to communicate clearly.
Henri Hein
Oct 24 2022 at 7:54pm
I have interacted with nobody.really on comments sections of various blogs over several years. I can testify that they are extremely well-read and knowledgeable. Not trying to speak for them, but I think you can assume they are well acquainted with the material you mention.
As for their comment, again, I cannot speak for them. Nevertheless, here is something that came to my mind: while it’s true that libertarians agree about the awfulness of government, and that many of them have proposed ideas for reform, it’s not true that they generally agree on the reform proposals. For every proposal from a libertarian, you do not have to look long to find another libertarian that disagrees with the proposal. Not only will many libertarians complain it’s not the best reform, some will even argue it’s not even advisable. Just to take one example: Tyler Cowen is against privatizing Social Security. With all this disagreement about these proposals, you can excuse non-libertarians for being confused about which are bona fide libertarian.
Kevin Corcoran
Oct 24 2022 at 8:32pm
I certainly do think that’s a possibility, which is why I also followed up by saying that if nobody.really is aware of the fact that libertarians don’t merely point out government imperfections, but do in fact suggest specific alternative and have a variety of arguments for why those alternatives would be better, then it’s unclear what point they thought they were making with that comment. Ideally, they’d cite some of those arguments and provide a counterargument to show where and how they fall short – that would make for an interesting discussion! But for now, I’d settle for at least an acknowledgement that such arguments actually exist.
You’re of course correct that there is disagreement among libertarians about specific remedies to specific problems – but that’s true of all groups. I also suspect that’s a good thing – if anything, political groups are too susceptible to falling into an intellectual monoculture and its prevailing groupthink. If one group is more likely than others to foster a larger degree of internal discussion and debate, that is (to me) a good sign of the movement’s intellectual health.
nobody.really
Oct 25 2022 at 1:38pm
I acknowledge the merits of SOME libertarian policy remedies—such as getting government out of the way when market forces can solve problems better. As for counterarguments, it is unclear to me that removing government necessarily improves matters when I see no market remedy–to pick an example at random, say, when alien body-snatchers are invading….
robc
Oct 25 2022 at 3:50pm
Just because you don’t see one, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
For example, in the body-snatcher scenario, getting law enforcement out of the way opens up the line-of-fire for the rednecks who have good marksmanship* to get their shots off. And there is clearly a market for shooting aliens.
*How many times have you seen a story about cops firing dozens of shots and 2 hitting their intended target?
robc
Oct 24 2022 at 9:10pm
robc’s two rules of libertarianism:
1. Everyone agrees with libertarians about something.
2. No two libertarians agree about anything.
nobody.really
Oct 24 2022 at 10:53pm
Ha! robc is abundantly clever, and Hein is abundantly kind–perhaps too kind in this instance. I like to think of myself as well-read and knowledgeable–but the world is vast, so even well-read, knowledgeable people will necessarily lack knowledge of many areas. And the nature of knowledge is that I can’t know what I don’t know–that whole “unknown unknowns” thing.
Anyway, I still find fault with Corcoran’s metaphor. That doesn’t mean that Corcoran doesn’t have a point. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he does, and I have simply missed it. Or maybe he does, but he needs a better metaphor to convey that point to minds such as my own.
robc
Oct 25 2022 at 9:59am
I had one clever moment about 15-20 years ago, and have been spamming the internet with it ever since. So “abundantly” goes too far.
So while neither is literally true (although the first is close), both have strong elements of truthiness to them.
nobody.really
Oct 25 2022 at 1:13pm
Corcoran:
nobody.really:
Corcoran:
Deepest apologies. Somehow I failed to recognize this as your proposed solution; in retrospect, I don’t know how I could have missed it.
So if the world were being invaded by alien body-snatchers, the libertarian response would be to shrink the power of the state. To his credit, Corcoran doesn’t hide his meaning; I couldn’t ask for a clearer summary.
Thanks to all for the discussion.
Walter Donway
Oct 24 2022 at 2:25pm
Interesting as far as it goes. I agree that one of the problems with government regulation is regulatory capture. But the analogy falls apart. The aliens are criminals. They are killing people, snatching their bodies. This is not a regulatory challenge. It is a law-enforcement challenge and libertarians, although no anarchists, endorse the role of government in law enforcement–against murder. And so would libertarians eliminate law-enforcement because it was being infiltrated by aliens? Then what?
In this case, government would be justified in supporting research aimed at solving the law-enforcement problem. Government, as long as it was focused on law enforcement, would in fact be justified in taking any steps at all short of violating the rights of non-snatched people.
The problem has nothing to do with regulatory capture. It does illustrate the broader principle that if any agency assigned to control individuals causing a problem is being taken over by those individuals, we have a problem.
But if the agency being taken over is law enforcement, we have a problem in a different category from regulation.
Jon Murphy
Oct 24 2022 at 2:47pm
If law enforcement is taken over by criminals, it should (and, historically, has been) abandoned.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Oct 24 2022 at 3:49pm
As a sort of Leftist (at least by Libertarian standards), my problem with Libertarians is in trying to see where the come out on specific problems. Granted Public Choice problems, regulatory capture, etc., what if anything should the US Congress do in light of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere? How should the DFA regulate the sale of food and drugs if at all? Should tax money be used to provide or finance “education?” If there is a state that expends money for anything, what kind of taxes should it impose?
Are any principles beyond distrust of state action needed to decide any of these questions? If so, what are they?
robc
Oct 25 2022 at 2:29pm
Those are mostly easy questions…the first is the hardest. I propose taking a wait and see approach. Maybe in a few decades a Manhattan Project type approach will be necessary, but I bet against it.
After that I answer, not at all, no, single land tax, yes, and principle of self-ownership respectively.
David Seltzer
Oct 24 2022 at 7:28pm
Person A: Corporations own the government.
Person B: What an outrage. Corporations should be regulated!
Person A: By Whom?
Person B: The government!
Mark Swanstrom
Oct 24 2022 at 7:48pm
The best way to get money out of politics is to get politics out of money. As long as government has the power to pick winners and losers through regulations and subsidies, that power will be abused by businesses, politicians, and the regulatory state.
Dylan
Oct 27 2022 at 8:36pm
While nobody is more eloquent than I and nobody is more well read, I’d like to try and add a thought anyway.
I think Kevin misidentifies the area of agreement. If I’m to stereotype the views of the left, I think it would be that corporations have too much power. Regulatory capture is just one of the symptoms of that power. But, the feeling is that in the absence of strong government power to regulate, corporations tend towards monopoly and the outcomes would be even worse for the average person and in particular for the least well off. I happen to generally disagree with this assessment, but I think that is the sentiment that you need to address.
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