Blue Staters don't support quasi-libertarian policies for libertarian reasons, they support those policies because they WANT to violate property rights. Their pro-criminal anti-property stance is the reason they support drug decriminalization but not drug legalization. When people try to get rid of homeless encampments, Blue Staters call it "criminalizing homelessness." The violation of property rights is the point.
I think you're making the same mistake that those on the left (of which I am a part) make when they think that the primary reason (at the first order ideological level) that conservatives are anti-abortion is that they want to restrict the liberty of women.
There's a very strong current of principled social liberalism within the American left. Just empirically, Democrats are clearly and consistently more pro immigration than Republicans, and are becoming more pro free trade.
I'm personally very happy to ally with Libertarians on issues like immigration, drug policy, housing, doctors unions and excessive restrictive pharmaceutical regulation, and free trade while also thinking that we should increase taxes to fund a more expansive welfare state, thinking that everyone should have access to healthcare that doesn't bankrupt them, and that we should have more onerous environmental, financial and antitrust regulation.
I think the only "principled social liberalism" from those on the left is when those principles also align with increasing the power of the Democratic party.
If Democrats thought increased immigration would decrease their power, they would be just as adamantly opposed to it as they are against school choice.
(To be clear, I think Republicans are similarly hypocritical.)
The stance of the Democratic Party is that they want:
1) as much immigration as they can get away with without losing elections
2) that preferably those immigrants will settle down somewhere other then their own back yard. Ideally in a red or purple state they hope to turn blue, but at a minimum not literally in their neighborhood.
I don't have to talk libertarians into this, but at the national level the most useful thing that could be done is to get rid of the SALT deduction. SALT subsidizes the Blue State model over the Red State Model. Moreover, it subsidizes the worst aspects of the blue state model. The same could be said about mortgage interest deduction.
Eliminating the SALT deduction makes a lot of sense because its existence creates the perverse incentive for state and local governments to grow and tax excessively with the knowledge that the tax liability they impose on residents will be deducted from those residents' federal tax bill. It's less clear to me how the mortgage interest deduction is comparable. If the argument is that those who pay higher mortgage interest tend to live in high COL locales that skew politically leftward, that seems to be a bit of a non sequitur unless one can show a causal link similar to the one that exists with SALT. In the absence of a clear causal link to a perverse incentive, the better policy seemingly would be one that defaults to lowering personal tax liability, and thus favors retaining the mortgage interest deduction.
It subsidizes the price of housing, which is exacerbated in blue states because of their actions.
I consider it pretty interchangeable. If one raises property taxes one reduces the price of the home. Deductibility of either the interest or the taxes raises it. If you allow interest deductibility the local government can raise property taxes while keeping price constant.
In general one of the most out of control factors in blue states is that the local education establishment has turned the property market into a cash cow for itself, and any subsidization of these high property values ultimately tends to flow towards that.
That's an interesting theory. Do you have any evidence to support the notion that local authorities consider the deductibility of mortgage interest when deciding to raise property taxes? Likewise, do you have any evidence for the notion that eliminating the deduction would reduce property values? It seems to be a small bucket of water poured into a vast ocean when compared to the drivers of property values in high COL areas, such as access to high-earning jobs, access to quality healthcare, public transit, quality of schools (public and private), lot size and home size, and other factors. Limiting SALT doesn't seem to have reduced property values or cost of living. I'd be curious to see the evidence.
What I observed in the northeast is that property taxes were raised quite a bit over the decades, the tax rate% is at least twice or more then when I was growing up. School budgets increased way beyond inflation.
Let us posit a 2% tax rate. Every thirty years that’s 60% the value of the house. If you’ve got SALT and a 32% marginal tax rate that is around 20% of your homes value. That ain’t nothing. Many places in The northeast have gone beyond 2%.
In CA where property tax is capped, you see it in the form of the states ridiculous income tax, also salt deductible.
In general I find governments that have some sort of sweet rent they can extract (like Silicon Valley or Wall Street) tend to tax just a little beyond what would be in their long term interest. To the extent they can get a so-40% discount it makes them bolder.
I don't disagree with what you've said. I just find it unlikely that paying tax at my marginal rate on my mortgage interest would lead either to (a) renewed fiscal discipline and lower taxes from state and local government or (b) materially lower property values in light of other factors in the housing market. Instead I think I'd see my overall cost of living increase due to the loss of the tax deduction with no benefit to balance out that cost. I think eliminating or capping the SALT deduction makes sense because of the perverse incentive it creates at the state/local level; I do not see the same dynamic with regard to the mortgage interest deduction. But perhaps I've misunderstood.
A lot of this argument is riding on (1) arrogantly attributing these successes to a particular political activism strategy, and (2) assuming that strategy to be generally effective instead of mostly particular and contextual.
Instead, it's quite plausible that the activism didn't do much of anything and was pushing on an open door. That is, the context is one of Cowen-esque "backlash" and unwisely over-rapid and counterproductive leftist overreach and progressives - self-blinded by their epistemic and social bubbling - abusing their disproportionate control over the public education system to implement aggravating new, ideologically-loaded policies which provoked many conservative frog parents and red state politicians to want to hop out of the boiling pot and create off-ramps from the default public system (with which they were formerly sufficiently comfortable to grudgingly tolerate) as soon as possible.
Changing activism strategies when this kind of related context is changing at the same time is not at all strong evidence for the effectiveness of the strategy. That's like taking credit for the greater relative success of a food-advertising campaign directed at soldiers initially before but now returning from a long march. "But look at how much more food they bought!" - Yeah, because after the march they were really hungry not because of marketing but because of, you know, all that marching!"
Yeah if I had to point to successful activism at all it would be Rufo style. COVID and LibsofTikTok have done more for school choice then CATO ever will.
I would say the real political lesson for libertarians is to understand the way that, for their target audience of people on the margin of supporting an effectively liberty-expanding reform, the general only serves as a socially acceptable cover story for the specific. Libertarians may be motivated by and arguing for abstract principles of liberty which could be generally applied to everyone in an impersonal and context- independent way, but, alas, these days, most people are not strongly motivated by appeal to these abstract principles, and only want to be able to deploy them as seemingly not self-interested, """principled""" ways to achieve their personal objectives. So, for example, with regard to "school choice" the general principle is liberty but the specific interest is the desire to either abuse control of the public schools to indoctrinate and oppressively impose progressive ideology, on the one hand, or escape such imposition, on the other. Arguing for """liberty""" in a generalized, neutral, principled way will have zero resonance with the first group, and only strike the second group - in that kind of cognitively automatic, subconscious / subliminal manner of social psychological processes - as a rhetorical focal point of well-crafted, plausibly deniable language upon which they can converge for coordinating the furtherance of their common special interests.
So, when the issue in any particular area is leftist domination, one may argue "liberty" in general, but only effectively to conservatives in a way that winks and alludes to their specific, particular interest in escaping what the leftists are doing to them, and vice versa. But one is not going to be able to use sly rhetoric with clever linguistic alterations to argue for more liberty to both groups at the same time. It depends mostly on who is in practice exercising power over whom. Instead of just general "liberty", what members of the relatively more coerced faction really want is freedom from the other faction.
I think both competent activists and opportunity are needed. DeAngelis would not have enjoyed as much success had the teacher's unions not behaved so terribly during Covid, but I don't think there would've been as much progress legislatively had DeAngelis not existed to harness the anger and point it in a legislatively productive direction.
Whether or not the work of a political activist is indispensable is a separate question from whether or not causation for a particular success can be fairly attributed to a particular kind of rhetorical strategy. Advocates of such attribution bear the burden of proving they are not engaging in the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. My position is that DeAngelis and Caplan have not met that burden.
I think they should make peace with conservative activists.
For instance, it's clear that Chris Rufo style culture war arguments do a lot more to advance school choice then CATO style reasons. Now Caplan is a fan of Chris Rufo, but a lot of libertarians aren't. They don't like getting into the culture war. They want their arguments to be something both sides, though more specifically people in their social circle that generally lean culturally left, can get behind, rather then "blue haired tiktok weirdoes want to trans your kids behind your back, support vouchers so they can't do so."
My own view on this is that CATO style reasoning is self defeating. If you believe in something like the Null Hypothesis, that education doesn't change IQ and is all just pointless free daycare, then government daycare is close enough to private daycare that its not worth spending the political capital to change it. Whatever theoretical gains are trivial to the individual compared to taking on the might of the teachers union.
But if what's at stake is that mentally ill weirdoes are going to mutilate your children behind your back, then there is a huge difference between government daycare and private daycare. Perhaps enough to be worth fighting the teachers union over.
In brief, a) government schools are the main vector by which children become infected with socialist ideas b) pro-liberty folk should work hard to dismantle government schools and institute as strong a barrier between school and state as we have between church and state.
The CATO argument is that private schools would be better at *educating* children, but every time this is tried we find no impact because what we call *educating* is just "measuring IQ" which can't be changed.
I do think that while schools can't educate, they can indoctrinate.
The problem is that lots of libertarians are cultural leftists, and they WANT public schools to indoctrinate. Or at least, they don't want to tell their leftist friends from their social circle that they disagree with their cultural values or their role in schools.
Hence why Rufo says "you need school vouchers to avoid indoctrination by leftist, because leftist cultural ideas as BAD." This message resonates with conservatives because it's true.
The technocratic arguments about education efficiency aren't actually true.
I love the idea of generalizing DeAngelis's approach, however this remark raises a question from me: "Even very leftist states aren’t ready for full legalization, but once addict encampments disappear, the public will mostly stop caring." What is the libertarian policy prescription to make "addict encampments disappear"? As someone who has lived in blue cities with significant homelessness, mental health, and addiction issues (and happily escaped those cities for more tranquil environs) I am genuinely curious about this, because it's an issue on which I feel libertarian voices have largely been silent... but perhaps those voices have simply been ignored. What's the libertarian solution to entrenched urban homelessness, mental health, and addiction?
Legalizing housing is the libertarian solution to homelessness. Poorer red states with cheaper housing have much lower rates of homelessness than, for example, California.
That's because the red states are less friendly to the homeless and they move to more friendly weather and political climates, not because housing is cheaper. Most homeless people are mentally ill or are drug addicts.
"Legalizing housing" isn't going to solve the problem when the majority of homeless refuse the housing already available to them. It's apropos you mention California: When I lived in San Francisco I volunteered at Project Homeless Connect. The volunteers would convene regularly at Bill Graham Civic Center and the city's homeless would roll in. There would be doctors and nurses giving checkups, dentists cleaning teeth, showers and donated clothes and shoes available, lawyers giving basic legal aid, even veterinarians helping the homeless pets. A small army of social workers would be there, counseling the homeless and trying to convince them to get off the streets. Despite billions of dollars over the decades poured into halfway houses and affordable housing projects, only a minority of them sought anything more than short-term shelter. This was often due to mental health or addition issues. So while "legalizing housing" is laudable and as a philosophical anarchist I'm sympathetic to libertarianism, the reality leads me to be skeptical that simply repealing legal barriers to new home constructions, without anything else, is sufficient to solve the problem in all but the most trivial situations.
I'd reduce this to "don't bother in blue states". Conservatives are natural libertarians and often do things for libertarian reasons. If liberals do something libertarian, it is random coincidence. When I talk to my liberal friends, they don't even comprehend the libertarian way of viewing the world (government vs private, positive vs. negative rights, and on and on).
The libertarian things you attribute to liberals are immigration and drugs. I notice you left off abortion, presumably because you are hardcore on open borders and drugs but conflicted on abortion. Open borders is a political loser, and I think practically problematic at best. Drug legalization is a proven loser as policy. Nobody wants to live in a city full of homeless addict encampments. Left libertarians need a dose of reality and to understand that lots of people simply can't handle the freedom to choose with respect to hard drugs. I wish that were not the case, but real life says otherwise.
Free Staters have mostly done what you describe here: push libertarian ideas with conservative appeal using conservative rhetoric.
We've also taken our time to make friends and move up the leadership ranks. This strategy has allowed Free Staters to become the single largest force in the NHGOP.
If we take seriously your arguments about the benefits of education being mostly signalling isn't school choice either unimportant or even harmful?
If it's mostly just about signalling aren't we just driving competition that pushes children to spend more and more time doing unpleasant zero-sum competition that doesn't actually increase the overall pay off to the economy in the aggregate?
I don't see how you can make your support of school choice cohere with your signalling theory. On the signalling theory school is essentially a Veblen good meaning that it's a benefit to society when we impose limits on spending in that sector.
I think order of operations is important. For example, I think the Oregon drug decriminalization experiment failed because there was no mechanism to get / keep mentally ill drug addicts off the streets. So the decriminalization effort was seen as simply exacerbating the problem.
IMO, libertarian activists should work first to getting the mentally ill/homeless off the streets, then on decriminalizing drugs.
I suggest some libertarian strategies for helping the mentally ill/homeless here:
I don't think progressives care about immigrants any more than they care about schoolchildren. I think they care about power, and maintaining their power, and they think more immigrants will increase their power.
If they actually cared about immigrants, progressives wouldn't have spent most of the 20th Century vigorously advocating for the immigration suppression laws on the books. It's only when the unions had dwindled almost entirely outside of government that they switched to advocating for immigrants (seeing them as one of the few sources of union growth in the service/farm/construction industries).
Bryan - I haven’t started reading your new Self-Help is Like a Vaccine book yet, but having moved from a blue county in Silicon Valley to a red county in Idaho and now to a red county in North Carolina I’m familiar with the difference in demographics. I would suggest tailoring and combining this DeAngelis Generalized idea with your new self-help books. What do I mean by this? Red counties are characterized by large populations of Christians. Libertarians should work to appeal to and proselytize to these Christians. Here I would point to Lawrence Reed’s new book, Was Jesus a Socialist? It seems like a great book for bringing together libertarians and Christians. In fact, I think you should write a new self-help book called “Jesus Was a Libertarian” that describes the ways in which Jesus was libertarian.
Bryan - I’d be curious to see an x.com survey/poll of libertarians that informed us of the enthusiasm for this type of libertarian activism in Red States vs Blue States. How many libertarians are excited by activism in blue cities and counties? More accurately and efficiently I think this strategy should be characterized as county-by-county. There are economies of scale for characterizing it and implementing it as county-by-county. Counties are often either clearly red or clearly blue. States not as much.
Sadly, I have also recently come to the conclusion that playing the exclusion game is the only way that politics works in this country today. I was initially drawn to classical liberalism for its intellectual heft and saw in it a great consistency that I though we ought value. However, focusing exclusively on the rights of each and every individual does little to convince a society of Karens. Nor is the traditional libertarian focus valued in politics as currently practiced, so Bryan's "DeAngelis Generalized" seems to be the most rational left for us.
I do plan to keep my personal focus focused on classical liberalism. One day the Ponzi schemes and the constant "easy money, no Schumeperian 'cold douches' allowed, OPM mercantilism" era is going to rupture in a spectacularly bad fashion. The ideas of freedom must be there as an option for coming out of the current morass of addictions and passions.
"Live Action Role Playing" - the use of the term in the social or political context is a disparaging and often condescending way to claim that people are engaging in conspicuous pose and pretense, deceptive or at least condemnable on some level, and behaving in an inauthentic and performative way, in imitation (sometimes also bootstrapping aspiration - "fake it til you make it") of an identity and set of preferences, attitudes, and social roles that are not truly sincere and genuine.
David, didn't you get tossed from some leftist group with whom you were working, on the grounds of ideological impurity? I wonder what you have to say about the workability of Bryan's proposal.
No, I didn't. I did leave it but while I was in it, I was quite successful at helping keep a pro-peace group pro-peace rather than venturing into other unrelated issues. One of my biggest victories, early on, was blocking a proposal to send medical supplies to Cuba. Like them, I wanted to help everyday Cubans, but, unlike them, I realized that the Cuban government would be the allocator.
And by and large, with few exceptions, I was treated well. I think Bryan's proposal is workable.
:) I had to look that one up. Live Action Role Playing. Is this what Bryan does at his birthday parties? A step less real than researching and writing a book on Seasteading.
It's an interesting idea, but I doubt it would work for the Libertarians in Blue States because part of the fun of a D-on-D primary is accusing one's opponent of being close to any vaguely R or conservative cause. Any candidate getting libertarian support would be immediately targeted as being a tool of the Koch Brothers or something similar. So I doubt that this would be viable outside of deep Red states.
Focusing on state-based races is not a bad strategy, but the real challenge seems to be that libertarians are lacking the reliable voting blocs that the Rs and Ds have, especially in sufficient numbers to influence policy. If anything, the best option might be to push to some kind of major electoral reform like some amount of vote percentage-based seats in local government or state legislatures instead of first-past-the-post.
This won't work in Blue States.
Blue Staters don't support quasi-libertarian policies for libertarian reasons, they support those policies because they WANT to violate property rights. Their pro-criminal anti-property stance is the reason they support drug decriminalization but not drug legalization. When people try to get rid of homeless encampments, Blue Staters call it "criminalizing homelessness." The violation of property rights is the point.
I think you're making the same mistake that those on the left (of which I am a part) make when they think that the primary reason (at the first order ideological level) that conservatives are anti-abortion is that they want to restrict the liberty of women.
There's a very strong current of principled social liberalism within the American left. Just empirically, Democrats are clearly and consistently more pro immigration than Republicans, and are becoming more pro free trade.
I'm personally very happy to ally with Libertarians on issues like immigration, drug policy, housing, doctors unions and excessive restrictive pharmaceutical regulation, and free trade while also thinking that we should increase taxes to fund a more expansive welfare state, thinking that everyone should have access to healthcare that doesn't bankrupt them, and that we should have more onerous environmental, financial and antitrust regulation.
> Democrats are clearly and consistently more pro immigration than Republican
That's only been a relatively recent shift. For most of the 20th century Democrats were hostile to immigrants:
https://open.substack.com/pub/betonit/p/deangelis-generalized?r=fiarp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=68378960
I think the only "principled social liberalism" from those on the left is when those principles also align with increasing the power of the Democratic party.
If Democrats thought increased immigration would decrease their power, they would be just as adamantly opposed to it as they are against school choice.
(To be clear, I think Republicans are similarly hypocritical.)
The stance of the Democratic Party is that they want:
1) as much immigration as they can get away with without losing elections
2) that preferably those immigrants will settle down somewhere other then their own back yard. Ideally in a red or purple state they hope to turn blue, but at a minimum not literally in their neighborhood.
So California.
What is the principle behind "principled social liberalism"?
I don't have to talk libertarians into this, but at the national level the most useful thing that could be done is to get rid of the SALT deduction. SALT subsidizes the Blue State model over the Red State Model. Moreover, it subsidizes the worst aspects of the blue state model. The same could be said about mortgage interest deduction.
Eliminating the SALT deduction makes a lot of sense because its existence creates the perverse incentive for state and local governments to grow and tax excessively with the knowledge that the tax liability they impose on residents will be deducted from those residents' federal tax bill. It's less clear to me how the mortgage interest deduction is comparable. If the argument is that those who pay higher mortgage interest tend to live in high COL locales that skew politically leftward, that seems to be a bit of a non sequitur unless one can show a causal link similar to the one that exists with SALT. In the absence of a clear causal link to a perverse incentive, the better policy seemingly would be one that defaults to lowering personal tax liability, and thus favors retaining the mortgage interest deduction.
It subsidizes the price of housing, which is exacerbated in blue states because of their actions.
I consider it pretty interchangeable. If one raises property taxes one reduces the price of the home. Deductibility of either the interest or the taxes raises it. If you allow interest deductibility the local government can raise property taxes while keeping price constant.
In general one of the most out of control factors in blue states is that the local education establishment has turned the property market into a cash cow for itself, and any subsidization of these high property values ultimately tends to flow towards that.
That's an interesting theory. Do you have any evidence to support the notion that local authorities consider the deductibility of mortgage interest when deciding to raise property taxes? Likewise, do you have any evidence for the notion that eliminating the deduction would reduce property values? It seems to be a small bucket of water poured into a vast ocean when compared to the drivers of property values in high COL areas, such as access to high-earning jobs, access to quality healthcare, public transit, quality of schools (public and private), lot size and home size, and other factors. Limiting SALT doesn't seem to have reduced property values or cost of living. I'd be curious to see the evidence.
Well I can tell you that politicians from these areas spend a lot of time talking about SALT. Here’s an example.
https://gottheimer.house.gov/posts/release-gottheimer-fights-against-red-moocher-states-to-restore-salt-deduction-and-lower-taxes
What I observed in the northeast is that property taxes were raised quite a bit over the decades, the tax rate% is at least twice or more then when I was growing up. School budgets increased way beyond inflation.
Let us posit a 2% tax rate. Every thirty years that’s 60% the value of the house. If you’ve got SALT and a 32% marginal tax rate that is around 20% of your homes value. That ain’t nothing. Many places in The northeast have gone beyond 2%.
In CA where property tax is capped, you see it in the form of the states ridiculous income tax, also salt deductible.
In general I find governments that have some sort of sweet rent they can extract (like Silicon Valley or Wall Street) tend to tax just a little beyond what would be in their long term interest. To the extent they can get a so-40% discount it makes them bolder.
I don't disagree with what you've said. I just find it unlikely that paying tax at my marginal rate on my mortgage interest would lead either to (a) renewed fiscal discipline and lower taxes from state and local government or (b) materially lower property values in light of other factors in the housing market. Instead I think I'd see my overall cost of living increase due to the loss of the tax deduction with no benefit to balance out that cost. I think eliminating or capping the SALT deduction makes sense because of the perverse incentive it creates at the state/local level; I do not see the same dynamic with regard to the mortgage interest deduction. But perhaps I've misunderstood.
A lot of this argument is riding on (1) arrogantly attributing these successes to a particular political activism strategy, and (2) assuming that strategy to be generally effective instead of mostly particular and contextual.
Instead, it's quite plausible that the activism didn't do much of anything and was pushing on an open door. That is, the context is one of Cowen-esque "backlash" and unwisely over-rapid and counterproductive leftist overreach and progressives - self-blinded by their epistemic and social bubbling - abusing their disproportionate control over the public education system to implement aggravating new, ideologically-loaded policies which provoked many conservative frog parents and red state politicians to want to hop out of the boiling pot and create off-ramps from the default public system (with which they were formerly sufficiently comfortable to grudgingly tolerate) as soon as possible.
Changing activism strategies when this kind of related context is changing at the same time is not at all strong evidence for the effectiveness of the strategy. That's like taking credit for the greater relative success of a food-advertising campaign directed at soldiers initially before but now returning from a long march. "But look at how much more food they bought!" - Yeah, because after the march they were really hungry not because of marketing but because of, you know, all that marching!"
Yeah if I had to point to successful activism at all it would be Rufo style. COVID and LibsofTikTok have done more for school choice then CATO ever will.
I would say the real political lesson for libertarians is to understand the way that, for their target audience of people on the margin of supporting an effectively liberty-expanding reform, the general only serves as a socially acceptable cover story for the specific. Libertarians may be motivated by and arguing for abstract principles of liberty which could be generally applied to everyone in an impersonal and context- independent way, but, alas, these days, most people are not strongly motivated by appeal to these abstract principles, and only want to be able to deploy them as seemingly not self-interested, """principled""" ways to achieve their personal objectives. So, for example, with regard to "school choice" the general principle is liberty but the specific interest is the desire to either abuse control of the public schools to indoctrinate and oppressively impose progressive ideology, on the one hand, or escape such imposition, on the other. Arguing for """liberty""" in a generalized, neutral, principled way will have zero resonance with the first group, and only strike the second group - in that kind of cognitively automatic, subconscious / subliminal manner of social psychological processes - as a rhetorical focal point of well-crafted, plausibly deniable language upon which they can converge for coordinating the furtherance of their common special interests.
So, when the issue in any particular area is leftist domination, one may argue "liberty" in general, but only effectively to conservatives in a way that winks and alludes to their specific, particular interest in escaping what the leftists are doing to them, and vice versa. But one is not going to be able to use sly rhetoric with clever linguistic alterations to argue for more liberty to both groups at the same time. It depends mostly on who is in practice exercising power over whom. Instead of just general "liberty", what members of the relatively more coerced faction really want is freedom from the other faction.
I think both competent activists and opportunity are needed. DeAngelis would not have enjoyed as much success had the teacher's unions not behaved so terribly during Covid, but I don't think there would've been as much progress legislatively had DeAngelis not existed to harness the anger and point it in a legislatively productive direction.
Whether or not the work of a political activist is indispensable is a separate question from whether or not causation for a particular success can be fairly attributed to a particular kind of rhetorical strategy. Advocates of such attribution bear the burden of proving they are not engaging in the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. My position is that DeAngelis and Caplan have not met that burden.
What do you think pro-liberty activists should be doing that is different from what Caplan is recommending?
I think they should make peace with conservative activists.
For instance, it's clear that Chris Rufo style culture war arguments do a lot more to advance school choice then CATO style reasons. Now Caplan is a fan of Chris Rufo, but a lot of libertarians aren't. They don't like getting into the culture war. They want their arguments to be something both sides, though more specifically people in their social circle that generally lean culturally left, can get behind, rather then "blue haired tiktok weirdoes want to trans your kids behind your back, support vouchers so they can't do so."
My own view on this is that CATO style reasoning is self defeating. If you believe in something like the Null Hypothesis, that education doesn't change IQ and is all just pointless free daycare, then government daycare is close enough to private daycare that its not worth spending the political capital to change it. Whatever theoretical gains are trivial to the individual compared to taking on the might of the teachers union.
But if what's at stake is that mentally ill weirdoes are going to mutilate your children behind your back, then there is a huge difference between government daycare and private daycare. Perhaps enough to be worth fighting the teachers union over.
Thanks for the response! I don't think government schools are merely daycare:
https://archerships.substack.com/p/children-of-the-state
In brief, a) government schools are the main vector by which children become infected with socialist ideas b) pro-liberty folk should work hard to dismantle government schools and institute as strong a barrier between school and state as we have between church and state.
I don't think we are in disagreement.
The CATO argument is that private schools would be better at *educating* children, but every time this is tried we find no impact because what we call *educating* is just "measuring IQ" which can't be changed.
I do think that while schools can't educate, they can indoctrinate.
The problem is that lots of libertarians are cultural leftists, and they WANT public schools to indoctrinate. Or at least, they don't want to tell their leftist friends from their social circle that they disagree with their cultural values or their role in schools.
Hence why Rufo says "you need school vouchers to avoid indoctrination by leftist, because leftist cultural ideas as BAD." This message resonates with conservatives because it's true.
The technocratic arguments about education efficiency aren't actually true.
I love the idea of generalizing DeAngelis's approach, however this remark raises a question from me: "Even very leftist states aren’t ready for full legalization, but once addict encampments disappear, the public will mostly stop caring." What is the libertarian policy prescription to make "addict encampments disappear"? As someone who has lived in blue cities with significant homelessness, mental health, and addiction issues (and happily escaped those cities for more tranquil environs) I am genuinely curious about this, because it's an issue on which I feel libertarian voices have largely been silent... but perhaps those voices have simply been ignored. What's the libertarian solution to entrenched urban homelessness, mental health, and addiction?
Legalizing housing is the libertarian solution to homelessness. Poorer red states with cheaper housing have much lower rates of homelessness than, for example, California.
That's because the red states are less friendly to the homeless and they move to more friendly weather and political climates, not because housing is cheaper. Most homeless people are mentally ill or are drug addicts.
"Legalizing housing" isn't going to solve the problem when the majority of homeless refuse the housing already available to them. It's apropos you mention California: When I lived in San Francisco I volunteered at Project Homeless Connect. The volunteers would convene regularly at Bill Graham Civic Center and the city's homeless would roll in. There would be doctors and nurses giving checkups, dentists cleaning teeth, showers and donated clothes and shoes available, lawyers giving basic legal aid, even veterinarians helping the homeless pets. A small army of social workers would be there, counseling the homeless and trying to convince them to get off the streets. Despite billions of dollars over the decades poured into halfway houses and affordable housing projects, only a minority of them sought anything more than short-term shelter. This was often due to mental health or addition issues. So while "legalizing housing" is laudable and as a philosophical anarchist I'm sympathetic to libertarianism, the reality leads me to be skeptical that simply repealing legal barriers to new home constructions, without anything else, is sufficient to solve the problem in all but the most trivial situations.
I'd reduce this to "don't bother in blue states". Conservatives are natural libertarians and often do things for libertarian reasons. If liberals do something libertarian, it is random coincidence. When I talk to my liberal friends, they don't even comprehend the libertarian way of viewing the world (government vs private, positive vs. negative rights, and on and on).
The libertarian things you attribute to liberals are immigration and drugs. I notice you left off abortion, presumably because you are hardcore on open borders and drugs but conflicted on abortion. Open borders is a political loser, and I think practically problematic at best. Drug legalization is a proven loser as policy. Nobody wants to live in a city full of homeless addict encampments. Left libertarians need a dose of reality and to understand that lots of people simply can't handle the freedom to choose with respect to hard drugs. I wish that were not the case, but real life says otherwise.
Free Staters have mostly done what you describe here: push libertarian ideas with conservative appeal using conservative rhetoric.
We've also taken our time to make friends and move up the leadership ranks. This strategy has allowed Free Staters to become the single largest force in the NHGOP.
If we take seriously your arguments about the benefits of education being mostly signalling isn't school choice either unimportant or even harmful?
If it's mostly just about signalling aren't we just driving competition that pushes children to spend more and more time doing unpleasant zero-sum competition that doesn't actually increase the overall pay off to the economy in the aggregate?
I don't see how you can make your support of school choice cohere with your signalling theory. On the signalling theory school is essentially a Veblen good meaning that it's a benefit to society when we impose limits on spending in that sector.
My understanding is that school choice results in cheaper schools. Teacher's unions act to drive up the costs, rather than limit spending.
There's a pro-immigration activist group. I've seen their posters around town.
"Stop blaming immigrants for the housing crisis!" (Yay!)
"Instead blame greedy corporate landlords and developers!" (Sigh!)
Still, I'm tempted to go to their rallies. Hopefully they'll accept me!
I think order of operations is important. For example, I think the Oregon drug decriminalization experiment failed because there was no mechanism to get / keep mentally ill drug addicts off the streets. So the decriminalization effort was seen as simply exacerbating the problem.
IMO, libertarian activists should work first to getting the mentally ill/homeless off the streets, then on decriminalizing drugs.
I suggest some libertarian strategies for helping the mentally ill/homeless here:
https://archerships.substack.com/p/libertarian-strategies-for-dealing
I don't think progressives care about immigrants any more than they care about schoolchildren. I think they care about power, and maintaining their power, and they think more immigrants will increase their power.
If they actually cared about immigrants, progressives wouldn't have spent most of the 20th Century vigorously advocating for the immigration suppression laws on the books. It's only when the unions had dwindled almost entirely outside of government that they switched to advocating for immigrants (seeing them as one of the few sources of union growth in the service/farm/construction industries).
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/immigrants-didnt-kill-your-union/
Bernie Sanders didn't get the new messaging until a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIKDuBWcjyo
Bryan - I haven’t started reading your new Self-Help is Like a Vaccine book yet, but having moved from a blue county in Silicon Valley to a red county in Idaho and now to a red county in North Carolina I’m familiar with the difference in demographics. I would suggest tailoring and combining this DeAngelis Generalized idea with your new self-help books. What do I mean by this? Red counties are characterized by large populations of Christians. Libertarians should work to appeal to and proselytize to these Christians. Here I would point to Lawrence Reed’s new book, Was Jesus a Socialist? It seems like a great book for bringing together libertarians and Christians. In fact, I think you should write a new self-help book called “Jesus Was a Libertarian” that describes the ways in which Jesus was libertarian.
Bryan - I’d be curious to see an x.com survey/poll of libertarians that informed us of the enthusiasm for this type of libertarian activism in Red States vs Blue States. How many libertarians are excited by activism in blue cities and counties? More accurately and efficiently I think this strategy should be characterized as county-by-county. There are economies of scale for characterizing it and implementing it as county-by-county. Counties are often either clearly red or clearly blue. States not as much.
It depends on the issue. School choice for instance really only can happen at the state level.
True.
Sadly, I have also recently come to the conclusion that playing the exclusion game is the only way that politics works in this country today. I was initially drawn to classical liberalism for its intellectual heft and saw in it a great consistency that I though we ought value. However, focusing exclusively on the rights of each and every individual does little to convince a society of Karens. Nor is the traditional libertarian focus valued in politics as currently practiced, so Bryan's "DeAngelis Generalized" seems to be the most rational left for us.
I do plan to keep my personal focus focused on classical liberalism. One day the Ponzi schemes and the constant "easy money, no Schumeperian 'cold douches' allowed, OPM mercantilism" era is going to rupture in a spectacularly bad fashion. The ideas of freedom must be there as an option for coming out of the current morass of addictions and passions.
What does LARP mean?
"Live Action Role Playing" - the use of the term in the social or political context is a disparaging and often condescending way to claim that people are engaging in conspicuous pose and pretense, deceptive or at least condemnable on some level, and behaving in an inauthentic and performative way, in imitation (sometimes also bootstrapping aspiration - "fake it til you make it") of an identity and set of preferences, attitudes, and social roles that are not truly sincere and genuine.
Thanks.
David, didn't you get tossed from some leftist group with whom you were working, on the grounds of ideological impurity? I wonder what you have to say about the workability of Bryan's proposal.
No, I didn't. I did leave it but while I was in it, I was quite successful at helping keep a pro-peace group pro-peace rather than venturing into other unrelated issues. One of my biggest victories, early on, was blocking a proposal to send medical supplies to Cuba. Like them, I wanted to help everyday Cubans, but, unlike them, I realized that the Cuban government would be the allocator.
And by and large, with few exceptions, I was treated well. I think Bryan's proposal is workable.
:) I had to look that one up. Live Action Role Playing. Is this what Bryan does at his birthday parties? A step less real than researching and writing a book on Seasteading.
> never sounds good to libertarians
This link throws an error.
It's an interesting idea, but I doubt it would work for the Libertarians in Blue States because part of the fun of a D-on-D primary is accusing one's opponent of being close to any vaguely R or conservative cause. Any candidate getting libertarian support would be immediately targeted as being a tool of the Koch Brothers or something similar. So I doubt that this would be viable outside of deep Red states.
Focusing on state-based races is not a bad strategy, but the real challenge seems to be that libertarians are lacking the reliable voting blocs that the Rs and Ds have, especially in sufficient numbers to influence policy. If anything, the best option might be to push to some kind of major electoral reform like some amount of vote percentage-based seats in local government or state legislatures instead of first-past-the-post.