When was it ever popular? It was perhaps more common in earlier ages of less regulation, but there were other forms of tyranny then too. Maybe the mid-80s to 2010s were a bit of a high point between the Reagan-based libertarian/evangelical coalition with neoliberalism on the left getting us some reductions in global trade barriers. But none of that was really popular on the whole.
I was thinking more like 19.th century, when people weren't yet poisoned by statism and "positive" rights (meaning, privileges). Nobody expected anything from the government. And that was a good thing. That was enough.
Your standards are too high because standards should guide expectations, and it is irrational to expect that in the current-day USA any leader will meet those standards, and it is irrational to expect that wildly unpopular policy preferences will be adopted by those leaders.
NB: I agree that most people's standards for the free market are too high.
He doesn't probabilistically expect people to meet those standards. He *morally* expects people to meet those standards. If they can't meet them, they shouldn't do politics.
Imagine Bryan Caplan in 1860. He would be telling everyone that Abraham Lincoln, by not taking an absolutist abolitionist line, was morally unacceptable. And yet if he had he might not have been elected and if elected he might had lost the border states and the war.
Copy paste this to a million different situations.
No, politicians don't even make the standard of moderate libertarianism to push politics along in the right direction. Trump and Harris aren't anything like that, so it's not a good analogy.
Another harsh truth about the real world is that a single vote never decides the outcome of an American Presidential election, unless you happen to be a Justice of the Supreme Court and a case involving which ballots to count in a marginal swing state happens to land on your docket.
What you do control is not the choice of a President, but rather your own words and actions. In that sphere, your personal understanding of what is just and honorable is all-important.
I’m not suggesting you deny what is just and honorable, only that people will take you more seriously if you are willing to make a judgement call.
Basically, politics is a game of “Would you rather” and in those games, it is a given that everyone would choose “neither.” If you keep saying “Neither,” you’re going to get eye rolls and eventually will be ignored completely.
I’m not even suggesting that you should vote for a preferred candidate necessarily, though I do think that the modern libertarian penchant for abstaining from voting means that any candidate would be stupid to care what libertarians think on any particular issue.
“No, politicians don't even make the standard of moderate libertarianism to push politics along in the right direction. Trump and Harris aren't anything like that, so it's not a good analogy.”
This is true if you don't care about any one issue over another. But the candidates will be better or worse on specific issues. Sometimes you will want to choose the giant douche over the turd sandwich.
Interesting read. Some of these arguments were very new to me, like this one:
"People rarely give large amounts of charity to strangers. But they also often refuse to give large amounts of charity to their parents, adult children, and siblings. When you hear about such refusals, you probably don’t reflexively take the side of the would-be recipient. Maybe the refuser has a good reason to say, “I’ve done more than enough for my brother.” Why then should we reflexively side against taxpayers who don’t want to fund redistribution to strangers?"
Nothing is perfectly perfect and everything tends to be messy, push the boundaries and you get push back, that is the implicit mechanism of capitalism ubiquitous clarity. So I do not understand your complaint. Capitalism is messy and people unpredictable. It is beautiful! I have run businesses all my life and also watched many, and those that fail have owners that do not understand that people are imperfect and that you need to herd and not orchestrate them and you need to expect failure and chaos because of people actions, and if you herd carefully you will get outcomes close to your utopia for brief moments at a time, and that is enough, higher expectations then this means the business will be less robust and these business owners exit these businesses in disillusionment, irritation or broke. Democracy also herds people, imperfectly. Probably explains why you are an Econ professor, a very smart one at that.
I’m not a Democrat but I would ask AI to generate the following candidate: John Kennedy to lower taxes, Jimmy Carter to deregulate businesses, Bill Clinton to declare the era of big government at an end and Jared Polis able to talk to both sides.
You’re offering a false dichotomy here. It’s not full-on democracy and absolute 1000% free-market, or dictatorship. It’s not absolute zero regulation, or a managed economy with central control of means of production. There are infinite points in between.
In fact, I’d be interested to see an example of a functioning nation with absolute democracy and zero regulation. And if that utopia does not exist, then maybe, just maybe, “some” regulation and “some” government is necessary. And if you allow, or acknowledge, or accept, that reality, it is quite possible to envision a prosperous first world nation that strikes some balance that is still quite far removed from the dictatorship/communist end of the spectrum.
Caplan is an anarcho-capitalist. He's also writing a book defending laissez faire that has a chapter on why expecting small government is unrealistic because government has a strong tendency to grow and take more and more power.
He's well aware that anarcho-capitalism has not been tried, just like years ago classical liberal democracy had not been tried. Libertarianism is just the more consistent application of classical liberal values, so it shouldn't be surprising that it would work!
I am 67 years old, I lived in the USSR for 33 years and in Israel for 34 years and I have never taken part in elections. I am independent and I am well aware that participation in dishonest, pseudo-democratic elections makes me responsible for all actions of the future government. Therefore, I cannot take part in the destruction or deception of the majority of people. My conscience is clear. Imagine what would happen if all voters, like me, boycotted the elections?
If the majority of people realize that democratic elections are a scam and have nothing to do with democracy, then not one, not a thousand people who voted for a farce and a scam will have any meaning. Elections in which the number of voters who cast their ballots does not exceed 5-25% of the total number of voters, especially if the majority is against holding elections, will never be recognized by society as having taken place.
Such a conception of politics works both ways--if all the candidates who have a realistic chance of winning (which these days is usually one, or maybe two candidates at most) refuse to address issues that libertarians care the most about, why should they ever expect votes from libertarians? What do libertarians have to lose by staying at home or throwing their votes away on a third party?
On the other hand, your conception of politics has a couple of serious problems. First of all, candidates rarely win elections by caring about what voters outside their party's base think. They win elections by harvesting support from special interests, by inciting primal emotions (fear, greed, envy, shame) in their party's base to get them to turn out, and by rigging information flows and the voting process to favor themselves. None of these factors are favorable to the defense of individual liberty and private ownership.
Second of all, politics is about a lot more than putting candidates into office. As the size and power of the state swells up, every institution in our society gets caught up in political struggles, and everything you do becomes a political statement of some kind. A lot of people suddenly started caring about their own liberty recently when they were having vax jabs, woke loyalty oaths, and social media censorship being forced upon them. It is precisely because libertarians take principled stands against partisan power-lusters that some of them were able to play a meaningful role in waking up the resistance.
I believe several Republicans would have been better choices for President than Donald Trump. Of those who ran in the primary, my first choice would have been Vivek Ramaswamy. It would have been difficult for the Democrats to pick worse candidates than the Harris/Walz team. Before Kamala Harris became VP, FiveThirtyEight ranked her as the most extreme progressive in the Senate, with Bernie Sanders in second place. According to a recent Cato Institute report, Tim Walz is the worst governor in the US. For those who haven't read it, your book "The Myth of the Rational Voter" explains why voters tend to choose the worst candidates.
Perhaps the reason some people prefer government to the free market is that they implicitly compare an ideal government to an actual free market.
I'm not sure if you read the comments section, but if you do, have you read Following Their Leaders by Randall Holcombe? If not you should. It really completes the picture from your book.
Nobody except Islamo fascists sitting on petro city states have implemented your vision of “open borders with rightless second class citizens”.
Maybe you should take a chill pill. The closest thing we have to John Galt is the real world endorsed Trump, along with most of the other big Silicon Valley founders directly or implied. The builders are busy building in the messy real world instead of throwing a hissy fit like a child.
If laissez-faire ever becomes popular, we should give credit where credit is due, in considerable part to that modern Bastiat, Bryan Caplan.
"If laissez-faire ever AGAIN becomes popular..."
When was it ever popular? It was perhaps more common in earlier ages of less regulation, but there were other forms of tyranny then too. Maybe the mid-80s to 2010s were a bit of a high point between the Reagan-based libertarian/evangelical coalition with neoliberalism on the left getting us some reductions in global trade barriers. But none of that was really popular on the whole.
I was thinking more like 19.th century, when people weren't yet poisoned by statism and "positive" rights (meaning, privileges). Nobody expected anything from the government. And that was a good thing. That was enough.
Your standards are too high because standards should guide expectations, and it is irrational to expect that in the current-day USA any leader will meet those standards, and it is irrational to expect that wildly unpopular policy preferences will be adopted by those leaders.
NB: I agree that most people's standards for the free market are too high.
He doesn't probabilistically expect people to meet those standards. He *morally* expects people to meet those standards. If they can't meet them, they shouldn't do politics.
Imagine Bryan Caplan in 1860. He would be telling everyone that Abraham Lincoln, by not taking an absolutist abolitionist line, was morally unacceptable. And yet if he had he might not have been elected and if elected he might had lost the border states and the war.
Copy paste this to a million different situations.
No, politicians don't even make the standard of moderate libertarianism to push politics along in the right direction. Trump and Harris aren't anything like that, so it's not a good analogy.
In an ideal world, I agree!
But when interacting with the real world, your standards should have some expectation of actually being met.
Another harsh truth about the real world is that a single vote never decides the outcome of an American Presidential election, unless you happen to be a Justice of the Supreme Court and a case involving which ballots to count in a marginal swing state happens to land on your docket.
What you do control is not the choice of a President, but rather your own words and actions. In that sphere, your personal understanding of what is just and honorable is all-important.
I’m not suggesting you deny what is just and honorable, only that people will take you more seriously if you are willing to make a judgement call.
Basically, politics is a game of “Would you rather” and in those games, it is a given that everyone would choose “neither.” If you keep saying “Neither,” you’re going to get eye rolls and eventually will be ignored completely.
I’m not even suggesting that you should vote for a preferred candidate necessarily, though I do think that the modern libertarian penchant for abstaining from voting means that any candidate would be stupid to care what libertarians think on any particular issue.
As I said in my other comment:
“No, politicians don't even make the standard of moderate libertarianism to push politics along in the right direction. Trump and Harris aren't anything like that, so it's not a good analogy.”
This is true if you don't care about any one issue over another. But the candidates will be better or worse on specific issues. Sometimes you will want to choose the giant douche over the turd sandwich.
I’m not saying that one politician won’t be better than the other. I’m saying that that’s an extremely low bar.
In absolute terms, definitely. I'm just saying that's the reality we live in.
Interesting read. Some of these arguments were very new to me, like this one:
"People rarely give large amounts of charity to strangers. But they also often refuse to give large amounts of charity to their parents, adult children, and siblings. When you hear about such refusals, you probably don’t reflexively take the side of the would-be recipient. Maybe the refuser has a good reason to say, “I’ve done more than enough for my brother.” Why then should we reflexively side against taxpayers who don’t want to fund redistribution to strangers?"
"Charity begins at home" in my opinion.
Nothing is perfectly perfect and everything tends to be messy, push the boundaries and you get push back, that is the implicit mechanism of capitalism ubiquitous clarity. So I do not understand your complaint. Capitalism is messy and people unpredictable. It is beautiful! I have run businesses all my life and also watched many, and those that fail have owners that do not understand that people are imperfect and that you need to herd and not orchestrate them and you need to expect failure and chaos because of people actions, and if you herd carefully you will get outcomes close to your utopia for brief moments at a time, and that is enough, higher expectations then this means the business will be less robust and these business owners exit these businesses in disillusionment, irritation or broke. Democracy also herds people, imperfectly. Probably explains why you are an Econ professor, a very smart one at that.
I’m not a Democrat but I would ask AI to generate the following candidate: John Kennedy to lower taxes, Jimmy Carter to deregulate businesses, Bill Clinton to declare the era of big government at an end and Jared Polis able to talk to both sides.
Perhaps their standards are too high and yours are too?
You’re offering a false dichotomy here. It’s not full-on democracy and absolute 1000% free-market, or dictatorship. It’s not absolute zero regulation, or a managed economy with central control of means of production. There are infinite points in between.
In fact, I’d be interested to see an example of a functioning nation with absolute democracy and zero regulation. And if that utopia does not exist, then maybe, just maybe, “some” regulation and “some” government is necessary. And if you allow, or acknowledge, or accept, that reality, it is quite possible to envision a prosperous first world nation that strikes some balance that is still quite far removed from the dictatorship/communist end of the spectrum.
Caplan is an anarcho-capitalist. He's also writing a book defending laissez faire that has a chapter on why expecting small government is unrealistic because government has a strong tendency to grow and take more and more power.
https://www.econlib.org/radical-libertarian-economics-in-search-of-a-title/
He's well aware that anarcho-capitalism has not been tried, just like years ago classical liberal democracy had not been tried. Libertarianism is just the more consistent application of classical liberal values, so it shouldn't be surprising that it would work!
Are you the son of the famous economist? If so, I saw you speak at Armen Alchian's memorial service (I spoke too) and I enjoyed your speech.
I am 67 years old, I lived in the USSR for 33 years and in Israel for 34 years and I have never taken part in elections. I am independent and I am well aware that participation in dishonest, pseudo-democratic elections makes me responsible for all actions of the future government. Therefore, I cannot take part in the destruction or deception of the majority of people. My conscience is clear. Imagine what would happen if all voters, like me, boycotted the elections?
Then the one person that didn't join your boycott would get their exact political preference?
Not that I disagree with your general sentiment....
If the majority of people realize that democratic elections are a scam and have nothing to do with democracy, then not one, not a thousand people who voted for a farce and a scam will have any meaning. Elections in which the number of voters who cast their ballots does not exceed 5-25% of the total number of voters, especially if the majority is against holding elections, will never be recognized by society as having taken place.
Such a conception of politics works both ways--if all the candidates who have a realistic chance of winning (which these days is usually one, or maybe two candidates at most) refuse to address issues that libertarians care the most about, why should they ever expect votes from libertarians? What do libertarians have to lose by staying at home or throwing their votes away on a third party?
On the other hand, your conception of politics has a couple of serious problems. First of all, candidates rarely win elections by caring about what voters outside their party's base think. They win elections by harvesting support from special interests, by inciting primal emotions (fear, greed, envy, shame) in their party's base to get them to turn out, and by rigging information flows and the voting process to favor themselves. None of these factors are favorable to the defense of individual liberty and private ownership.
Second of all, politics is about a lot more than putting candidates into office. As the size and power of the state swells up, every institution in our society gets caught up in political struggles, and everything you do becomes a political statement of some kind. A lot of people suddenly started caring about their own liberty recently when they were having vax jabs, woke loyalty oaths, and social media censorship being forced upon them. It is precisely because libertarians take principled stands against partisan power-lusters that some of them were able to play a meaningful role in waking up the resistance.
_The Simpsons_ offered a pretty realistic view of the "lesser of two evils" problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuYsZUMuj0M
I believe several Republicans would have been better choices for President than Donald Trump. Of those who ran in the primary, my first choice would have been Vivek Ramaswamy. It would have been difficult for the Democrats to pick worse candidates than the Harris/Walz team. Before Kamala Harris became VP, FiveThirtyEight ranked her as the most extreme progressive in the Senate, with Bernie Sanders in second place. According to a recent Cato Institute report, Tim Walz is the worst governor in the US. For those who haven't read it, your book "The Myth of the Rational Voter" explains why voters tend to choose the worst candidates.
Perhaps the reason some people prefer government to the free market is that they implicitly compare an ideal government to an actual free market.
I'm not sure if you read the comments section, but if you do, have you read Following Their Leaders by Randall Holcombe? If not you should. It really completes the picture from your book.
Nobody except Islamo fascists sitting on petro city states have implemented your vision of “open borders with rightless second class citizens”.
Maybe you should take a chill pill. The closest thing we have to John Galt is the real world endorsed Trump, along with most of the other big Silicon Valley founders directly or implied. The builders are busy building in the messy real world instead of throwing a hissy fit like a child.
hard to argue with much of what is said in this post, but man, are a smug fellow.
It must be hard not to seem smug when you are SO right. Go, Bryan Caplan!