My Bottom Line on Worker Freedom

By On July 6, 2012 · 32 Comments · In Exploitation

Bertram and company’s criticisms of BHL have gotten some attention. Some of my fellow BHLs think their arguments are important. I’m not as impressed. I think their arguments miss the mark.* They have not yet produced a real objection to BHL.

Here’s the bottom line. We BHLs are for the most part not hard, deontological libertarians. We are liberals who think that a major part of the justification for property rights and market institutions has to do with their expected consequences for all decent, conscientious people. We think that in the real world, in the long run, the best way to liberate workers is to produce high levels of wealth and opportunity, such that even the lowest workers are usually in a position to tell employers to shove it, and such that employers face serious economic pressure to behave well. We want to liberate workers by making them rich and making sure they have lots of options. We advocate formal negative economic liberties in significant part because such liberties are vital to realizing positive economic liberty. If it turns out empirically that certain governmental social insurance schemes are necessary to make sure that large swaths of innocent people are not left behind, then we will advocate such schemes. In short: We believe that as a matter of fact, our favored institutions will tend to prevent workers from being exploited, even though we might not have the law criminalize certain kinds of exploitation. We care about results, not legal guarantees.

Since that’s our position, most of Bertram and company’s hypotheticals (and even many of their real examples, which occur, of course, in a non-BHL world) are of little interest to us. What they’d need to do instead is argue that the kinds of market societies we advocate would in fact be horrible for workers.

Bertram et al have a different view about how our favored institutions would function. They may be right and we may be wrong. However, as far as I can tell, they evaluate the market on the basis of semi-Marxian, heterodox economics, while we get to use mainstream neoclassical and institutional economics. That doesn’t mean they are wrong and we are right, but it does mean they argue from a defensive position.

Now, if I learned that Bertram et al were right in claiming that free markets undermine or fail to promote workers’ positive freedom, then I would change my position. Hey, if I discovered that Marx were right about markets, I’d stop being a classical liberal (at least at the non-ideal level).

*If Bertram et al want to know where we’re coming from, quit thinking of us as disguised Nozickeans. Read North, Weingast, David Schmidtz and me, Elinor Ostrom, the public choice literature, de Soto, Coase, Demsetz, Oliver Williamson, and so on. If you want to object to my position, refute these people.

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  • Kevin Vallier

    Its worth adding that if BRG have an argument against BHL political principles, that they have not explained in sufficient detail why the cases they point to are supposed to be problematic. A lot of running together the ideal and the nonideal in their piece. I think the thought is something like, “Here’s X in the real world. X sucks. If a political principle allows X, the principle sucks.” So I think the idea is that the non-BHL world cases would occur in the BHL world and would therefore prove problematic for the BHL theory.

    • http://voodothosting.com/23/ Lorraine Lee

      I would expect the cases to occur in the BHL world, if nothing else, because the BHL literature oh so consistently sides with business. Or explains why the hard bargain driven by business is better than “the alternative” of low GDP and mass poverty. At best, it’s yet another ideological tendency flogging us actual bleeding hearts over the head with the nostrum “utopia is not an option.” Might as well be Nozickism. It would help if they could make a list of real-world examples (which BRG at least attempts to do, though Google Books seems somewhat deep-linking resistant), even a short one, in which BHL is in moral support of those with a complaint against a business. BHL seems to offer a Faustian Bargain to the general populace (UBI on offer!) in exchange for blanket immunity to the business community. I’m more than a little suspicious of this particular Trojan Horse…

      People accuse me of being a utopian but really, I’d settle for a world in which nice guys and gals finish second last.

      • http://www.facebook.com/les.nearhood Les Kyle Nearhood

        Sorry but it is nonetheless true, utopia is not an option. Kevin repeats a lot of what I wrote in reply to BRG. The things they came up with are not really much of a concern in the real world. They made a lot about a person signing away some of their freedoms when they sign a work contract, but so what? You do the same when you enter into nearly any other human interaction.

        It is a mystery as to which state mechanisms can be used specifically to improve this situation which are not already a part of every advanced society (work laws, unionism, occupational safety, anti-discrimination, etc.)

        While these laws have undoubtedly done a lot of good there is a point in which regulation strangles commerce. This leads to lower growth, lower wages, and a less than positive result for those who want to change occupations.

        It is not that libertarians all want to eliminate government and give business, carte blanch, it is simply that we understand free people and free markets as usually superior to the heavy hand of government.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Kervick/100000673155327 Dan Kervick

    Great. It’s good to know we’re all something like utilitarians now. At least then most of the disputes come down to questions amenable to empirical investigation.

  • http://twitter.com/nerdbound Mike Wernecke

    I realize you’re being deliberately dismissive, but honestly, the last paragraph comes off as just arguing from authority. I’m not sure it’s profitable to argue against a blog post by noting that it failed to refute multiple large intellectual traditions.

    • Aeon Skoble

      I took the point to be that they were attempting to refute BHL by arguing agaisnt Nozick, while overlooking the fact that there are other players in libertarianism, some of which more on-point for BHL. So attacking Nozick as a kind of sideways criticism of BHL fails on 2 levels.

  • HookaSmokinCatapilla

    Jason you say “What they’d need to do instead is argue that the kinds of market societies we advocate would in fact be horrible for workers.”

    It’s so obvious that your system doesn’t work; all the bad things that have b een happening in westernised countries since the ’80′s have been because of the libertarian obsession with the market as God. You can say it’s the regulation but I live in Australia and it is far more obvious from over here that it is because we did not allow our neoliberals to totally wreck the social security system we did have.

    You need to make the case that your societies would or could ever work. Give us a scenario that doesn’t involve everyone just doing “what Jesus would do”.

    • http://www.facebook.com/les.nearhood Les Kyle Nearhood

      Your “obvious” view is in fact not obvious at all nor actually true at all. In fact we have had nothing but a very highly structured, highly regulated, and highly controlled economy among all the industrialized nations. Nothing even remotely bordering upon libertarianism or even deregulation has been the norm in the last fifty years. That you would even try to characterize our highly regulated and taxed economies with the constant meddling and “fine tuning” of governments and central banks as somehow libertarian makes your entire argument laughable.

  • StudiodeKadent

    HookaSmokinCatapilla,
    As an Australian and also an Economist, I can flat-out state you are incorrect. “All the bad things that have been happening in westernized countries since the 80′s” cannot be pinned on libertarianism. That is a bizzarely overstated claim. Can the Columbine massacre be blamed on libertarianism?
    If I were to read you charitably, I’d assume you meant “all the bad economic things” are to be blamed on libertarianism. But neither the US nor Australia are libertarian societies at all. “Our system” (i.e. libertarianism) has not even been tried in the first place.
    It is not “obvious” that free markets will fail. Given that neither Australia nor the US have (fully) free markets, one can’t come to that conclusion. Australia certainly is not free-market by any stretch of the imagination, the Australian Labor Party is the political arm of the Union movement and devoted to creating institutional privileges for specific unions. This is corporatism, not a free market.
    We don’t assume people would do “what Jesus would do.” Jesus, arguably, was anti-commerce. Libertarians do not assume people won’t be mean, vicious or cruel.
    And “you can say its the regulation” is a completely reasonable argument to make. Australia and the US are both mixed economies, and regulations typically have wide-ranging, complicated effects on how the actors within these economies act. Looking at how regulations affect marketplace actors is an important task for economics. You can’t honestly allege there is no connection between, say, George W. Bush’s promotion of home-ownership, the Federal Reserve’s historically low interest rates during the early 2000′s, and the US housing bubble and the massive orgy of investment during the pre-GFC boom. Regulations, government incentives, and the actions of government-sanctioned bodies, all have effects.
    But I’m presuming you are arguing in good faith. And tactics like 1) insinuating libertarians are like religious fundamentalists (i.e. “market as God” and “what Jesus would do”), 2) assuming your opponent’s errors are “so obvious” that no one from your country could agree with your opponent in an intellectually honest manner, and 3) making hysterically overwrought and empirically false claims which impute blame for all economic crises in the last 3 decades onto an untried ideology, are simply not the hallmarks of good faith argumentation.

    • billwald

      > Libertarians do not assume people won’t be mean, vicious or cruel.

      Yes, but do Libertarian theories take this into consideration? Start from, “We are mean, vicious, and cruel. What sort of government and economic system will benefit the most people in society of people like us?”

      Libertarians buy the hypothesis that evolution is causing humans to become more civilized and moral. My hypothesis is that humans have become more efficient and sanitary in doing our evil.

      • http://voodothosting.com/23/ Lorraine Lee

        Liberals/Libertarians seem to assume human nature is essentially greedy, while Conservatives and “Original Sin” slingers seem to assume it’s essentially vicious. For this reason, I regard liberalism (even of the vicious “classical” type) as a lesser ēvĭl than conservatism. Me, I’m a human nature non-essentialist. I give people credit for being the authors of their own natures.

        • StudiodeKadent

          This is not true; many libertarians do NOT assume humans are essentially greedy. Many libertarians do assume some form of psychological egoism (Locke and the British Empiricists clearly argue that people are naturally self-interested, and arguably the American Founders do the same), but “self-interest” is a far broader (and far less loaded term) than “greedy.” Most actual advocates of self-interest (Rand, Aristotle, Spinoza for three off-the-top-of-my-head examples) argue that the interests of others are generally PART of one’s rationally-understood self-interest. “Self-interest” is broader than material acquisition.
          Also, as for Rand, she was philosophically a non-essentialist in epistemology (she was a Conceptualist), and the British Empiricists were generally Nominalists. Neither of them were “essentialists” in the epistemological senses of the term (Rand was a bit inconsistent on this point since her fetish for bodice-ripper-sex was predicated on a kind of gender essentialism, but that was her psychological way of dealing with her feelings of being alienated from her own femininity, read Susan Love Brown’s “Ayn Rand: The Woman Who Would Not Be President” for more on this).
          Epistemic essentialism is NOT something that libertarianism requires. Indeed, epistemic essentialism tends to lead to methodological collectivism in the social sciences, which in turn leads to anti-libertarian conclusions.

          • http://voodothosting.com/23/ Lorraine Lee

            Clearly I’m no match for you in the study of philosophy, so I’ll defer to you on who is or isn’t an essentialist. I was under the impression that “A is A” is the definitive essentialist statement. A facile understanding at best, I’m sure.

      • StudiodeKadent

        All libertarian theories consider the issue of human meanness, viciousness and cruelty. Even the free-market anarchists do this. John Locke’s argument contra Hobbes was precisely over this topic (i.e. whether “leviathan” was in fact necessary to restrain human meanness, viciousness, cruelty. Locke argued that we only needed a modest state to do this).
        Making blanket generalizations about libertarians accepting certain understandings of evolutionary theory is just bogus and honestly, it makes me suspect the breadth and depth of your research into libertarianism. Many libertarians don’t bring evolutionary biology into the discussion in the first place.
        You are correct that those who do tend to use evolutionary biology to argue that humans have a natural level of benevolence towards each other and (in general) do not wish harm upon each other. IIRC this argument goes back to Hume. Honestly, I agree with it to a great extent; it certainly squares with my own experience.
        You’re entitled to your own hypothesis on the issue. But it doesn’t accord with my experience on the subject and so I am disinclined to believe you.

      • http://www.facebook.com/les.nearhood Les Kyle Nearhood

        That is not a valid view of any libertarian thought. I have never read libertarians saying that people are getting better. It is precisely because of our fear of the negative aspect of human behavior that we favor freedom and small government. Because government is run by people.

    • HookaSmokinCatapilla

      Studio, I read you but you don’t make sense to me. I like this bit though, “3) making hysterically overwrought and empirically false claims which impute blame for all economic crises in the last 3 decades onto an untried ideology, are simply not the hallmarks of good faith argumentation.”

      Such a hypocrite you are; and you argue just the way all glibertarians argue. You and your kind impute blame for all economic problems on the ‘proles’ and their stupidity laziness and dishonesty or regulation.

      ISo, to deal with your idea that there are stupid people who hold your society back; I’m a ‘prole’ myself, although I’ve never actually had an Australian libertarian call anyone of our ‘lazy and stupid’ people a prole; that seems to be something they have not adopted yet. So why bother with me, being less intelligent than you how could I possibly understand that your system will work perfectly if only …. no stupid people and no regulation?

      That reasoning is axiomatic for libertarians; you people go ‘if someone doesn’t understand my reasoning then they must be too stupid to understand it’ and so of course you are always right.

      But you say your system has never been tried. LOL, so it’s such a weak and precarious system that it needs to be carefully protected and nurtured through it’s growth stages? So delicate that even though all western govts have become neo-liberal and protect the market, this system isn’t able to bring about any real increase in human progress except for a very few people at the top?
      Good for you though, you hang in there and have your fantasy. I’m all for diversity and alternate reasoning but I don’t have to pretend that it has a place in the category of ‘good ideas that human beings have come up with’.

      I have a very high IQ but somehow ‘m just too stupid to like being selfish and greedy and I just can’t feel proud of myself for being a parasite western person who screws all the other people in the world while pretending to want to make them better off.

      I like to help people and I like stupid people, so it isn’t easy to do well in the type of society you value. But let me be even more ‘hysterical’ and ‘abusive’ and tell you to bugger off with your autistic economic reasoning. If you aren’t aware of and convinced by all the valid critiques that have been levelled at libertarian economics over the past few years, I’m not going to bother.

      I would be more interested in your arguments if any of you libertarians had bothered to correct the moron who calls people proles. Or is that just simply his freedom to say what he wants and he doesn’t get called ‘hysterical’?

      Oh, he is being ironic? I didn’t think he had the creativity to do irony. Silly me.

      • http://voodothosting.com/23/ Lorraine Lee

        I think the notion of market fundamentalists is apt. While nobody seriously believes that the market “is God,” many rather explicitly claim that the market is virtually infallible. Belief in infallibility is the defining feature of fundamentalism, be it infallibility of the Bible, of the Pope, of Price Signals…

        • StudiodeKadent

          Ms. Lee, you are context-dropping. “Infallibility of the Bible,” “Infallibility of the Pope” and “infallibility of price signals” are completely different things, not to mention that libertarians do NOT believe price signals to be in fact infallible.
          Popes and Bibles deal with a totally different class of (alleged) fact. All price signals are is indications of the opportunity cost of a specific good, i.e. how much resources have to be used (i.e. given up, spent on X instead of Y) for one unit of X.
          This is a totally different matter from statements intended to be eternal truths across all societies relating to the workings of a Platonic/Transcendent realm of eternal perfection inhabited by an allegedly omniscient/omniponent/omnibenevolent deity named Jehovah.
          As to whether or not markets are accurage gauges of opportunity costs in the first place, markets are the best we have. The idea of constructing some sort of shadow market (the Oskar Lange proposal) was thoroughly refuted by Hayek’s “The Use Of Knowledge In Society.”
          Beliving that a market is the best alternative out of the alternatives we have is scarcely “fundamentalism.”

          • http://voodothosting.com/23/ Lorraine Lee

            So the price mechanism is not only not omniscient, but not even eternal? That is the most optimistic news I have heard in a long time.

          • http://voodothosting.com/23/ Lorraine Lee

            Some of the claims concerning the market mechanism are, if not claims of infallibility, certainly claims of superlativity. That it is unbeatable as an allocation mechanism is treated, if not as a starting point, as a given. There’s a “case closed” mentality concerning any suggested alternatives. “There is no alternative,” from the outsider perspective, sounds less like a statement of empirically tested fact than a statement of “you’ll go with the program whether you like it or not.” The non-negotiability of the alleged Laws of Economics has become a claim not only of empirical validity, but of certainty. The sense of triumphalism with which this certainty is communicated, of course, adds to this.

      • StudiodeKadent

        I didn’t mention the “proles” even once. Your use of Marxian terminology (terminology which I neither used nor even alluded to) seems to indicate an underlying Marxian framework for your worldview.
        For the record, I NEVER in my entire existence have made blanket assumptions about the “proles.” I’d even doubt the epistemic legitimacy of such a categorization (Marxism depends on an intrinsic separation between capital goods and other kinds of goods, which is based on epistemic essentialism; I don’t agree with that premise).
        Naturally, your reply is filled with blanket generalizations about “libertarians” as a whole, and you refuse to acknowledge that there is substantial diversity between various kinds of libertarian! This only demonstrates that you haven’t given libertarian thought serious study.
        I do NOT believe the “proles” are dishonest, I do NOT believe they are stupid, and I do NOT believe they are lazy. Quite the opposite in fact. Many people who are “working class” (by Marxian definition) are very honest, hard-working and intelligent.
        You impute ideas to me that I simply do not hold; that I believe “stupid people” are “holding society back” is just simply untrue. That said, I do believe a lot of people, of ALL social classes, aren’t particularly well-versed in economics. But economics is a TECHNICAL field of knowledge, and people can be very intelligent without being well-versed in the field.
        And no, I do NOT believe that “anyone that doesn’t agree with me doesn’t understand me.” However, many people do NOT understand libertarianism (or its various subtypes), partially because a lot of libertarianism’s enemies have been blatantly unfair and defamatory in their criticisms of libertarianism and have misrepresented the actual position/s various libertarians take.
        If you think all western governments have all become “neo-liberal” (a smear term), then I simply think you have a far too broad definition of “neo-liberal.”
        Libertarianism is not “selfish and greedy” in the way you make it out to be. Your image of the philosophy is a strawman parody of Objectivism. A distorted strawman of one subtype of libertarian is hardly a representative sample or an intellectually honest argument.
        And then you end your argument by calling my economic reasoning “autistic” and then saying that if I haven’t accepted any of the “valid critiques” of libertarianism, I’m somehow irreperably intellectually dishonest.
        I’ve READ plenty of critiques of libertarianism. I’ve been exposed to a huge range of different perspectives during my time doing undergraduate and postgraduate economics. I’ve seen heaps of critiques. I happen to disagree with them.
        You accused me of believing that anyone who disagrees with me is “stupid,” yet you basically do precisely the same thing to me in your reply.
        Then you conclude by saying you’d “be more interested in your arguments if any of you libertarians had bothered to correct the moron who calls people proles.” I have NEVER called people “proles” and I have NEVER heard a single libertarian actually do that. If you could tell me which libertarian has done this, link me to them and I’d be happy to call them condescending elitists.

      • http://www.facebook.com/les.nearhood Les Kyle Nearhood

        There was absolutely not one single idea of value in your entire ad-hominem diatribe. Try being congenial for a while and maybe people will take you seriously.

  • Javier

    You say: ” However, as far as I can tell, they evaluate the market on the basis of
    semi-Marxian, heterodox economics, while we get to use mainstream
    neoclassical and institutional economics.”

    Are you sure? I don’t remember them endorsing “heterodox economics.” Anyway, there are plenty of left-wing neoclassical economists.

    • Javier

      Also, I think it would be disappointing if the whole BHL project turned
      out to be just consequentialism plus an empirical claim that markets
      work best.

  • Lamont

    Re: your final note. Is it fair to see the Bertram et al piece as offering an accurate picture of the Nozickian position? I think the article may function as an external criticism of Nozickians, but I don’t see it as a good internal critique. It’s not something Nozickians have failed to see, is it?

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  • http://www.facebook.com/ikilled007 Michael Barnett

    This entire blog summed up in three sentences:

    “Here’s the bottom line. We BHLs are for the most part not hard, deontological libertarians. We are liberals who think that a major part of the justification for property rights and market institutions has to do with their expected consequences for all decent, conscientious people.”

    Or, translated, “We’re not libertarians.” Thanks for this admission.

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  • j_m_h

    Keep up the good work Jason. You seem to be annoying both, what I would call, reflexive hard core libertarians and those High Liberals. Going from a view that the best compromise is one that leave everyone unhappy you all seem to be on track.

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