Some moral and political theories are completely insensitive to consequences. These moral theories are crazy; I dismiss them with prejudice.

Any sensible moral or political theory has some concern for the consequences of different actions and institutions. So, for instance, Nozick probably thought that rights are not absolute, but instead could be violated in order to avoid catastrophic moral horror. Rossian pluralists, such as Michael Huemer, Bryan Caplan, or I, explicitly accept that rights can be overridden in some such cases. But that doesn’t make us thoroughgoing consequentialists–saying consequences matter, and that sometimes consequences can be severe enough to override deontological principles, doesn’t make you a consequentialist. It just makes you not a nut.

With that in mind, consider another instance of the type of question I’m fond of asking:

Suppose central planning in a large scale economy turned out to be Pareto-efficient, but libertarian markets were far inferior in Paretian terms. Would you still favor libertarian markets? How much worse would these markets have to perform before you would favor central planning?

Many libertarians react thusly to this question:

After they put their heads back together, they feel compelled to tell me about Mises and the Calculation Problem, as if I didn’t know about it or misunderstood it. But, they say, it’s completely implausible that central planning would be Pareto-efficient while markets would be inefficient. We know from history that this is not the case. Some of them would even assert that we know a priori that’s it not the case.

First, yep, I accept the Calculation Problem. However, I don’t accept that one can prove a priori that central planning can’t work. Instead, I think Mises’s  and Hayek’s arguments just cast strong ex ante doubt on the viability of central planning, and subsequent history showed ex post that they were right. I think it could have turned out that Mises and Hayek were wrong, and I think it remains possible that new evidence will come in that central planning can work. Sometimes institutions work differently from what we expect. 

Some people say that they can’t even imagine a world in which central planning worked out. No doubt they can’t. But so what? Lots of people can’t imagine that things work the way they in fact work. Nicole Hassoun can’t imagine that comparative advantage (or basically any mainstream economics) is true. Chuck Norris can cut through a hot knife with butter, but he can’t imagine that humans evolved from other primates. My mother-in-law can’t wrap her head around the Monty Hall problem. Aquinas, Ayn Rand, and lots of other people have tried to make a priori arguments about whether the universe is eternal, when in fact it’s an open empirical question, to be settled by physics. Lots of things seem incoherent or impossible to us, but aren’t. So, I read Mises as saying, “Here’s what it would take to make central planning work. I can’t figure out how they’d possible do that. So I bet they’ll always fail.” And I agree with him. But it was possible that the Soviet Union would surprise us, that the Soviets would find a way to make central planning work, and Mises would have had to eat his words. Sure, it would have been a big surprise, and it would be an even bigger surprise if a government made it work now. But it’s not incoherent.

Still, let’s just take it for granted that central planning on a large scale isn’t going to work (read: be Pareto-efficient) in a world like ours, at least not without some fantastic new technology. So, is my question above dumb? Of course not. It’s just a way of probing to what degree the argument for markets depends upon the consequences of markets and the consequences of the alternatives.

If you can’t see the point of asking that question, or if you think the question is just incoherent, there may be an unflattering explanation why.