The Non-Non-Libertarian FAQ

[grarpamp]

https://nintil.com/nnlibertarianfaq

The Non-Non-Libertarian FAQ

2016-03-24; Last updated: 2016-03-24

aka The webpage you will always remember for changing your political
views, maybe :)

Contents

0. Introduction

A. Economic Issues

1. Externalities 2. Coordination Problems 3. Irrational Choices 4.
Lack of Information

B. Social Issues

5. Just Desserts and Social Mobility 6. Taxation

C. Political Issues

7. Competence of Government 8. Health Care 9. Prison Privatization 10.
Gun Control 11. Education

D. Moral Issues

12. Moral Systems 13. Rights and Heuristics

E. Practical Issues

14. Slippery Slopes 15. Strategic Activism 16. Miscellaneous and Meta

Epilogue

Introduction

0.1: Who are you, what is this?

For me, see in the About section of this site.

This is a response to Scott Alexander's Non-Libertarian FAQ, initially
written in 2010 and revised in 2013. Note that his FAQ is not called
the Anti-Libertarian FAQ. In the same spirit, this FAQ does not defend
libertarianism, but criticises arguments offered against
libertarianism.

0.2: Are you a libertarian?

That depends on your definition of libertarian. I've never been really
comfortable with any ideological X's in 'I am an X'. But you can get
an idea of what I think by reading Michael Huemer, Loren Lomasky,
Robert Nozick, Matt Zwolinski and Jason Brennan.

On statism, I define statism as the belief that the State has
political authority, or that the law ought to be obeyed just because
it is law, whatever its content. Political philosophers nowadays
reject this, so statists are on the wrong side of philosophical
progress. However, arguments still remain for State commands being
right for other goals. That is, laws against murder are
nonproblematic, but that's because murder is wrong, and the State
enforces its ban. Also, there may be other arguments for the State
that do not rely on political authority, namely consequentialist
arguments.

Then, most non-libertarians (and some libertarians, curiously) are
statists as defined above. Scott does not believe in political
authority: he is a consequentialist. Hence, he is not a statist. He
would support the state only if it is the social-institutional
arrangement most conducive to the Greater Good™.

0.3 Do you hate non-libertarians?

Hating is irrational, and doubly so in intellectual inquiry. The
mental state of 'hating' not only makes you feel worse, but it also
induces you to think in biased ways regarding that which you hate.

Now, Scott says that he likes libertarianism as a set of hands-off
policies that can be argued to work better than the alternatives, and
that he dislikes the libertarianism that "rather than analyzing
specific policies and often deciding a more laissez-faire approach is
best, starts with the tenet that government can do no right and
private industry can do no wrong and uses this faith in place of more
careful analysis.".

He addresses the FAQ to the second type of libertarians. I would be a
third type: I do think libertarianism works better in general (based
on empirical and theoretical evidence)  and that the situations where
it doesn't work as good do not justify the use of force to correct
them. If there were situations where it worked really poorly, then
coercion would be justified. That is, I believe States can do many
things right, and that the private sector can do many wrong things,
but that by itself doesn't say anything about whether there should be
a State, or if there has to be one, what should it be doing.

One thing is economics and history, and the other is moral philosophy.
In this FAQ we will deal mainly with the former, as Scott has another
FAQ that deals with the latter: the Consequentialism FAQ. Although I'm
not a consequentialist, I think consequences matter greatly. This FAQ
mainly deals with empirical issues, so it isn't relevant for my
purposes what the correct ethical theory is. To add to the prima facie
unimportance of this debate at this point, many libertarians are
consequentialists or utilitarians, so if consequentialism is true, it
may end up leading to libertarianism anyways.

0.4 Will this FAQ prove that the free market is always better than the
government?

No.

What I will argue is that free markets are very good. Even better than
most economists think they are. And in the long term, coupled with
non-market institutions and a proper definition of property rights (to
solve externalities), this is a (meta)system that is very hard to
criticise by comparison to an alternative system.

0.5 Why write a Non-Non-Libertarian FAQ?

Scott Alexander has written a document for which there is no publicly
available (high quality) critique, and given that it is well argued,
and has a friendly tone, some have taken the document itself, and the
absence of critique for three years as proof that libertarianism is
wrong.

If a person as honest, rational and rigorous as Scott has rejected
libertarianism in a non-strawmanning way, and no one has replied to
his arguments, doesn't it count as a strong prima facie case against
libertarianism? It does! There is one such reply (not very good,
imho), and David Friedman emailed Scott another, also available here.
But still there is no publicly available good response to the entire
FAQ, point by point. Of course, there are good argumentations for
libertarianism elsewhere (see here for philosophy, see here for
practical issues), but those are not specific to this FAQ.

That said, Scott Alexander admitted some years ago that he wasn't sure
he's a non-libertarian anymore, and that the FAQ is aimed at non-smart
libertarians, so writing my critique may seem, and I think it will
seem, like an overkill.

Finally, I cannot let well argued arguments to stand unanswered if I
disagree with them. If one wants to keep holding beliefs in
disagreement with his FAQ, one must produce reasons for it. I make my
list of such reasons available to everyone to move  the debate
forward.

0.6 How is this FAQ structured?

The same way as Scott's. I recommend you to read mine in parallel with
his, as the questions in my FAQ are summaries of Scott's answers, more
or less. My want could even make little sense without this parallel
reading.

As an additional comment, in this paragraph, Scott alludes to the
tendency of libertarians to resort to economic and moral arguments. If
morality dictates libertarianism, why bother with consequences? If
libertarianism is the system that works best, period, why bother
saying that things are morally wrong?

This critique was initially advanced by Jeffrey Friedman (1997), and
was debated afterwards (Palmer 1998, Friedman 1998). Recently,
Zwolinski and Tesón made this explicit:

    While an appeal to self-ownership is probably the most famous
libertarian strategy for defending rights of private property, it is
by no means the only one. Some libertarians have sought to base their
defense on different but equally deontological grounds such as an
appeal to negative liberty, or to autonomy. Other libertarians have
sought to  provide a more consequentialist justification, by showing
how private property replaces the zero- (or negative-) sum
transactions of the commons with the positive-sum  transactions of a
market economy.  Or by showing how rights of private property are
instrumentally valuable in securing other important civil and
political rights. For the most part, though, individuals in the
libertarian intellectual tradition have refrained from drawing sharp
distinctions between consequentialist and deontological arguments,
believing instead that respect for private property is both a moral
duty and a wise social policy.  Libertarians, especially those outside
the discipline of academic philosophy, have thus tended to help
themselves generously to both sorts of arguments, without always
distinguishing clearly between them. [...]

    That fact that justice and utility both point in the same
direction in so many libertarian arguments is surely a fact that calls
out for explanation. One possible explanation is the skeptical one.
The reason justice and utility line up for libertarians, this line of
reasoning goes, is because libertarians frame their arguments to fit
their conclusions, rather than the other way around. See, for a
somewhat sympathetic expression of this skepticism, Jeffrey Friedman,
"What's Wrong with Libertarianism?," Critical Review 11, no. 3 (1997).
However there are other, less skeptical explanations available as
well. For instance, perhaps justice and utility do not come into
conflict because the content of justice is partly a function of
utilitarian considerations? See, for a discussion of many such
possible explanations, and an endorsement of one, Roderick Long, "Why
Does Justice Have Good Consequences?,"
http://praxeology.net/whyjust.htm [Ed. See alsothis and this]

I don't have a defined view on this matter yet, but I will say that if
libertarianism had very bad consequences, it ought to be abandoned.
Also, if libertarianism had very good consequences, but it were highly
unethical, it ought to be abandoned as well.
Part A: Economic Issues

The Argument

Every transaction affects not just the seller and buyer, but everyone
else, and that it assumes that consumers have coherent wants and
demands. Markets have problems: externalities, coordination problems,
irrational choice, and lack of information. Given this, a regulated
market trumps a free market.

The Counterargument

Yes, voluntary trade makes people ex-ante better off necessarily, but
this does not presuppose all the conditions of classical perfect
competition. Perfect competition gives sufficient, not necessary,
conditions for efficiency.

It is true that trade occurs not in isolation. Precisely this will be
the key to answer the challenges the FAQ raises. Also, trade doesn't
need to be between two people, you can have multilateral trade. As
long as everything is voluntary and property rights are well defined,
the free market delivers, it will be argued.

1. Externalities

1.1 What is an externality?

Externalities are costs imposed upon people who were not participants
in the transaction that originated said cost. While some economists
like to derive justifications for government interventions from
externalities, we should remember that there are quite a few
externalities no one advocates for fixing, and yet some are as
externalities as pollution.

One is the psychological distress non-whites cause to white
supremacists. If that externality has to be fixed, non-whites would be
taxed for existing, and the white supremacists would be compensated,
or something like that. Instead, most of us agree, and rightly so,
that white supremacism is wrong, and that what ought to happen is for
them to change their preferences. This also solves the externality by
making it vanish.

Another one is procreation: bringing more children to the world alters
the distribution of traits (intelligence, health, creativity,
kindness, etc) in society, and that affects everyone (Anomaly, 2014).
To fix it, we may require positive (unproblematic) or negative
(problematic) eugenics, or family planning by some authority.

Most people would not endorse taxing non-whites to compensate white
supremacists, or curtailing reproductive rights in such a way as to
ensure every child is not a walking negative externality.

Also, we wouldn't want to fix pecuniary externalities: externalities
that affect others via the price system. If I buy orange juice, I
marginally raise the price of orange juice for the rest of consumers,
so it affects them negatively. But that loss for them is balanced by
an equivalent gain (in money) for orange juice producers.

What (negative) externalities are usually the ones that most people
would like to fix? Those that are basically violations of rights, and
that is required by libertarianism.

There are also some positive externalities, but arguments that begin
from there to justify coercion to fix them are harder to make.

1.2 But the libertarian ways to solve externalities fail, unless you
propose something that basically is a government

The externality described in the FAQ would be solved by a court. You
would kindly ask the wasp farmer to stop having his business there
because he's annoying, and if he doesn't, you sue him. Alternatively,
there could be private organisations that could to the suing for you.
The court would assess if the nuisance caused by the wasp farmer is a
rights violation or not. It probably would: people in the
neighbourhood were there before, and the presence of the wasp farmer
leaves them worse off in a very noticeable way.

Alternatively, another institution to fix that is a Homeowner
Association (HOA). These are not governments, but provide most of the
functions that you would like local governments for.

Another one is covenants, binding agreements that are transferred with
the property of the house. Why would builders include prohibitions
against wasp farming in the buildings in their newly built
neighborhoods? Because people would value such neighborhoods more,
obviously. This is also a foundation for libertarian zoning
restrictions. For more info on this, see Beito, Gordon & Tabarrok
(2009)'s excellent book on the topic. These may not be used nowadays,
because the government is already in the business of doing that, but
in the past, it wasn't that rare.

1.3 People won't boycott companies that pollute unless most consumers
are knowledgeable and altruistic

Pollution wouldn't be primarily handed via boycott. Pollution is
another thing that would be court-regulated in the libertarian world.
For minarchists, this is easy: there is a State doing the regulation.
For anarchists, this is harder, but I think it's still doable.
Pollution is one of the hard problems for libertarian theory, and work
in that area continues  (Zwolinski, 2014).

Anyway, while boycotts won't be a main tool for governance in the
libertarian world, other institutions can play that role, including
general consumer pressure: There are some studies showing that it can
induce companies to change their behaviour (Hettige et al. 1996).

1.4 Therefore, externalities justify some regulations

Call them regulations if so you wish. They can also be called
definitions of property rights, which are fully consistent -and
required by- libertarianism. By excluding fine property rights
definitions from the definition of libertarianism, it is possible to
create problems for it where there are none.

2. Coordination Problems

2.1 What are coordination problems

Moloch. Or, situations where everyone sees a solution, but there is no
coordination to implement it. I criticised the broad idea of pervasive
and unsolvable coordination problems elsewhere. Regarding the story of
the fish farmers, I copy-paste from myself:

So we have our 1000 firms, each one causing a -1$ loss to others, from
an initial gain of $1000 each, so they are making zero. The fishermen
get together and lay out their situation. They agree on signing a
conditional contract, not too dissimilar from what you can do in
Kickstarter: Everyone will pay 300$ for a filter, so that everyone
makes $700 a month. The contract will only be binding if everyone
signs it, and they go to a court and sign it there so that it becomes
binding, and enforceable by an external agency. Now they have changed
their incentives: They can choose to do nothing (payoff=0) or sign
(expected payoff=700). So they sign. Once they have gone to court,
they can either cooperate (expected payoff=700) or can shirk. But now
their payoff is not 999, but paying a fine until they cooperate, so
now it’s rational to cooperate. Fixed.

But you have used a court!, I'm told. So what? In Libertonia there are
courts, what were you expecting? Third-party enforceability is a
valuable service.

But what if there’s a stubborn fisherman who demands others to pay him
to actually sign the contract. There we run into the question of
whether the fishermen actually had the right to pollute the water in
the first place.

So suppose that the fishermen raise this issue. Most of them argue
that since the lake is a common resource, and since it’s in the
interest in all of them for it to be clean, they should regard it as a
common property, where rules can be imposed to ensure inner
coordination. The hypothetical free rider could argue that since he
was the first to get to the river, he has the right to pollute, and
that others ought to pay him. This could be some sort of Coasean
bargain. In this case, if he demands payment P from each other, he
would be making 700+999P. Others would be making 700-P. In the
cooperative case, total earnings are 7001000=0.7 megadollars. In the
noncooperative case, 700+999P+700999-999P=0.7 megadollars, same
amount, different distribution. P would depend here on a variety of
factors, but total gains are the same. The court system would have to
deal with cases like this, and resolve disputes, set precedents,
trying to ensure good outcomes while respecting rights. No trivial
task, but not an impossible one either.

Read also this. On fisheries, In general, read  Ostrom (1999).

The Coasean solution is not troublefree: it is necessarily efficient
only if, at least, there are no transaction costs. Real life
bargaining will not be texbooklike efficient. But as is highlighted
through this FAQ, these are not the only solutions. David Friedman
discusses here Coase's Theorem.

2.1.1 But this doesn't work

Empirically, yes. Read Leal (1998). The FAQ proposes fishing quotas.
The obvious libertarian solution is private or common property rights,
to which fishing quotas are an approximation. On a comparison between
private and common property rights, seeOstrom and Hess (2007).

The example of the Atlantic Northwest cod fishery was an example of
government failure: the fishery was government (mis)regulated. What
would have happened had there been property rights on the whole
fishery? The government didn't allow that to happen. The US fishery
policy has its problems (White, 2000).The EU's Common Fisheries Policy
also seems (Khallilian et al, 2010) to be failing. Governments can
succeed or fail at solving common resource coordination problems, but
so can private or communal institutions (Tarko, 2012).

That said, the state of global fisheries today is dim, even with
plenty of national and international government regulation. Creating
common property in fisheries that span national borders conflict with
sovereignty (Ha, mere fishermen telling States what to do with their
territorial waters!), so in a way States could be making their
governance more difficult.

2.1.2 But Fishermen won't do it!

As said above, they actually, empirically, do it, especially for
non-international water regions, and when rights of some sort are in
place. Formal external enforcement will be a feature of any
libertarian political order, with or without a state, so the fact that
it is required is no critique of libertarianism.

For international waters, things are trickier, to the point that, as
pointed out above, States are not able to deal with it (right now).
But would we go as far as claiming it is impossible?

2.2 Global warming is an example of this problem, as is ozone layer
depletion and recycling

The same problem that affects the private sector affects States. So
this kind of problems are not quite problematic for libertarianism qua
libertarianism, as States also can't fix them on a global scale. The
statist solution would be to have a world-State to regulate these
matters. The libertarian solution would be to say that since everyone
makes use of the atmosphere, and that for the purposes needed
(regulate emissions of certain gases and pollutants) it can't be
subdivided, it has to be a single property. So it would be justified
for it to exist a worldwide atmospheric regulation committee to solve
this tragedy of the commons. Sounds really hard to do, but States
haven't been doing that much better lately.

Fortunately, it seems that technology can do what individual
incentives are not able to in a world of Nation-States. Right now,
we're living through a solar energy revolution (and if we're a bit
optimistic, we'll live a fusion energy revolution in some decades)
that will end up with fossil fuel energies replaced by a cheaper and
cleaner one. So while the problem is not solved, it stops being an
actual problem, so everything is ok.

2.3 Libertarians say boycotts can discipline corporations. Incentives
aren't aligned that way.

Suppose markets are more competitive so that the difference between
one product and its replacement is slim. Then it's maybe $1 plus an
ethical cost of buying from an unethical company vs $(1+x) and buying
from a nice company. If x is relatively small, it may work.

Now, I'm not arguing boycotts are a really really strong tool. But
those unspeakable things can be solved by courts. I mean, if there is
a company that uses slave labour, anyone could sue them for slavery,
on behalf of the slaves. I don't really see the problem here.

2.3.1 They don't work: the Coke example

Those kind of abuses are highly rare, and they also happen with
governments around. Governments that, in some cases, are corrupt. Some
left-libertarians even claim they happen because there are governments
around.

And the Coke example doesn't work that well. It wasn't Coca-Cola
itself, it was a bottler that worked for Coca-Cola, the evidence for
the alleged crime is dubious, and the lawsuit ended up dismissed.

2.3.2 Governments can do better

Most of the laws mentioned had little to do with people wanting
things. Except for very particular cases, there is a notable
disconnect between what people want and what the government does in
its day to day activities. Overall, governments, and any institutional
system, anarchies included, are constrained by generally accepted
beliefs about what's right and wrong (Long, 2008, Wiśniweski 2014 ).
But within this, governments have lots of leeway.

Some of these regulations could be actually said to privilege the
corporations they regulate.

2.4 Coordination failures also justify government spending on charitable causes

Regarding world hunger, it is not that clear that there is a
coordination failure here. Why? Depending on whether people value
alleviating people's suffering vs feeling good by making donations, it
will or won't be. For the first case, it is a private good. For the
second one, it's a public good. In the first case, for each dollar you
donate to a charitable organisation, you get a marginal reduction of
poverty or hunger. It's not that if everyone except one person
donates, then hunger doesn't go away. People don't really care that
much about world hunger in practice (Leeson, 2014) . This issue is
serious, yet how many people devote time to inform themselves about
how to better deal with it (e.g. Effective Altruism, knowing about
Givewell, etc)? Almost no one. Yet those resources to acquire
information are free.

In the OECD, which I will use as proxy for developed countries, there
are about 1.3 billion people. Let's assume all of them can donate. So
1.31(365/4)=118.6 bn$ per year. If Jeffrey Sachs is right, and ending
poverty costs 175bn$ per year, people would have to pay 1,5$ per week
for 20 years (This assumes kids will also pay, so the estimate is a
lower bound). But Sachs is not without his critics. Givewell accepts
that sort of criticism for that sort of aid plans, while defending
that their approach: bottom-up, cost-effective, step-by-step
interventions doesn't have the same problems. Sadly, there are no
obvious solutions to lift the world's poor out of their situation, and
if there isn't, I think it's difficult to justify coercion to help
towards that goal.  So far, $4.6 trillion have been donated towards
foreign aid in the last 50 years. Is it really believable that just
with 175bn$ per year for 20 years, there is going to be a substantial
increase on the global quality of life of the poor, above that
produced by economic growth?

Finally, if this argument succeeded, it may be that it proves too
much: Wouldn't we have to, on consequentialist grounds, eliminate the
welfare State to a bare minimum, and donate huge amounts of money to
the absolutely poor?

If people really cared that much, they have a handy mechanism to make
everyone pay: the State. Massive foreign redistribution, or open
borders is something that's hard to see defended by political parties,
or asked for by voters.

One further thought is that States may be making this problem worse.
The EU's Common Agricultural Policy, and US subsidies for biofuels do
harm the poor in other countries, while benefitting interest groups
inside their borders.

**2.5 & 2.5.1 We need labor regulation **

We don't. Outsourced to Bryan Caplan.

3. Irrational Choices

3.1 People are not rational. They don't choose the best means to reach
their goals: if someone is signed up into a pension plan by default,
he will stay. If someone is not signed out by default, he won't join
it. Transaction costs are almost zero, so it shouldn't make a
difference.

Governments are also people, and coercing people to implement
alternative choice architectures to fix minor cases of irrationality
that exist are not justified, especially if the proposed solution is
worse than the problem. Highly problematic forms of irrationality will
end up inducing social norms and institutions that will fix them.

The arguments here seems to be like

        Markets maximize welfare under stringent epistemic conditions
including apt probability estimation, stability of preferences, an
absence of framing effects or externalities, etc.

        One or more of those conditions do not hold in a given market
because individuals are less than fully rational.

        That market thus fails to maximize welfare.  (Boettke et al. 2013) .

But markets don't really need that to be efficient.

Consider the case of pensions. If one behavioural argument is right,
then people won't save enough for retirement, and we'll have masses of
relatively poor elderly people. This hypothesis is grounded in human
psychology, and presumably, for the argument to take effect and be
immune to the critique of the welfare-induced irrationality ("The
ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of their folly, is
to fill the world with fools" (Spencer, in Zwolinski 2015)), we would
have to observe those masses of people in really bad conditions before
the coming of public pensions. Also, public pensions will have
appeared because private pensions were not working, or existed but
were stagnant, or something like that.

So why did public pensions appear? There are many theories, and a
paper that studies them, and finds that several reasons account for
it. The first countries in adopting them were Germany,(1889), Denmark
(1891) and New Zeland (1898), and the last ones were Switzerland,
(1948), Netherlands,  (1947), Argentina, (1944), and Japan (1942).
(Cutler et al. 2004).He doesn't mention the terrible conditions of the
old as a general, or even prevalent explanation, so the hypothesis of
massive market failure in providing old-age pensions is in principle
rejected. One question would remain: what was the poverty rate for old
people before and after mandatory pension schemes?

Before public pensions there were sickness funds. Non-profit
associations for the provision of , amongst others, old-age pensions.
This was a time before financial markets were well developed, so there
was no possibility of widespread pension funds as we know them today,
and yet people managed to avoid ruin, in general. (Immergut, 1992).
Ideally, we would look for statistics from before and after mandatory
insurance was introduced,but those a hard to come by.

After some Google Scholar archaeology, I found some statistics from
the pre-Social Security period in the US, and I think this confirms my
account more than Scott's: the elderly do fine without State
intervention.

First, there's Weaver (1987) who explains how society cared about its
elders before the State took care of them. There were, as described
above, several mechanisms, including savings, family care, various
types of insurance, pensions, and charity, and the reason why Social
Security appeared was not due to a systemic problem, but due to the
harsh conditions imposed on the poor by the Great Depression. Instead
of being a set of emergency measures, Social Security was instituted
as permanent, and then grew to be what it is now (Miron and Neil,
1998). Some even argue not only that these institutions were good
enough, but that they were economically optimal (Emery, 2010)

They worked until a later age than now, too. But we also know that
retirement age had been going down decades before Social Security, and
continued going down at the same pace after it (Lee, 2000a)

Papers that do endorse public interventions, like Valdés-Prieto (2004)
are more theoretical than empirical, and don't take into account the
historical evidence like Carter and Sutch (1995), or Gratton (1997),
who shows that the Social Security Administration overreported elderly
poverty in order to have legislation passed to strengthen their role.

Earlier scholarship on Social Security did show that the elderly were
impoverished, but now the consensus view is that they were not, though
some disagreements remain (Lee, 2000b).

So

    Until convincing evidence proves otherwise, we should assume that
most older people in the early twentieth century fared relatively well
by the standards of the time, that the economic well-being of the
elderly improved during this period, and that younger people expected
to achieve economic security in old age. Given these findings, the
creation of a welfare state dedicated to generous transfers to the
aged becomes a great curiosity. Nothing in the economic evidence
substantiates overwhelming need among the elderly, as opposed to some
other group in U.S. society. Indeed, by the late 1930s, SSB
bureaucrats knew full well that children were much more likely to be
impoverished than the aged. What then was the source of Social
Security? Weaver's political economy approach identifies a state
bureaucracy intent on expansion of the old age insurance title in the
social security program. (Gratton,  1996)

3.1.1 People's preferences are complex, and are not (fully) revealed
when they act.

Okay.

3.2 Many choices are not really choices, but spontaneous,
unthoughtful, reactions that don't conform to rational principles.
There is an unequal distribution of abilities to take those
irrationalities into account: not everyone is a perfect reasoner
übermensch, so some paternalism is justified.

This is true. But you need an extra argument to go from "we are not
equal in X dimension" to "It is morally right to use coercion as to
reduce inequalities in X"

3.2.1 People will be happier and have more preferences satisfied if
they don't make irrational choices. More rational choices will improve
also the economy.

I haven't seen evidence of the economic-growth enhancing effect of
behavioural economic policy. But while it could be granted that
coercing people to design their choice architectures so that the
default choice is the rational one may improve preference
satisfaction, it violates the preference of the coercee not to be
coerced. You could just have a nonprofit and tell people to use nicer
default options, if the costs of changing default options is minimal.

3.2.2 Predictably irrational behavior justifies government pensions,
consumer safety and labour regulations, advertising regulations,
concerns about addictive drugs, and public health promotion.

Not really. You may say, well, but aren't people not saving for their
retirement a hugely bad thing? Surely you don't want to have most of
our elders starving and dying en masse. No, I don't. We can solve this
issue by looking at how this used to work before the welfare state,
and old people didn't die en masse. Why? Perhaps because you knew that
if you didn't save, you were going to die, or be a burden to your
family and friends, and you don't want that. That ended up
crystallising into social norms ad institutions.  Nowadays, you need
not worry about that, and so there's less incentive to worry.

It may justify some things, related to harming others mostly. All of
them implementable within the libertarian framework. And it may also
justify limiting the State (behavioural public choice) and even
welfare. See also Murphy (2015) for how irrationality affects
different political arrangements, even considering politicians are
more rational than the average voter.

4. Lack of information

4.1 What is means by lack of information?

There is no perfect information, acquiring it is costly. People
usually want some information about safety, efficacy, and the ethics
of how a product is produced. Governments can listen to these demands
and enforce them, and markets can do so by directly catering to
consumer's demands.

4.1.1 People won't spend time to know about safe and effective products

Won't they? In some instances they won't, like with sugary products.
But in general there are mechanisms to easily get information: First,
the envelope of the product itself tells things about it, as does its
price. There may be third party certifications, consumer websites with
information, or even just word of mouth. Ultimately, though, selling
really ineffective and unsafe products is a case of fraud, and we know
what happens to fraudsters in Libertonia. In the particular case of
sugary drinks, I think right now a norm is spreading to be more
cautious about their consumption.

What about credit rating agencies then? Weren't they selling defective
merchandise (fake ratings)?  Yes, but it wasn't because of any fault
in the market mechanism, but because of government mis-(not
under)-regulation. (White, 2010a White, 2010b, Cole and Cooley, 2014)

4.2 [[Insert list of examples of unethical corporate behaviour]]

4.2.1 Not even smart, educated people know about the things described
in the examples above

I don't have much experience with those products, which may explain
why I have little experience with them. Just think about this: if
something was so bad that clearly didn't work, people would stop
buying it. If something is so unsafe or it is made violating someone's
rights, it should be possible to sue the company over that.

At this point, I've replied to a few question by pointing out to
courts, and you may feel that this is cheating. It isn't: Delineating
property rights require, among other things, to determine a threshold
for when a risky action is considered a rights violation even before
the actual damage has happened, and this cannot be done a priori. This
is the fundamental moral principle upon which libertarian market
regulation would rest.

4.2.2 I won't tell you which of the examples were true or false

Ok

4.2.3 If you believe you care less about product safety because of the
government, you're ten times more statist than me!

Well, not necessarily. You can believe governments do a good enough
job in this area, and not bother with really doing your research.

4.3 Without consumer regulation, small business could be destroyed, as
only big companies would have an incentive to maintain their
reputation by selling good products.

For one, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means you'd have
a different market structure doing the job, but the products would get
sold and bought in the same way.

This ignores the possibility of a) Small business owners not being
jerks b) Suing them c) Third-party certification

4.4 This justifies consumer and safety regulations

I think it doesn't. Plus you can do them without taxes. Here is how:

Imagine you have a new product you want to bring into the market. In
the current system, there are specifications that tell how you have to
make your product so that it is safe. Additionally, you may have to
first prove to a governmental agency that your product is safe. Then,
you can sell it.

In an alternative system, there are known standards (courts!) that the
products have to comply with. Say, computers must not electrically
shock users, food must be in good condition, cars shall not
spontaneously explode and so forth. Companies then are free to do as
they wish to make sure their products pass the requirements. Then,
they stamp a logo on their products saying that it complies, and sell
them, without having the government say anything, or maybe just
notifying them that they are selling the product. Then, from time to
time, governments or private agencies go to the market, buy some
products, and see if they comply. If they do, ok. If they don't, the
company is sued for massive fraud.

What do you think of this second system? It seems workable within a
purely private setting. And what if I tell you that something like
this is the system that is in place in the European Union since 1985,
replacing the system described in the first paragraph? Okay, it's not
a private system. The EU makes the rules and governments enforce them.
But it's closer to what a market solution would look like.

Regarding regulatory agencies more broadly, there are reasons to be
sceptical of whether they do more good than harm, see this for the
FDA, and this quote from the Oxford Handbook of the Economics of the
Biopharmaceutical Industry

    "Despite the central role of the FDA in regulating quality and R&D
costs of medical products, economists have conducted relatively little
theoretical or empirical research on the efficiency of FDA policies.
Ironically, if a product application were presented to the FDA with
the scant amount of evidence that currently exists on the efficiency
of the policies of the agency itself, such an application would likely
be rejected on the basis of insufficient evidence. (Malani et al.
2012)

Part B: Social Issues

The Argument:_ __Most of the difference in success are not
attributable to hard work or intelligence, but to trivial, unchosen,
factors. Therefore, most of people's lives is determined by unfair
factors._

If you think trickle-down economics works to benefit the poor, you are
deluded, it doesn't work, as history proves.

**The Counterargument: **That's basically true. Except that fairness
does not univocally determine justice or entitlement. That's why the
argument fails.

Trickle-down economics has never been defended by any serious
economist, and it was born as a strawman.

5. Just Desserts and Social Mobility

5.1 Children of the rich are more likely to be rich, and children of
the poor are more likely to be poor

True, but maybe not to the extent the FAQ says. If intergenerational
income elasticity means, roughly, how much mobility there is, Denmark
is three times more mobile. If instead of measuring intergenerational
income mobility, you measure rank-mobility (Correlation between
parents being in a quartile and the quartile the child ends up), the
US has an average upward social mobility (and greater downward
mobility), on par with Europe's (Corak et al. 2014). If you instead
focus on how many people born poor stay poor, the results do show that
the US is less mobile: around 66.6% (or  58.2%, in another measure) of
the poor remain poor,  in Denmark this figure is 60.5% (Compare 62.5%
for UK,, 71.9% for Finland, 62.5% in Australia). If you then use
transition matrices, then you get different results, which confirm
again that the US is less mobile, but not as little mobile as
elasticities suggest: the US is 10% less mobile than Denmark, not
300%. This isn't the only issue, though: being poor in the US is worse
than being poor in Denmark.

The US is no libertarian paradise, so this isn't hardly useful for the
debate, though. Rather, compare the Nordics to Switzerland, Singapore,
Hong Kong or New Zeland. From a Rawlsian point of view, you may prefer
to be born in one of these countries rather than in a Social
Democracy. As an example, if you measure Eurostat's material
deprivation rate by age group in 2013, you get that in Denmark 8.8%
were poor, compared to 3.7% in Switzerland, 11.6% in Germany, 8.5% in
Finland, 4.3% in Sweden, 5.6% in Luxembourg, 4.8% in Norway, and 17.4%
in the UK, and 16.9% in Spain. Granted, in all of those countries
there is a State that does redistribution, but their sizes wildly
differ. Given a desired outcome, it seems reasonable that the less
coercion required to achieve it, the better.

That said, I don't know any academic libertarian philosopher who talks
about this moocher/productive distinction, or that hard work makes you
deserve stuff.

The US is also an argument why having the State spend more does not
necessarily translate into better outcomes for the poor: the US has a
larger welfare statethan Denmark if you account for tax breaks and
other things. Where's the catch? Denmark focuses more on the poor, and
the US more in the middle class.

To sum up: The Nordics are very good, but not optimal, nor an argument
against libertarianism. Some libertarian authors actually argue that
the Nordics are more libertarian than the US itself!

5.1.1 But the conventional knowledge among progressives is different!

It's because it is based in a different methodology: measuring
intergenerational elasticities of income. We can ask different
questions: Do children of poor parents have better prospects in
Denmark than the US? Is there a higher correlation between children
and parent income in the US than in Denmark? Is it easier to escape
poverty in the US or in Denmark? Welfare-wise, the question to ask is
the first one. And prima facie, in Denmark they do better, but not
because of a lower intergenerational income elasticity, but because of
freer markets, and a better designed welfare State.

You could now ask: Well, if you think the Nordics are so libertarian
vis-a-vis the US, if you had a magic button to transform the US into a
huge version of Denmark (Copying the best things Denmark has to offer,
so that the end result is a mix of the best of both worlds), would you
press it? And my answer is yes, I would. I would also press a similar
button to transform the US into Switzerland over the Denmark button,
and the minarchist button over the Switzerland button. And if we're
ex-ante sure it works as its theorist say, then the anarchy button is
at the top of the ranking.

5.1.2 Things like genetics, and parents teaching better habits could
explain part of the wealth gap, instead of parents just handing money
to children

True

5.1.3 Social mobility is a political choice, not something given.
People are naturally unequal.

True, but the data shown before shows that welfare-wise, the US
doesn't do it that bad compared to Europe. Also, some of the countries
that have lower income elasticities than the US have freer markets
than the US (as measured by Heritage's Index of Economic Freedom),
especially if you discount the welfare State. You can have both a free
market and a welfare State, and a less free market and less welfare,
so that the former is globally freer than the latter, depending on how
the index is constructed.

Plus, the Nordics were already egalitarian, high social mobility
Nordics before it was cool they had a welfare state. And Nordics
living in the US enjoy much better prospects than the rest of
Americans, which calls into question whether the Nordic success is
just an institutional matter that you can easily copypaste elsewhere.

5.1.3.1 The government can improve social mobility

Scott cites Mayer & Loppo (2008) Well, maybe. Data shown above casts
some doubt on this, but prima facie it is highly plausible that a
welfare state will improve the prospects of the poor. (How much, 10%?
500%?)

But, in the long term, it may have perverse effect, such as
incentivising the same behaviours that keep people in poverty. This is
not blaming the poor for their poverty, just recognising a possible
cause and effect relation. And then, if Gregory Clark is right, social
mobility (broadly understood) is more or less fixed, so you can only
aim at improve the conditions of the poor.

Finally, a declared aim to improve the lot of the poor may not
actually do so, but end up extracting resources to give them to the
middle classes in a greater proportion than to the poor: what is known
as Director's Law (Mohl et al., 2008).

5.2, 5.2.1 Hard-working and conscientiousness, and so on depend on
external factors

True. If you take into account parents, genetics, and so on, what one
is able to do above that is generally not that much.

Regarding the free will debate, if there is no free will, it's hard to
see how you can have merit or desert, except perhaps via
compatibilism. But if there is, merit and desert aren't relevant
philosophical concepts either, as I've argued elsewhere, so our
argumentations shouldn't hinge on that.

5.2.2 Lead poisoning reduces IQ, self-control and other sort of bad
consequences. Is it fair to blame someone for being less smart due to
higher lead exposure?

True, and it is not fair to blame them. And phasing out, and finally
banning, leaded gasoline, was correct.

Lead is an interesting example. It was assessed and allowed by the
government back then, and when evidence arose that it was dangerous,
industry accepted, voluntarily, to restrict the use of lead as an
additive, and complied with it, before the EPA formed, and ended up
banning it.

5.3 Therefore, if success is externally determined, redistribution.

Wait, why?

I think the FAQ has the same problem Rawls had: He notes that no one
deserves anything (more or less), and from there he follows that
everything is up for grabs. As I argued in another post, this argument
also licenses, in principle, organ redistribution, and
thought-engineering to ensure people act in such a way as to be people
that work towards a society that makes the worse off better off, want
it or not.

Here is the Rawlsian view:

    Since most of who we are and what we do is greatly influenced by
undeserved native endowments and by the undeserved circumstances into
which we are born, one cannot deserve anything, or, at best, one can
deserve very little.  According to a common interpretation, Rawls
believes that desert should not have any role in distributive justice,
since these undeserved factors have a major influence on all would-be
desert bases (Sher 1987, 22 ff).  (IEP)

The problem is not rejecting desert. I basically reject it. The
problem is saying that desert is a precondition of entitlement, and
that requires an argument.

Rejection of desert or merit, I think, is the mainstream philosophical
view today, including among libertarian academics. And even if it were
not, the mainstream view among libertarians is that there is no
connection between desert and entitlement. It was Robert Nozick who
famously said:

    We feel more comfortable upholding the justice of an entitlement
system if most of the transfers under it are done for reasons. This
does not mean necessarily that all deserve what holdings they receive.
[…] We noted earlier that the entitlement conception of justice in
holdings, not being a patterned conception of justice, does not accept
distribution in accordance with moral desert either. Any person may
give to anyone else any holding he is entitled to, independently of
whether the recipient morally deserves to be the recipient. (Anarchy,
State, and Utopia)

Hayek and Milton Friedman also rejected that.

To be sure, there are libertarians who accept the notion of desert and
merit, like Bryan Caplan, but they don't make desert the core of their
justification for free markets.

This mistake is what I've called the Unjust World Fallacy. The
well-known Just World Fallacy, applied to this case says: 1. Poor
people deserve being poor 2. If they deserve so, it is just for them
to be poor 3. Therefore, it is just for the poor to be poor.

The Unjust World Fallacy is: 1. Poor people don't deserve being poor
2. If they don deserve so, it is unjust for them to be poor 3.
Therefore it is unjust for the poor to be poor.

Both second premises are mistaken, as there is no justice and desert
connection. Additional arguments are required to go from lack of
desert to lack of entitlement and the need of redistribution.

That said, you can defend that there exists a general moral duty to
help the poor, but not because they deserve it, but just because it is
good to help others, and doing more good is better than doing less
good, so if you are going to dedicate resources to helping others, if
you target the poor you will get lots of helping done.

6. Taxation

6.1 See the Moral Issues section for a discussion of whether taxation
is inherently evil

See my reply to the above in the corresponding section

6.2 Progressive taxation is not unfair: it is utility-wise equal
taxation. Flat taxes are unequal taxes with respect to the value
people give to the money they have

You can still have flat taxes and equal burden: As pointed out by
David Friedman, if there is a person A with 40,000$ and a marginal
utility of income of 2 utiles/dollar, and a person B with 80,000$ and
a marginal utility of income of 1 util/dollar, a flat tax of 10% will
get 4,000$(8,000 util) from A and 8,000$ (8,000 util) from B.

Also, if this argument goes through, it doesn't justify your typical
redistribution. It justifies taxing everyone progressively in
developed countries and throwing the money at a vastly enlarged
version of Givewell.

Read White (2015) for debunkings of economically based arguments for
redistribution. Redistribution, to be justified, needs moral
arguments.

6.2.1 Progressive tax systems don't work the way some people think

Okay

6.3 By what standard are taxes too high?

By historical standards

6.3.1 Historical standards show the size of government is more or less stable.

Historical standards show the government has been steadily growing,
and people have to pay more and more taxes. We should look at the
fraction of social income that is extracted by government

Here there is a chart of taxes and expenditures from the year 1900 in
the US. Expenditures more or less track taxes, so it's a good enough
proxy.

chart1_1

Here you have longer term data from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

fig06 Government expenditures over GDP (USA)

fig07 Government expenditures over GDP (Sweden)

6.3.1.1 Taxes for the rich are the lowest they've been for the past 75 years

Technically, yes. But in the longer term, no. (I know these are not
effective rates, but I couldn't find those. You get the idea, anyway)

highest-marginal-tax-rates-1913-2013

6.3.1.1.1 The rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer, and as
more money concentrates in their hands, more of the taxes come from
them

The poor are not getting poorer, after tax incomes are growing for
everyone, at diverse paces.

6.3.1.2 Tax rates for corporations are also really low

Not only they are high historically, in the US they are absurdly high
even if you compare them to, say, the Nordics. Estimates for the
effective tax rate vary, some say it has been going down, so that they
are somewhat lower than OECD average (16.1). Corporations in the
SP500, though, pay around 30% of their income, which is really high.
So the companies you think of when you think of 'corporations' do pay
really high taxes.

6.3.2 We're at the left of the Laffer curve, and it is false that high
tax rates discourage production, real income has low elasticity with
respect to taxes. What taxes affect is taxable income, so increasing
taxes x% will bring less than x% of revenue, but it's still positive.

If overall taxation is a proxy for government size, then unfortunately
the consensus is that increasing the government size (and taxation
required to fund it) by 10 percentage pints leads to a 0.5%-1% less
lower growth rate (Bergh et al. 2011, Bergh et al. 2015).

If you measure aggregate wages and aggregate productivity, there has
been no decoupling, if you were thinking in that.

6.4 Trickle down doesn't work

As said before, no serious person defends trickle-down.

Are the poor getting poorer? You need to look at full compensation,
not as just income. Market income depends upon what the government
does, you can't just measure it in isolation. As wages=productivity
more or less holds, you can estimate that free market wages=actual
compensation today. Doing that, we see that the poor are not getting
poorer, but richer, at a slower pace than the rich.

6.5 Raising taxes won't fix the deficit. But cutting lots of things,
including all of welfare, won't do it either.

US federal deficit was 438$bn in 2015 and 616$bn in 2016. Let's say
500$bn. When Scott wrote, it was 1.2$tn. If Medicaid, Medicare, and
Social Security are cut, and defense is cut in half, you get savings
of  1.9tn$, so technically, you can do it. Now, you wouldn't want to
do it in a year, that'd be dangerous. For the case of Spain, there is
a transition plan proposedhere to a minimal state (5% of GDP), and it
takes 50 years to transition.

6.6 Little taxes go to foreigners and the poor. Most taxes go to
benefit middle income citizens.

Indeed. Welfare states are not about rich-to-poor redistribution, but
mostly medium class-to-medium class redistribution. Nordics included.

This is because of Director's Law (also here, in Spanish).
Part C: Political Issues

The Argument: Governments sometimes do things right, and there are
reasons people are biased to think otherwise. Government-run
healthcare systems are better than private systems, and some
libertarian proposals like prison privatisation are insane.

The Counterargument: Yes, governments sometimes do things right.
However, private healthcare does work better than government-run
healthcare systems. Private prisons in the US aren't a good example of
private institutions.

7. Competence of Government

7.1 Government landed a man on the moon

[[Insert pic of alternative uses of 170 billion 2005 dollars, and the
engineers and scientists dedicated to it]]

I say this as someone who particularly loves space and rocketry, and
who sees the landing on the moon as one of the crowning achievements
of mankind.

7.1.1 If that's not enough, governments also brought us: smallpox and
polio eradication, worldwide. Cholera and malaria eradication in the
US, the computer, the mouse, digital camera, and email. The internet,
and regular highways. Clean, free water, and electricity to the whole
continent. Forcing integration and leading the struggle for civil
rights. GPS. Accurate disaster forecasts for a series of disasters. No
bank runs. Nuclear power and game theory.

I think we're not in agreement here.

    Smallpox and polio eradication. Okay for Smallpox. Polio
eradication is a public-private effort. Other illnesses have been
targeted and successfully reduced by nongovernmental-led efforts
(Dracunculiasis, Hookworm ). Ongoing efforts against malaria are
public-private.
    Cholera and malaria eradication in the US. Okay.
    The computer: Advances in computing have been happening since
Babbage, and important advances like Zuse's were initially
self-financed. That said, yes initially with cryptography and military
requirements for computation, government played an immense role.
    The mouse: Doug Engelbart (and some guys at Telefunken) is to
credit for that one. He received government funds for it.
    Digital camera: Invented at Dresden Eastman Kodak
    Email: If you mean AUTODIN, it was designed by RCA, IBM and
Western Union (for the Air Force). If you mean host-based or LAN mail
systems, there were a few private ones. Or maybe you mean email
networks, in which case it was ARPANet's mailing system, see below.
    The internet: Modems, glass fibers, most communication satellites,
almost all submarine cables (which carry 99% of the traffic), ISPs and
their peerings, and every website of interest, is privately designed,
owned, and managed. That is the internet. Now, if you go to the
network that preceded the internet, ARPANET, it was the work of ARPA,
and a few subcontractors. I have no trouble granting the invention of
the internet to ARPA. Read here a story.
    Regular highways: Private highways precede government's, as do
private roads, in general. If you mean building more of them, then
yes, the government did that.
    Clean, free water: Work initially began by private utilities, plus
it isn't really free.
    Electricity: Same as above.
    Forcing integration, leading the struggle for civil rights: Even
if this were true, you would have to weight this against flagrant
violation of civil rights (think of apartheid in South Africa or
segregation in the US). Regarding civil rights, I don't know what
Scott exactly means, but I think civil rights extension was a thing of
civil rights movements, not governments.
    GPS: Okay
    Disaster forecasts: Okay. Governments have been at the satellite
business from the beginning, and competing with free services is hard.
    No bank runs: Okay. But bank runs before were usually caused by
government regulations, and the possibility of them happening is a
good thing and government management of money has been worse than what
came before it (Selgin et al. 2012), and even worse when compared to
fully private banking. Inflation under the FED has been higher and
more volatile (Hogan, 2015). The banking system ought to be reformed.
    Nuclear power: Okay. But you can imagine an alternate future where
nuclear energy progressed at a slower pace, with safer, and smaller
reactors, so that it gets less bad press. The general problem with
innovations is that it's hard to know what would have happened if some
particular agent hadn't player it's role. My position on this is that
for technological improvement it doesn't matter, and that for
practical implementation, it does.
    Game theory to avoid misusing it. Game theory was birthed by von
Neumann, without government intervention. After he invented it, the
government subsequently hired him to continue his work.

Whatever I could had said above, what matters is whether the private
sector would have come up with those inventions and advances, and I
see no reason why not. We could then debate, case by case, how longer
would have taken for a market process to achieve them.

Also, think about the many things governments did wrong or that could
have done wrong (nuclear war). Right now, think about over-regulation
and excessive defense spending in the US.

7.1.1.1 Governments brought peace, plus some links

Or maybe guns did. Or moral progress. I don't think the Hobbesian
logic works (see Huemer's book for an explanation). Regarding the
links, I'm going to skip doing a debunking, I don't think it would add
that much substance to this FAQ at this point.

7.2 Large government projects are not more bloated and over-budget
than private ones, according to one study

Scott links a paper that studies costs in transport infrastructure.
The critique here is not that project building will be more expensive,
but that it will be less economically rational vs. the market.

Also, I want to remark that the study applies to transport
infrastructure, not large projects in general.

7.3 Some of the world's greatest companies are or have been state-run
like JNR or the BBC. Sometimes, those corporations are set up to
provide goods the market wouldn't provide

Okay. I won't go deep on Amtrak or the USPO, but I think it's
difficult to defend those on that basis. If it is more efficient for
small urban concentrations to have more delays in their mail
deliveries, so be it. Incentive for them to move to larger cities.
Amtrak should also go the same way. If people actually want passenger
transport, they will pay for it. One cause of Amtrak's problems might
have been an oversupply of public highways.

7.3.1 Advances made by the government included what was mentioned
above, plus the radar, jet engine, satellites, fiber optics,
artificial limbs, and nuclear energy, plus at government institutions.
Many market innovations come from de-facto state-owned monopolies,
like Bell Labs. Apple does consumer packaging. De novo invention comes
from very large organizations that can afford basic research.

I commented already on some of those advances.

    Jet engines: I wrote about that here, and here. Not invented by
government, but improved after invention by it.
    Radar: Not invented by government, but independently discovered
and improved by it thereafter
    Satellites: Okay
    Fiber optics: The key achievement was made by Corning Glass Works.
Government's role was relatively small here.
    Artificial limbs: In recent times (post WWII), there has been a
lot of government work here. But there was work in that field before
that.
    Nuclear energy: okay

Contra Scott -and Schumpeter- innovation does not happen just at large
companies shielded from competition. There is no causality pointing
from more concentrated markets to more innovative markets. Other
researchers find an U relationship, where the largest and smallest
firms are the most innovative (Cohen, 2010 [sec 2.3]). If we use R&D
Magazine's 100 Awards as proxy, we find that most innovations come
from the private sector, and that, unlike in the past, they come
usually from small companies. Where breakthrough discoveries (not
inventions) are made is in basic-science research centers, and those
are mostly universities, and yes, big corporations. And universities
are heavily government funded. But they need not be.

Regarding Apple, what Scott says is true. He doesn't claim the US
government is responsible for the iPhone, but there are people who do.
Here is a reply to that.

7.4 The fact that it seems that many government programs are failures
is based on a biased perception.

Okay. Negativity bias is strong. The same thing explains why there are
people who think the world is getting worse.

7.4.1 Many things governments do are not known, so its contributions
are understated

Okay

7.4.2 Yes, sometimes regulations don't cause better outcomes, things
were improving before them. But apply your skepticism fairly and
evenly. It isn't the case that government destroys what it touches,
but it might be that even if what it touches goes well, it's not
because of the government.

Okay

7.4.3 Regulations foster social norms, like wearing seatbelts, perhaps
without things like that there would be less lifesaving regulations

Perhaps. But take into account that mandatory seatbelts encourage less
careful driving, and hence more deaths. Lives saved by mandatory
seatbelts may equallives lost due to them. Nonprofits can also play
that norm creating role.

Also, the rates of usage were rising before they were made mandatory.

8. Healthcare

8.1 Government-run health systems do better than private health
systems, and are cheaper. Sweden, France, Canada UK (single payer)  vs
the US (private). Public systems win at life expectancy, infant
mortality, and cancer.

I reject the fundamental premise: the US does not have a private
healthcare system. Or, if we accept that it does, it is private in the
sense the Federal Reserve is a private bank. One thing is that a
substantial part of the US healthcare system is privately owned.
Another is the degree of regulation that sector has, and the effects
it has over how it behaves. I will explain this in this section.

Another criticism to be made is that the populations are not the same,
and that biases outcome comparisons in the variables presented by the
FAQ. See here for more.

No one defends the US healthcare system as it is now, as far as I
know. And it's not because of an implicit no-true-Scotsman fallacy:
there are reasons why libertarians criticise the US healthcare reason,
and propose measures to fix it:

    Tax-subsidized health insurance that distorts the market
    Medicare, Medicaid , etc (45% of total spending)
    And others

The problem of US healthcare in a nutshell: In a healthcare system,
someone should be doing the rationing. In the US, no one is. Unlike in
Europe, the public part of the US healthcare system does contribute to
price inflation because of that.

Lots of things could be said about healthcare and how a pure free
market there would work, but this is a Non-Non-Libertarian FAQ, not a
place where to present a full defense of any particular position.

8.2 Government-run healthcare is more efficient than market
healthcare: the Blue Cross example, and a chart of spending vs
outcomes

The claim of Blue Cross is a  bit hard to evaluate. The chart the FAQ
links has no source but some googling leads us to a book by Peter
Drucker. Drucker does not cite the source for those numbers. But Blue
Cross in Massachusetts covers around 2.8 million people, and the
Canadian Health system 27 million. Health Canada has 10403
employees,and BC has 3600. Hence, the claim made is false. It may be
then argued that the people/employee ratio is better in Canada, to
which I will reply that there are economies of scale, and other
factors at play.

The chart presented here is not fair for the reasons presented in 8.1.
Instead, you could compare the share of GDP expenditures on healthcare
vs GDP, and find out that the US is not that much of an outlier (see
also this) depending on how you measure it, plus that costs have been
increasing also in single-payer systems (not as much as in the US, in
some cases). But as I will say later, this is to be expected.

8.3 Waiting list are not a big issue. Health has to be rationed. In a
private system, the price system does this, but it has the
disadvantage that if people want too much healthcare than they really
need, prices will spiral up. In contrast, in public systems,
allocation is based according to need.

If people want to see a doctor more than they 'need' to do so, that is
just an increase in demand, and the mechanism described by the FAQ
will work equally well. If the system excludes masses of poor people,
there are strong incentives to find out alternatives to serve that
market.

**8.4 Death/life panels **

Fine with that

8.5 Government healthcare is more effective because of economies of
scale, and people are irrational and don't know what healthcare they
need. And for-profit hospitals have worse outcomes than non-for profit
hospitals.

Economies of scale have little to do with it, beyond the fact that
governments can impose their dictates on companies if they are a
single buyer (a monopsony). Above a certain threshold, an insurance
pool adds little fixed-cost-sharing by adding more people to it, and
insurance pools can always opt to reinsurethemselves.

Regarding profits/nonprofit hospitals: Fortunately 75% of private US
hospitals are non-profits (note that the study doesn't compare private
v public, but this does). The results are not robust (they depend on
regions, and time periods), and apparently public hospitals aren't as
good as private non-profits (Eggleston et al., 2008 Koning et al.
2007) And the problem here is not the profit motive: non-profit
hospitals 'owners' do make 'profits' via paying higher salariesto
their boardmembers (and other workers)

If you want to look at something that looks closer to the system
libertarians imagine, look at Singapore. Yes, there is plenty of
government intervention, but libertarians will argue that the way the
system works can be replicated entirely with the market mechanism.
Read also this by Caplan on free market healthcare.

A healthy healthcare system will have lots of out of pocket payments.
Insurance should be that, insurance, to be used only for very rare,
high-cost things. We can even do a quick analysis of the impact of
public and out of pocketpayments on healthcare costs, as measured by
the cost of a basket of hospital services (Koechlin et al. 2010). If
we do the analysis for a series of countries (Australia, Canada,
Finland, France, Italy, Israel, Korea, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, and
the US) We get these charts (orange line is a fit excluding the US):

[gallery ids="2495,2496" type="rectangular"]

This is, of course,no conclusive evidence on its own.

We can also take a look at India's healthcare system. Why, you may ask.

In many poor countries, healthcare is mostly private (Forsberg et al.,
2011) . India in particular is of interest because of the some
innovations that are happening right now in their private healthcare
system,  that people prefer over the lower quality, but free, public
one (Das et al. 2015).

These revolution has come to the point where some Indian hospitals
deliver western-level qualitycare at a fraction of the cost via both
process innovations and technological innovations (PSP4H, 2014), while
at the same time helping the poor by using fees from the richer
clients to subsidise the poorer ones.

Granted, India is not a wealthy country, and lots of poor people
become indebted due to health expenses. But this situation is what has
spurred innovation in the healthcare sector, and it is not a situation
of poverty that will last forever. Health outcomes are improving at a
good pace (Joumard et al., 2015). The system, as you may see from my
references, is not perfect. But doesn't it work better than you
expected? Now imagine this in a wealthier country!

To finish this section, I can also point you to this article and
podcastby John Cochrane on healthcare reform for the US, and how
markets can help making its healthcare system better.

9. Prison Privatization

9.1 Private prisons are worse than regular prisons. They also have an
incentive to lobby for stricter sentencing to get more prisoners, and
thus more income.

I don't know about this. But private prisons in the US are more like
"contracted-out" prisons than privatised ones. There seem to be people
that have evidence for them too. In ancient Athens they didn't work
that badly (D'Amico 2009). And you can also have charity-run prisons
(Skarbek 2014).

9.2 It's ok if libertarians don't believe in private prisons

Minarchists are fine with both types, if private ones turn out to be
really bad. Anarchist libertarians would need private prisons, if
imprisonment is to be done. Most theorists, I think, tend to be
against the idea of imprisoning people, but of making them work to
generate money to compensate those they have aggressed against. Or,
perhaps, security agencies would pay for the prisoners to be there.

10. Gun control

**10.1 Maybe guns should be allowed, but some restrictions should be in place **

Indeed. How to keep nuclear weapons, and similar stuff out of the
streets? For minarchists this is trivial: what weapons are reasonable
to have can be decided by the State. For anarchists, it is indeed much
harder. The solution would have to be for the court system to  ban
unreasonable weapons, and since most people would favour such a
measure, it would probably be implemented.

11. Education

11.1 But public schools do better than private ones, and we don't have
statistics from before the rise of public education.

Fortunately, we do have such statistics. For UK (West, 1978) and
France(Blum et al., 1985). Reminder: Public education begins in both
countries around 1870.

Captura de pantalla de 2016-03-03 15-10-56 Illiteracy rate

Plus, government sponsored public education is a horrible failure in
underdeveloped countries (Tooley, 2005) compared to private schools.

The case of Finland: Finland spends per student 5% more compared to
Spain, and the difference in the PISA ratings is of 40 points.
However, if you compare SES-adjusted ratings between Finnish public
and Spanish private schools, you get a difference of just 10 points
between Finland and Spain (in favour of Finland). A fairer comparison
would involve students in Finland itself, but there are no private
schools for such comparison. If you compare Macao and Hong Kong (>90%
in private schools) with Finland, these countries win over the Nordic
country in PISA (500 vs 485-478 of Finland).

Contrary to Scott, School ownership does not make a difference (also
this and this and this) in quality if both schools have the same level
of freedom to set their schooling policies, after adjusting for SES.

11.2 Libertarians believe in equality of opportunity, but that
requires regulating schools

If by that you mean mandated equality, I think they don't believe in
that. As discussed above, genes, and external factors determine to a
great extent your chances in life. By default there is no equality of
opportunity or of results.

Regarding the extreme cases Scott discusses, in Libertarialand, some
'regulation' would be justified as a means to avoid fraud. Offering
things that sound like educational services but aren't is like selling
rotten apples. The thing is, this may not be enough for some people.
If you want full equality of opportunity, you need to equalize not
only schools, but food intake, parents, universities, friends, and
mostly everything you find in your life. This is doable to some
extent, especially with the future advent of cheap genetic selection,
but the philosophical question remains of whether it is justified to
coerce others to accept these more extreme measures, or to coerce
others to get resources to implement said measures.

11.3 The government should protect children from their parents

Surely. But this is not something 'special'. Children have rights, and
it is right to protect them: any properly structured organisation that
can do that will do. It is a violation of the rights of the child to
mistreat it, or even not to give it adequate resources, given the
resources of the parents. There are interesting debates about whether
libertarianism actually requires licensing parents to have children as
a matter of justice.
Part D: Moral Issues

**The Argument: **Moral systems based only on avoiding force and
respecting rights are incomplete, inelegant, counterintuitive, and
usually riddled with logical fallacies. A more sophisticated moral
system, consequentialism, generates the principles of natural rights
and non-initiation of violence as heuristics that can be used to solve
coordination problems, but also details under what situations such
heuristics no longer apply. Many cases of government intervention are
such situations, and so may be moral.

The Counterargument:_ __Consequentialism suffers from the same
problems that absolute rights theories suffer from, and lead sometimes
to even more unintuitive situations sometimes. As of today, there is
no fully coherent ethical system to make decisions in any given
circumstance, but we can rely on reflective equilibrium to make our
ethical intuitions and ethical principles cohere._

12. Moral Systems

12.1 Freedom is not infinitely valuable

Indeed it isn't.

12.1.1 Franklin didn't mean what you think he meant

Okay

12.2 Taxation is theft, yes, but everyone accepts that. The only force
this argument has is emotional

I don't know if everyone accepts that, but everyone accepts that theft
ought not be done in general, and that the particular kinds of theft
governments undertake would also be criticised if regular people did
them. People think governments have political authority, that's why
they accept it. The argument against taxes has force insofar as
regular theft is rejected, which it is.

Strategically, saying that taxation is theft, or that the non
aggression principle is true is not useful and shouldn't be
done,because people won't take it as a starting point.

12.3 Why should the initiation of force against innocent people be wrong?

Most people would say it is wrong, and seems obvious. Consider this
thought experiment: You are told that a government is about to use
force against an innocent person. You can make that use of force
happen or not. Most people would stop that use of force. A
consequentialist, given no more information, would be indifferent and
flip a coin to decide. Alternatively, she would think that given real
world governments, it is more likely that the use of violence against
the innocent will lead to bad consequences, and chose to stop it. This
response is somewhat defused by considering a government for which you
are told, explicitly, that you know nothing about, in an alien planet
far away.

It can be the case that, given more information, it would be right,
all things considered, to use force against an innocent. Would you
punch a random person in exchange of the future existence of mankind?
Most people would.

Initiation of force is prima facie wrong, and it can be right in some
cases, but the burden of proof if on those who argue for it.

12.3.1 Sometimes, the use of force has good consequences

Sometimes, yes. But what you would need are occasions where the use of
force has good consequences, and it is justified in that circumstance.
If successful, that argument wouldn't justify a government as
understood today, but a very narrow governance institution, and that
only if the overall institutional framework is better than an
alternative.

Suppose there are two kids who will die in a year due to a rare
illness. Suppose now there is a person with a peculiar genetic makeup
such that he has resistance to the illness. Science says that if
experiments are performed on that person, a cure can be produce before
one year to save the kids. Here, the consequentialist recommendation
is to kidnap this fellow and experiment with him. Everybody else would
object to such kidnapping. Consequentialists may want to avoid this by
resorting to rule-consequentialism. I have some comments regarding
this in the following sections.

12.3.2 Non-consequentialism is arbitrary

Few people follow theories that are fully consequence-independent.
Noninterference with other people seems to be one very universal
principle, but that doesn't lead you to consequentialism or
utilitarianism.

The claim of arbitrariness could also be thrown at consequentialism:
why is harm bad? Why should each of us consider everyone'sinterests
equally?

In the end, if we understand arbitrariness as "beginning from false or
dubious premises", we would have to focus on ethics, and study the
relevant premises. That is outside of the scope of this FAQ.

12.3.2.1 The Principle of Non-Aggresion is a hook to hang pre-existing
prejudices

Maybe for some people it is. Indeed, people believe in something like
the NAP, and a belief being widely held makes it hard to eradicate if
it is false. This claim can also be leveled at political authority.

Some versions of the NAP may require hardcore epicycling to work. But
the same thing is done by utilitarians when they resort to rule
utilitarianism, or by changing the definition of utility (pleasure,
preferences, welfare, etc). In the end, most moral systems clash with
some or other strong intuition, this is not a problem only for
utilitarianism or the NAP.

That said, full, hardcore exceptionless NAP has its defenders, but not
every libertarian agrees with the version of it that the FAQ
criticises.

12.3.2.1.1 Arguments for the NAP are weak

Many are, specifically Rothbard's and Hoppe's (Eabrasu 2012). But
perhaps the idea that the things that form part of one's personal
projects, body included should not be aggressed against is one
plausible enough to be self-evidently accepted (As is the idea that
harm is to be avoided). This doesn't solve the issue of what things
become property, to what extent things are property, and if what is
property today still is property tomorrow. That's why you need a legal
system for. Libertarians accept the Lockean Proviso, so the situation
described for Tristan de Cunha can't happen.

Here is A. John Simmons, who is no libertarian, but a philosophical
anarchist Lockean, interpreting Locke to explain the Proviso:

    Fairness, then, seems to generate a conflict. Fair acquisition may
result in resources being closed out (or in the requirement that any
reminder of them be left common, thereby eliminating rightful
appropriation). But fairness also demands a share for later persons.
Governments must settle such conflicts. But these conflicts need not
be insuperable, since later persons can get their share by getting
access to a living. Fairness does not necessarily require the
redistribution of initially fair acquisitions. It requires only that
persons who cannot appropriate a share are not denied access to their
share or room to exercise their rights of self-preservation and
self-government. Where these latters goods are precluded, later
persons must be allowed to appropriate the property of earlier ones.
This conception of a “fair share limit” on appropriation, holding, and
transfer seems to me a plausible addition to the mixing argument. (The
Lockean Theory of Rights (1994, ch 5))

Here is Nozick

    A theory of appropriation incorporating this Lockean proviso will
handle correctly the cases (objections to the theory lacking the
proviso) where someone appropriates the total supply of something
necessary for life (For example, Rashdall’s case of someone who comes
upon the only water in the desert several miles ahead of others who
also will come to it and appropriates it all.) A theory which includes
this proviso in its principle of justice in acquisition must also
contain a more complex principle of justice in transfer. Some
reflection of the proviso about appropriation constrains later
actions. If my appropriating all of a certain substance violates the
Lockean proviso, then so does my appropriating some and purchasing all
the rest from others who obtained it without otherwise violating the
Lockean proviso. If the proviso excludes someone’s appropriating all
the drinkable water in the world, it also excludes his purchasing it
all. (More weakly, and messily, it may exclude his charging certain
prices for some of his supply.) This proviso (almost?) never will come
into effect; the more someone acquires of a scarce substance which
others want, the higher the price of the rest will go, and the more
difficult it will become for him to acquire it all. […] The total
supply could not be permissibly appropriated by one person at the
beginning. His later acquisition of it all does not show that the
original appropriation violated the proviso (even by a reverse
argument similar to the one above that tried to zip back from Z to A).
Rather, it is the combination of the original appropriation plus all
the later transfers and actions that violates the Lockean proviso.
Each owner’s title to his holding includes the historical shadow of
the Lockean proviso on appropriation. This excludes his transferring
it into an agglomeration that does violate the Lockean proviso and
excludes his using it in a way, in coordination with others or
independently of them, so as to violate the proviso by making the
situation of others worse than their baseline situation. Once it is
known that someone’s ownership runs afoul of the Lockean proviso,
there are stringent limits on what he may do with (what it is
difficult any longer unreservedly to call) “his property.” Thus a
person may not appropriate the only water hole in a desert and charge
what he will. Nor may he charge what he will if he possesses one, and
unfortunately it happens that all the water holes in the desert dry
up, except for his. This unfortunate circumstance, admittedly no fault
of his, brings into operation the Lockean proviso and limits his
property rights.  Similarly, an owner’s property right in the only
island in an area does not allow him to order a castaway from a
shipwreck off his island as a trespasser, for this would violate the
Lockean proviso. […] I believe that the free operation of a market
system will not actually run afoul of the Lockean proviso. (Recall
that crucial to our story in Part I of how a protective agency becomes
dominant and a de facto monopoly is the fact that it wields force in
situations of conflict, and is not merely in competition, with other
agencies. A similar tale cannot be told about other businesses.) If
this is correct, the proviso will not play a very important role in
the activities of protective agencies and will not provide a
significant opportunity for future state action. Indeed, were it not
for the effects of previous illegitimate state action, people would
not think the possibility of the proviso’s being violated as of more
interest than any other logical possibility. (Here I make an empirical
historical claim; as does someone who disagrees with this.) This
completes our indication of the complication in the entitlement theory
introduced by the Lockean proviso. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia)

And here is Eric Mack, discussing the case of the island and other,
similar, case.

Here are Brennan and Zwolinski, discussing the proviso. (Brennan even
notes that academic libertarians don't even use the NAP as a_basis_
for libertarianism)

Arguments for private ownership of stuff don't say that because you
have your body, therefore you own it. They explain why you own a body,
and then the rest of the things. Bodies are not qualitatively special.

Plus, banning bodily self-ownership as a foundational moral value is
question begging. Everyone agrees to some version of self-ownership.

12.3.2.1.2 The NAP has a weird definition of force, and libertarians
tolerate certain initiations of force, and the NAP requires a sausage
of exceptions to work.

Definitions are arbitrary. 'Initiation of force' is defined as
violating rights, and rights come to be according to the libertarian
principles of homesteading and contract.

Some libertarians do not tolerate those exceptions, but, admittedly,
most do. Problems with NAPping your way through ethics were pointed
out decades ago by David Friedman, who was subsequently criticised by
Block (2011) (I still agree with Friedman). Rights in theory shouldn't
conflict, if in practice they do, courts will have to try to interpret
them the best they can. This is, with different rights, how courts
work right now. And consequentialist considerations are allowed to
play a role in determining those hard cases.

12.4 Consequentialism is better than the NAP

People are, in general, not implicit or full consequentialists. Not
even Scott Alexander. Even self-declared consequentialists do not
behave like such, even though it is possible to do so. Consequences
matter, and other people matter. But not infinitely.

Also, capitalism is not driven by consequentialism, but by
rights-bounded search for entrepreneurial arbitrage opportunities.
People are not usually trying to unconstrainedly maximise their (or
everyone's) welfare, even if economists model firms as
profit-maximising because it's close enough to reality. Plus,
consequentialism in the way usually depicted in the FAQ is different
from ethical egoism, or do what's best for you, disregard the rest of
the world.

12.4.1 You decide what consequences are good

(Consumerism tells you? Huh?) I think there is a confusion here in
mistaking economic decisionmaking for ethical theorising. Decisions
have opportunity costs, and we face tradeoffs. Those have to, and are,
factored in when we think about what's the right thing to do.

12.4.2 If you care about other people, take them into account in your
ethical calculations

Most people do that, but that's not a purely consequentialistic thing.
Plus, this reasoning is impotent vs ethical egoists, or national
consequentialists who don't care about foreigners, or even against
family consequentialists. Or... white supremacist consequentialists.

12.4.3 Consequentialism won't become a war of all vs all because
people will agree to a set of rules to avoid so

Yeah, but that undermines previous reasoning earlier in the FAQ.
Individually, I'm maximising my good optimally if the rest of the
people refrains from maximising their goods and let me maximise mine.
What incentive do I have to bind myself? I don't control other people,
so I can calculate the expected utility of each decision, and go for
maximising my good anyways. In reality, people would probably
coordinate, as I've explained above, byt the FAQ is quite critical
with overcoming anti-coordination incentives.

12.4.4 That won't lead to undesirable situations like slavery,
decadence or some dystopia

Who knows. Maybe those things do maximise utility. Maybe some people
will totally think that the right thing to do, long
term-discounted-welfarewise, is for the US to conquer the world,
enslave sub-100 IQ people, and coordinate global resources to wirehead
humanity in order to get a future of eternal brain stimulation-induced
pleasure. (Something that Scott rejects). If such a thing were
endorsed by utilitarianism, would you go with that, or accept it as a
reductio?

12.4.5 Consequentialism is the gold standard for morality, but maybe
trying to implement it, by just doing what we think has good
consequences, is not a good idea

Even Scott, the writer of the FAQ, doesn't really believe this, as
pointed out above: he knows that it still misses things. Scott hints
here at the act/rule consequentialism distinction. In the next
section, I will criticise it.

12.4.6 Read the consequentialism FAQ

I did, and I'm not that impressed.

13. Rights and Heuristics

13.1 Rights are conclusions, not premises. Heuristics. They should
only be supported if they bring good consequences

Every argument begins with some premises. Consequentialists have
theirs, deontologists have theirs, virtue theorists have theirs, and
so on. In consequentialism, rights are (or not) conclusions. In
deontology, good consequences are conclusions that follow (or not)
from following the right rights structure.

Things like 'I shouldn't kill people, except in very particular
circumstances' seem more initially plausible than 'I ought to maximise
aggregate utility'. Now, you may ask for a unifying principle for
rights from where to deduce them. No one has worked out a moral system
that works perfectly, but libertarians may reply that self-ownership
or the NAP or the implications of the fact that you are arguing
(Hoppe) are such an axiom. But one can reply by rejecting those
axioms, or claiming the reasoning is fallacious, as academic
libertarians point out, but the same can be said of consequentialists.
See this list for several background philosophies libertarian
theorists rely on. Read this and this and this for further info.

So: Right theorists will say that, one of the reason for rights is
that rights-respect is constitutive of a good society by itself,
separately from consequences. Since a few libertarian theorists are
pluralists, they will say that there are a series of goods, and not
just "happiness" or "utility", and that rights are both part of those
goods, and means to get them.

13.2 Consequentialism doesn't imply breaching rights when it seems to
smart people that they should be breached, rule consequentialism is
the answer.

There aresome philosophical reasons  to be against rule
consequentialism. If you are smart, and have thought about the issue,
and other smart people agree, it seems that it is morally mandatory to
violate someone's rights if that increases utility. If not, you would
be tied to respecting the right structure determined at some instant
of time, and never revise them.

13.3 Sometimes, you should change which rights to respect: the
alchemist example. Rights are warning signs.

This doesn't solve the problem presented before. How to determine
whether a paradigm shift of sorts should induce a reconsideration of
whether a right should still be in place or not? How to determine what
is such a circumstance in which we should do that? One solution is
abandoning consequentialism and directly applying common sense
morality: people have rights, and those can be breached if the
consequences are really bad. This is no different from the approach
most academic libertarians already take.

And pace Scott, a rule against practising alchemy was a bad idea:
people pursuing alchemy ended up doing useful things sometimes,
leading up to modern chemistry.

13.3.1 Property rights are generally useful, but sometimes they can be
breached, okay. But if people did that on their own, consequences
would be terrible. Therefore, it is best for a central agent to decide
uniform rules for when to violate rights: governments.

If governments are needed to avoid societal breakdown, governments are
justified. But is that true? Minarchists say it is, anarchists don't.
Is the welfare state required for that? The welfare state was born
about 130 years ago in Germany. The modern welfare state is a
post-WWII creature. Before it, it doesn't seem like society was at the
brink of collapse: it was getting better and better. To decide when it
is justified to break rules, you need a court system. Many court
systems acceptextreme good consequences as an excuse.

13.3.2 Choosing when to violate rights is complicated, but we can have
some meta-rules for that: at least must be a procedure to get
everyone's input that works. Governments are one such example.

Scott proposes this. Libertarians will reply rule of law: a common law
system can play the same role. Governments work well in developed
country, not so in many underdeveloped ones. In democracy, there is no
will of the people. There are results that are the outcomes of an
election process that is designed by people who can vote (not
children, not foreigners), and who vote once on who is going to rule,
not issue by issue. Unless you're Switzerland and can pull off
large-scale direct democracy.

So democracy fails the universalizability test, unless we restrict the
meaning of 'everyone' to 'every adult in a given country'. And still,
it can be said that if something seems right to you you should do it.
Or if something is wrong, not do it. The rest of the world will react
to you, and you knowing this, will take it into account. If there are
lots of robberies because people are hungry, people will hire
security, and other people may philantrophically provide for them, or
even just devise new business models to lower food prices. The system
will end up balancing itself.

Regarding government size and well-being: There is no clear
correlation between higher taxation rates (or government spending) and
standards of living, beyond the fact that only rich societies can
sustain a large State.  You can have huge governments like in
Kiribati, Cuba, Lesotho or Micronesia and live in poverty, or small
ones like in Hong Kong, Switzerland, or Singapore, and live in
prosperity. Ideally, we would compare the Nordics to a place with a
truly minarchist(<5% GDP) government, and free markets, but we don't
have contemporary examples.

13.4 Governments may make mistakes when acting. But not acting can
have worse consequences: the case of the Holocaust and Rwanda.

The Holocaust wouldn't have happened if everyone had followed a
non-interventionist policy from the beginning. No First World War, no
Versailles Treaty, no poor beaten Germany, no Hitler, no World War II,
and no Holocaust. Pacifism seems to be the way to go.

And most, if not all, great catastrophes resulting from violating
rights have been perpetrated by large governments. It's not that
sometimes they violate rights: Some governments regularly do it.

There is an asymmetry in using coercion in war: to use it, it has to
be ex-ante crystal clear that it is going to result in the desired
consequences, and that rarely it's the case. And where did all the
talk about being careful about not violating heuristics even when it
seems it's the right thing to do?

**13.5 Libertarians seem to endorse fighting terrorism, which is
expensive, but if instead that money went towards fighting
cardiovascular diseases, more lives would be saved. There is no
benefit in fighting terrorism instead of CVD. **

I haven't surveyed libertarians on this, but here there's one talk by
Michael Huemer in which he explicitly makes the point that devoting
massive amounts of resources to fighting terrorism is irrational. So I
think libertarians should be against that. But I don't see the
similarity with the previous case, unlike the argument being made is
just that killing by omission is the same as directly killing, a
premise that almost no one accepts, and that would have to be argued
for. On what rational grounds is the decision that there is no
difference between killing by omission and directly killing being
made?

13.6 There's a case in which libertarian principles are followed and a
catastrophe results: there's a pandemic, and only a guy has the cure,
and he charges what he wants for it, and everyone ends up enslaved

On Lockean Proviso grounds, he would have to provide the cure at a
fair price to everyone who asked for it, and it would be justified to
coerce him to do so.

This, however, is a very good example of why 'hard' libertarianism is
problematic. Regular varieties of it are unaffected by this issue.

13.6.1 Okay, the story is not realistic, but it is still a reductio ad
absurdum. The fact that the heuristic "never initiate force" works is
only limited to some cases. The circumstances in which libertarianism
works are contingent

It's a good reduction. But it doesn't work against academic
libertarianism. If the world wasn't the way it is, then we would
factor that in into the conditions required to violate rights.

13.7 Being poor in countries without government welfare sucks. Private
charity is not solving third-world poverty. Private charity can't
plausibly increase as much as required, as some easy math shows.

Most developed countries do have some kind of government welfare, so
it's hard or impossible to find the poor Scott is looking for. There
are still homeless and really poor poor people even in advanced social
democracies like Denmark, as mentioned above. (Poor after taxes and
transfers, that is)

The calculations Scott suggests were made for Spain in a book here
that proposed a detailed transition to a minarchist state (5% GDP) in
50 years, covering specific proposals and budgets for education,
healthcare, pensions, etc.

The math itself is right, but one premise is wrong: spending on
welfare is not really helping the poor. In the US, welfare for the
poor is the EITC, TANF, SSI,food stamps, housing vouchers, and a child
tax credit. In total, $212bn. So the increase in money in the hands of
the private sector, would be able to offset the increase in charity
required.

Maybe more refinement could be done: The precise calculations outlined
by Scott were done in the previously cited book for Spain, which has a
higher market-poverty rate than the US. And Switzerland, which I've
been citing as an example all along, as a market-poverty rate (by
relative standards, I couldn't find pre-market absolute poverty rates)
of 15%, even lower than US's post-tax and transfer.

13.8 People who make bad decisions don't deserve to suffer

Agree. But insulating people from the consequences or their actions is
incentivewise problematic.
Part E: Practical Issues

**The Argument: **Allowing some power to government won't lead us to
tyranny. Libertarians should instead work within the system to oppose
regulations that don't work, and accept regulations that do work.

**The Counterargument: **This argument is made not by minarchists, but
anarchists. The problem is not tyranny, but a government larger than
it should be. In advanced countries, it would be rare that the
government became tyrannical. Instead, there is at least one
historical example of a country that began on the premise of limited
government, and ended up with quite a larger government: the US. There
are reforms that can be made to enhance the ways democracies work, but
instead of going for a second-best, libertarians will still go for the
first-best. Everyone else should follow.

14. Slippery Slopes

14.1 Giving some power to government won't convert it into a tyranny
in the long run

As explained above, the problem is not tyranny, but overreach ( if
some government functions are accepted).

14.1.1 If we let government have its way, it won't engineer a collapse
into dictatorship

I don't know if there are many libertarians endorsing this. I agree
with Scott's view of politics.

15. Strategic Activism

15.1 If you are smart enough to be a libertarian, you should use your
intelligence and energy to enact a proper system

Given that votes have little power, people have no incentive to do
that. This is a huge coordination failure - of the sort that are used
to criticise libertarianism. It's not an utter failure, though, for
the same reason the failures pointed out in markets aren't that bad.

Instead, smart non-libertarians can work to help make the transition
to libertarianism :_)

15.2 You can't say government cannot be improved, there are people
proposing clever arrangements for government

Futarchy is replacing one piece of government: policymaking.
Governments are still governments made of people, and will still have
problems. My point isn't that this wouldn't be better. Surely it's
possible to improve government, and futarchy is an interesting idea
that I would like to see tried, but it will still be a monopoly on
force with political authority, and libertarianism may still dominate
it: the market process generates information by itself. If not for
this, it would be possible to improve upon capitalism by having a
futarchic central planner committee.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the quality of government in a few
countries doesn't seem to be improving: the rate of approval of US
Congress is at a historical minimum, and Trump has shown what happens
when a democratic system works as designed. Perhaps it's time to start
advocatingepistocracy, instead of democracy?

And altough this issue is orthogonal to this disquisition and raising
this borders on trolling, the nifty theorems of economics mentioned
are not necessarily that true: Tetlock's forecasters do better than
prediction markets, altough prediction markets remain really good.
(Atanasov, et al. 2015)

15.3 Improving government is hard, but libertarianism is politically impossible

Incremental attempt to reduce government are also more viable than
transitioning tomorrow to libertarianism. The problem is not just that
reforming the government is difficult. Some libertarians do have
reforms for making governments better, even if those libertarians
don't want any government at all as a first best. The real problem is
that the best possible government is still no match for the best
possible libertarianism, and then if a society is able to overcome the
many coordination problems that surround politics in order to get good
government. Why can't it also solve the coordination problems you
wanted to set up government for in the first place?

15.4 Drawing a line in the sand and banning all government
intervention doesn't work. If libertarians want to have some impact,
they should take a case by case approach to policies. People won't
listen to people who are against every single policy.

Some libertarians say this: the US government could be taken as a
refutation of the theory of limited government. But the conclusion is
then to go for anarchism.

As for the later question, I quote Huemer:

    Why is the proposal of this chapter not similarly utopian? Why is
it more realistic to expect that citizens convinced of the
illegitimacy of government will work to abolish their government than
it is to expect that citizens apprised of the flawed policies
implemented by a democratic government will work to perfect their
government’s policies?

    The answer is that acquiring awareness of the illegitimacy of
government in general is much, much less cognitively demanding than
acquiring sufficient awareness of the specific policy errors of a
particular government to enable one to make rational plans to correct
most of those errors. To realize that government is illegitimate, it
suffices to accept the arguments in this book. But to identify most of
the specific policy errors of one’s government would require detailed
familiarity with thousands of statutes and regulations; dozens of
government agencies, boards, and commissions; and hundreds of
political figures. One would have to update this knowledge
continuously throughout one’s life to take account of each new action
of each arm of the government. It is much morerealistic to hope that a
consensus could be reached on a single philosophical principle, the
rejection of authority, than to hope that a consensus could be reached
on the specific flaws of most particular government policies.

16. Miscellaneous and Meta~~l~~

16.1 I disagree with you. How should I engage with non-non-libertarian
arguments in a way that is most likely to change your mind?

Being nice, in general. Read academic libertarian philosophers, and
read about the history of how things worked before States began doing
them. Don't assume consequentialism entails a rejection of
libertarianism without having fully explored the mechanisms a
libertarian society has to solve the many problems that may arise. And
furthermore, don't assume consequentialism to argue for a political
philosophy, it will make your job harder. Begin from shared  moral
premises, and work out an equilibrium between principles and
intuitions. As Scott says, you would have to prove your standards are
right from first principles. So far, no one has succeeded deriving a
full moral system from scratch. In the future, I might therefore do a
critique of the non-consequentialist FAQ. Alternatively, you can show
that a realistic libertarian society will be really bad compared to a
social democracy, or an alternative system. I think that should
convince people to abandon libertarianism.

Don't assume smart libertarians are the cartoon libertarians you find
angrily commenting in internet posts or twitter. Like with every
ideological group, there are tiers of sophistication.

16.2 Where can I go to see a rebuttal to this FAQ?

So far, there aren't

16.3 Where can I go to find more non-non-libertarian information?

Well, non-non-libertarianism is about answering bad objections to
libertarianism, so that really depends on the arguments. For good
libertarian arguments, read books. Specifically, Mike Huemer's The
Problem of Political Authority, Jason Brennan's Why not Capitalism?
and Libertarianism: What you need to know, Brennan and Schmidtz's A
Brief History of Liberty, G.H. Smith's The System of Liberty, Loren
Lomasky's Persons, Reasons, and the Moral Community, Nozick's Anarchy
State and Utopia, and D. Friedman's The Machinery of Liberty.

For a survey of academic libertarianism and classical liberalism more
broadly, see Mack & Gaus (2004 , ch. 9), Zwolinski & Tomasi (2014),
and Brennan & Tomasi (2011).

Also, I address this to libertarians: Libertarians should be aware
that the best libertarian theorists are not Rothbard, Hoppe and Rand.
They are not very good, actually. Some authors you should look to are:
Nozick, Mack, Lomasky, Huemer, Brennan, Zwolinski, D. Friedman and if
you can read Spanish, Rallo.

Conversely, libertarians should try to read or be acquainted with the
steelmanned versions of the anti or non libertarian arguments. This
means reading Rawls, G.A. Cohen, Jeffrey Friedman, Samuel Freeman, the
Non-Libertarian FAQ, and Peter Singer. Or even Pettit and Kymlicka. Of
course, they also have to read papers to grasp the empirical details
of how things actually work.

In general, if you think governments can make things better, read some
history and see long-run historical trends, and how life was before
the welfare-regulatory state existed. The systems we have today are
not the result of careful empirical work and institutional design, but
of war, emotional politics, and institutional inertia. It is naive to
assume that the contemporary Nation State is the better and ultimate
form of social organisation to exist.

Consequentialists should be willing to explore alternatives, including
minimal states, city-states, polycentric orders, and anarchy, instead
of focusing that much in within-the-system policymaking.

16.4 How can I respond to this FAQ in some way?

Send me an email to reverse(jritra) at gmail dot com.

16.5 And what about the Meta_l_

Here, have some.
Epilogue

I hope you have enjoyed this FAQ. I think both libertarians
(especially the sort of libertarian Scott has in mind) and
non-libertarians will be able to learn something from it.

I don't actually expect you to become a libertarian by reading this. I
have not argued for libertarianism here, just explained that the
arguments put forward by Scott do not debunk libertarianism. For
example, I don't expect you to believe right now that private
healthcare is better than public healthcare. I haven't discussed the
arguments economists put forward in that debate, or done a full
literature review. But I hope to have convinced you that it may be
workable.

The way you should think of libertarianism right now should be between
two extremes: one, full acceptance. And two, seeing it as an
interesting idea that maybe should be tried in a tiny place far away.
This is Scott's current position here. Defending libertarianism is
usually done by historical examples, or picking examples here and
there, as there is no country that is currently libertarian. Hence,
debates about its viability or desirability tend to drag on forever,
as there is no hard, conclusive evidence on the matter, like social
democrats have with the Nordics.

I want to finish by addressing one thing Scott says in the previously
cited post:

    And this leads me into one of my deepest problems with
libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism: why should it work? I don’t
mean the sort of “why should it work” where you answer with specific
reasons why no, monopolies won’t form, and no, people won’t routinely
sell themselves into slavery, and no, protection agencies won’t form a
new feudal ruling class, and no, people won’t bash their heads against
public goods problems and externalities forever without any market
solutions appearing, and no, the poor won’t starve to death. I mean
the very Outside View question of “why is it that, by coincidence, not
using force is an effective way to solve all problems?” Good
governance is a really really hard problem. The idea that the solution
to this problem contains zero bits of information, that it just solves
itself if you leave people alone, seems astonishing. Even if we agree
that capitalism works very well by incentivizing companies to do what
the consumers wants, there are still a lot of peripheral issues which
that just doesn’t cover. Friedman for example is a strong supporter of
child rights, because children should mostly be free from coercion
from their parents, and that children treated this way turn out
better. Now in addition to solving governance with zero bits of
information, you have solved optimal child-rearing with zero bits of
information. That is implausibly impressive. Given that the universe
is allowed to throw whatever problems it wants at us, and that it has
so far gleefully taken advantage of that right to come up with a whole
host of very diverse and interesting ones, why is it that none of
these problems are best addressed by a centralized entity with a
monopoly on force? That seems like a pretty basic structure from a
game-theoretic perspective, and you’re telling me it just never works
in the real world? Shouldn’t there be at least one or two things where
a government, or any form of coercive structure at all, is just the
right answer? And can’t we just have a small government that does
that?

This is a very good question. Some months before writing that review,
Scott wrote his now famous Meditations on Moloch. He sees coordination
problems everywhere, and not even governments can fix all them: they
are also subject to perverse incentives. The solution, then, is an
external unmoved mover, an artificial god, to ensure people do
cooperate when they want to cooperate but don't have the incentives
for it. And since that is really hard, the whole piece has a tone of
existential angst, of fear and trembling at the idea of unsolvable
coordination problems, not evil, as our greatest problem.

There may be an answer to that. But before considering it, think of
the socialist calculation problem. Imagine we're back some decades,
and someone writes this to us:

Yes, markets are very good. But hell, how on Earth are they so good
that central planning does not work in any industry? Not bread, not
steel, coal or oil, not widgets, cars or aircraft. Why? Central
planning has advantages, like economies of scale, solving some
coordination failures, and reducing duplicities. Why is is that for
every conceivable industry you are saying the market works better? And
why capitalistic management? Why not worker ownership? How do you know
capitalistic ownership works best in every single case?

And I say: If central planning is efficient, that will appear in the
market. If worker cooperatives are efficient, that will appear on the
market. If worker cooperatives are efficient, that will appear on the
market. The market dominates every single alternative, because the
market structure will transform into the alternative if the
alternative is better, and then readapt if necessary. Today, you might
have two big oil companies. Tomorrow, you might have three or eight.
The day after tomorrow, maybe none and we're all using solar energy.
At the same time, you can have worker owned firms, anarchosyndicalist
firms (like Valve), decentralised firms, with extense supply chains,
or firms that do everything inhouse (like SpaceX).

This is basically the First Theorem of Welfare Economics. But then,
it's possible to say: yeah, but that holds if there is perfect
information, perfect competition, and no transaction costs.

It is possible to make two counter arguments here. One, of comparative
institutions: Governments are not benevolent social planners.
According to the Soylent Green Principle of Institutional Analysis,
governments are people. It's possible that the optimal institutional
arrangement is one in which markets failures are allowed to exist, but
governments failures aren't, by limiting the role of the State.

And the second, more interesting one, is that market failures are
profit opportunities for entrepreneurs to solve. It's not that there
is a series of conditions that markets need to work properly, it is
that an institutional framework that allows markets to work will lead
to those conditions: enough competition, enough information, and
sufficiently low transaction costs. People are able to step outside
the games they are playing, rearrange the incentives, get into the
games again, and cooperate.

    If the argument for laissez-faire conditions was a consequence of
behavioral assumptions of super heroic behavioral assumptions like you
are a fully informed and perfectly rational chooser that exists in a
frictionless environment, which is how a lot of people think the
argument goes, then all I need to do is undermine the rationality of
agents and also the function of the price system as being a perfect
guide, so the perfectly competitive model.

    But from Adam Smith, all the way up to Vernon Smith, that’s never
the way that they couch their argument for a relatively free economy
versus an interventionist economy. They always couch it in terms of
comparative institutional analysis and if you look at Adam Smith and
the various different examples that he gives, it’s never the case that
he relies on a perfectly-informed actor operating in a perfectly
competitive market yields an argument for laissez-faire. (Boettke)

Most people see markets as one mechanism and government as another
mechanism, and you have to see which one works best in any case. I
think a better way of thinking is thinking of markets as a
meta-mechanism, that enable many sub-mechanisms (including
government-like institutions) to arise from the bottom-up (Pennington,
2013). Another meta-mechanism is to have everything within a
government, which is what we have now, altough that, in turn, is
nested inside a state of international anarchy.

The solution to the "Who will watch the watchmen?" problem is not to
designate special watchmen, but have everyone, within the domain known
by that someone, be a watchmen. This, especially when coupled with
some moral norms (people are not and ought notbe fully selfish) is
what makes libertarianism the best possible, theoretically and
practically, basis for social order and cooperation.

As you may see in this FAQ, most of the disagreements between
libertarians and the rest are empirical. It should be possible to
study, and agree on how each system would work. Perhaps it's the case
that overall libertarianism is better except for the poorest 5% of
society, who are somewhat worse off than in a social democracy. Or
perhaps it's also better for them. After that is done, we can resume
arguing which values are correct.

Some of my answers may have felt like cheating. Am I really giving
libertarian answers to the problems Scott raises? Am I a master
handwaver?

I have  rejected some absolutist interpretations of the NAP, I have
accepted the need for some regulations that could be market provided,
and I've praised the Nordics above the US model in some aspects, and
so on. I claim that most of the critiques, even if successful, can be
addressed by a minimal state.

I think the reasons and explanations offered above are perfectly
compatible with the kind of libertarianism proposed by academic
libertarians, and so while there are serious problems for the sort of
cartoon libertarians that may be the target of the FAQ, the arguments
presented there fail to refute more rational and informed variants of
libertarianism, while at the same time casting some doubt on its
alternatives.


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