Cynicism and libertarian ends (again)

Why M. Yglesias is a nationally acclaimed writer and I am not, exhibit #7572: a couple of years ago I wrote a somewhat convoluted post about cynicism and libertarianism, whereas today Yglesias wrote this which is elegant, readable, and much more worth your time.

Cynicism about government does not help the libertarian cause

TLF has been much less interesting since Tim Lee left, and this piece by J. Harper is the sort of thing that is reducing my desire to keep the TLF feed in my Reader. I'm not going to address the ostensible main thesis of the piece, but I just want to comment on one aspect that strikes me as dramatically misguided:

I’m a person who notices premises, and Lessig sets up an interesting premise indeed: What he calls the “naked transparency movement”—unvarnished access to government data—”is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system off the cliff.”

Yes, Lessig has “change” and “pushing faith in our political system off the cliff” in opposition. So, the only thing that qualifies as “change” is improving faith in our political system? This pegged my bs detector.

First, there's an elementary error of logic here. The proposition

"change" and "pushing faith in our political system off the cliff" are in opposition

does not in any way entail that

"improving faith in the political system" is the "only thing that qualifies as change"

Political change and faith in the political system are variables in a very high-dimensional space, and the observation that they converge at the origin does not entail that every single increase in one is correlated with an increase in the other. Or in less math-metaphorical terms, even if you grant Lessig's premise, there might be a large number of changes which slightly reduce faith in our political system, or hold faith in our political system constant, and this would still not contradict Lessig's statement. (N.b. I say this as someone who thinks that "faith" in our political system is about as misguided as any other kind of faith.)

But never mind that.

The point I really want to make is that Harper seems to think that cynicism about the political system is in some way helpful to the libertarian cause. I'm not exactly a libertarian but this strikes me as completely wrong. Cynicism breeds two things: (1) apathy and (2) shameless exploitation. A population that is truly cynical about politics leads to even greater disengagement plus even greater corruption than prevails in the ordinary course of government.

Libertarians are not cynical about politics. A true cynic would adopt the essentially nihilistic stance of today's Republican Party leadership, whose political strategy is basically

• Use the government to enrich one's political allies.
• Sabotage any attempt to use government as an instrument to enhance the general welfare.
• Distract people from the former two points by a systematic campaign of deceitful propaganda relating to irrelevancies.

On the contrary, principled libertarians are in fact extremely idealistic about the possibility of government being reformed in ways that either enhance the general welfare (in the case of utilitarian libertarians) or are more respectful of the libertarian conception of natural rights (in the case of natural-rights libertarians).*

In short, true cynics either become players in the game or stop playing; libertarians hate the game. And hating the game requires a certain belief in the possibility of a better game. Basically, Harper seems to be deeply confused about the distinction between procedural and substantive liberalism.

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Oh, all right, I'll say a little bit about the primary thesis of the piece. I don't read TNR and I don't want to start, but my view on transparency is more or less in line with Aaron Swartz's: exposure is necessary but it's not going to change things without the development of social practices and norms which increase civic engagement.

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*Of course I disagree that actually existing libertarianism does either of these things but that doesn't have anything to do with how libertarians justify their own beliefs.

On banning prostitution (of a particular sort)

So, this Spitzer thing. Much commentary from male writers on the broader issue of prostitution and the merits of legalizing it; you may fruitfully begin your traversal with Ezra Klein or T. Cowen or even A. Tabarrok (whom I usually find odious).

My comment is simple and not at all original. There are many different ways of exchanging money for intimacy — physical or otherwise — that are not only legal, but mostly socially accepted, as long as one does them discreetly.¹ Here are some of them:

• It is legal to pay someone to go out on a date with you, and even be physically intimate with you (hugs, kisses, cuddling, etc.), as long as there is no explicit quid pro quo w.r.t. genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone to give you a sensual massage, as long as the massage does not involve direct prolonged genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone someone to strap you to a bench and strike you with a whip for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to take off their clothes and dance in front of you for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to perform arbitrary sex acts on camera with you, and then either sell or give away the video.
• It is legal to have sex with someone who would not be having sex with you if you did not buy them many gifts and support their lavish lifestyle. (Fun personal note: I have a (female) friend who knows a girl who once said, quite frankly, "I am not going to sleep with a man until he has spent at least a thousand dollars on me." See also this Valleywag post. See also all four characters on Sex and the City, none of whom ever dated a $25k-annual-salary social worker as far as I know.)

The upshot is that everything is permitted, except the straightforward transaction of exchanging a modest sum of money for someone else to privately give you an orgasm by applying friction in the genital area. If you're sufficiently rich, or if your particular sexual kink does not require penetration, or if you like to have sex on camera, prostitution is legal for you. Laws against "prostitution" — which is to say, one very narrow subgenre of sexual commerce — are a hypocritical, hairsplitting exercise in moral hysteria and a massive waste of law enforcement resources.

Finally, I want to point out one more thing. The argument that (one narrow flavor of) prostitution should be illegal because it's closely linked to organized crime and human trafficking is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Prostitution" is undoubtedly tied to organized crime in part because society frowns upon it so much that respectable businesses don't want to be involved in it. Organized crime is fundamentally inefficient, due to unprotected property rights, unenforceable contracts, illiquidity of capital, and all the other standard problems that come with operating a business without the protection of a well-run modern government. If a business like McDonald's or Starbucks ran brothels, they would drive organized crime out of the market pronto. People like Nicholas Kristof heap opprobrium on "prostitution" and then bemoan the inevitable results, namely that women and girls get exploited by criminals.

This is roughly equivalent to the scam whereby Republicans get elected and trash the government every couple of decades, and then point to their own incompetence as proof of their ideology that government doesn't work. It is like pissing on the rug, and then complaining that the rug stinks of piss.²

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¹ Bonus link: The Purchase of Intimacy, by Princeton sociology professor Viviana A. Zelizer, has been on my to-read list for a long time. Perhaps I will finally order it.

² In fact, I hereby coin a new term for this fallacy of reasoning, akin to "poisoning the well" or "begging the question": "pissing the rug". To piss the rug is to endorse a course of action which leads to a bad outcome, and then blame those who disagree with you for the bad outcome. The grandest example of pissing the rug in recent times is, of course, the Iraq War apologetic wherein liberal war opponents are blamed for the bad consequences that would follow withdrawal. Oh, wait — Kristof did that too. Maybe we should just call it the Kristof Maneuver.

A brief reply to Leon Wieseltier

OK, one more thing on today's Times, and then I'm going to put the paper and the blog down and get back to work. In the Sunday Book Review, Leon Wieseltier writes, whilst discussing Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint:

Liberals must think carefully about their keenness to mirror some of the most poisonous qualities of their adversaries. It was never exactly a disgrace to American liberalism that it lacked its Limbaugh. But demagoguery now enjoys a new prestige.

There is an old Jewish joke that goes like this (quoted from the rendition in this Canadian Jewish News article):

Two Jews, sentenced to death by the czar, are before the firing squad. They are offered blindfolds. One says, "You can stuff your blindfold." The second Jew responds, "Shh! Don't make trouble!"

That is all.

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UPDATE: No, wait. I'm too mad. Just one more thing. Wieseltier writes:

The demagogue's gravest sin is not incivility, it is stupidity. Does the Bush administration love capitalism too much? But it is also possible to love capitalism too little. The greatness of capitalism, after all, is that it may be politically corrected. Was American power used improperly, or for ill, in Iraq? But it is also possible for American power to be used properly, and for good. Is the friendly opinion of the world a condition of American security? Often, but not always. The incompetence of the Bush administration in world affairs, too much of which was ideologically ordained, does not alter the fact that the United States must sometimes deploy overwhelming force against extreme wickedness. It will be disastrous, for liberalism and for America, if the indignation against George W. Bush becomes an excuse for a great simplification, for a delirious release from the complexities of historical and political understanding that it took the American left decades to learn.

And, of course, it's us irrational "Bush-haters" (note how this term insinuates that our hatred of the man derives from something other than hatred of his policies) who are leading America off the cliff. We're a simplistic rabble, too immature to run the country, unlike wise old men who, like Wieseltier, understand the ins and the outs and the what-have-yous, the intricately braided complexities of homiletic aphorisms like "it is also possible for American power to be used properly, and for good".

The supercilious hectoring of liberal hawks, like Wieseltier, and the editorial staff of The New Republic, and Thomas Friedman, should be viewed in light of a singular fact: they supported the Iraq war. They believed that even with an obviously dishonest and incompetent American administration at the helm, it was worth killing Iraqis and killing American soldiers on the enormous gamble that was the Iraq war. (Needless to say, none of these well-fed pundits' lives were placed in the line of fire. Funny how it's so much easier to let other people die for your grand abstractions.) All the while, they caricatured people who were against the war (such as, say, 90% of the population of Spain) as a bunch of shaggy, dunderheaded narcissists. And now, the Iraq war has predictably turned into a disaster; and, far from being ashamed of their own gullibility, they are turning around and lecturing us on how to run a country, accusing us of "demagoguery" and "stupidity".

This is like a guy who walks into a chess tournament drunk, loudly calls everybody a patzer and a cheater, brags about his own strategic brilliance and moral probity, passes out handbills containing glowing encomia to his amazing unbroken string of victories, and then sits down at a table and gets roundly checkmated in six moves.

And then he gets up and tells everybody else how he's still got all the answers and you should never open with king's pawn to four.

I never thought I'd quote approvingly from Forrest Gump, but stupid is as stupid does. The American liberal hawk faction, of which The New Republic was perhaps the leading light, has done stupid, big time. It would do well to sit down and display a little humility.

Larry Everest: Feckless speaker

Speaking of crappy radio, KUOW (Seattle's NPR station) is now broadcasting a speech by Larry Everest, who has an incredibly irritating speaking style, rather reminiscent of the vegetarian hippie Waterfall Jr. on the Futurama episode The Problem with Popplers. He has a high-pitched, nasal voice; his speech cadences oscillate between overwrought hectoring, sarcastic whining, and stiffly rhythmic droning; and he presents his material in a way that is practically guaranteed to preach only to the choir --- he started hitting the inflammatory notes about imperialism and capitalism right up front, gestures that stroke the sensibilities of people who already completely agree with him, but are unlikely to win over anyone.

He's also rather sloppy with his rhetoric; for example, early in the speech, he said: "The war in Iraq was not about finding weapons of mass destruction; it was about making sure that America had more weapons of mass destruction than anybody else." Uh, America has more weapons of mass destruction than anybody else, and will for the foreseeable future. Our military supremacy over the rest of the world hasn't been in doubt for a decade and a half. Maintaining military supremacy was not the motivation for the war. To suggest such a thing is nonsense --- and I mean that literally: it just does not make any sense. It's like suggesting that Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor of California because he wanted really big muscles. But this sort of thing strokes the right spots for a certain kind of listener.

More excerpts from his speech: "...a war on terror that is a war of terror... globalization at gunpoint... the shadow war going on behind the scenes that people don't understand... the United States confronted the Soviet Union, a nuclear power, for thirty years, it was a huge impediment to United States power..." (Uh, Larry, the Soviet Union was deeply evil.) "...the Right wants to change the dime, instead of FDR facing left, they want Reagan facing right... gay marriage isn't just an issue in its own right, it's a wedge issue to enforce patriarchy... people say we can't leave Iraq, we can't just leave. Why not?" (audience clapping) "...I'm not for the Shia clerics, don't get me wrong... no good can come from this occupation..." (Uh, Larry, there are good reasons to fear what will happen if we leave Iraq; you may disagree, but it is not prima facie ludicrous to believe we should stay.) "...terrorizing people, putting wire around whole villages..."

The thing is, I agree that the Iraq war was about building an American empire (hardly a controversial assertion among those in the know), and I still find Everest annoying. After about fifteen minutes I had to turn it off.