On Liberalism

Review

See my critique on TBinDC.

Notes

pix - Liberals prize two things above all: freedom and pluralism.

pxiv - Liberal philosophers disagree with one another about many other things as well. Some liberals, like Robert Nozick, are libertarians; they believe that redistribution from rich to poor is fundamentally unjust. Other liberals, like Rawls, do not share that belief at all. They might even believe that large-scale redistribution is mandatory. So long as you are committed to freedom, you can be a liberal whether you agree with Nozick or instead Rawls. Other liberals, like Philip Pettit, emphasize the central importance of a principle of freedom as nondomination, by which no one is subject to the will of another. (TB: nondomination, see D. Allen JBMOD)

p3 - 11. Liberals note that Mill’s argument is an extended version of Lincoln’s remarks on slavery. With Mill and Lincoln, they insist on a link between their commitment to liberty and a particular conception of equality, which can be seen as a kind of anticaste principle. If some people are subjected to the will of others, we have a violation of liberal ideas.^7 Many liberals have invoked an anticaste principle to combat entrenched forms of inequality based on race, sex, and disability. They insist that in many nations, those forms of inequality have involved, or now involve, the imposition of something like a caste system. (TB: chapter 1)

p5 - 21. Liberals prize free markets, on the ground that they provide an important means by which people exercise their agency (see chapter 6). In addition, liberals never forget that free markets promote economic growth. Liberals believe that economic growth is important for a wide range of important things, above all well-being, including or perhaps especially for the bottom of the economic ladder. (TB: Growth as a concept here, is undefined, and that lack of definition is careless. Growth at a sustainable pace and constrained by the State to ensure protection of humans is critical. Unrestrained growth goes by another name: cancer.)

p7-8 - 35. Although Liberals like liberalism, they do not like tribalism. They are concerned when people sort themselves into different groups, defined in specific ways, and see other people as part of other groups, defined in other ways. Liberals tend to think that tribalism is an obstacle to mutual respect and even to productive interactions. They are intensely uncomfortable with discussions that start with “I am an X and you are a Y,” and that proceed accordingly. Skeptical of “identity politics,” liberals think that each of us has many different identities, and that it is usually best to focus on the merit of issues, not on one or another “identity.” (TB: Spoken like an economist, not a humanist. The reality is that identity is important, and cannot be set aside or separated. Being able to navigate this is important. Groups offer protection, but he is right that tribalism is dangerous, but it is also a different thing. Gay rights did not occur because gay folks set aside their identities to focus on the “merit of the issue” – it happened because a group leveraged the power of numbers. C.S. has little interest in this dynamic, as evidenced by his catastrophically stupid ‘solution’ to the gay marriage issue as presented alongside Thaler in Nudge.)

p11 - 49. It is possible to be a liberal and to agree with Hayek and thus to insist on the evils of socialism and the importance of free markets.^33. It is possible to be a liberal and to agree with Rawls and thus to be open to (some forms of what is sometimes called) socialism and to downplay the centrality of free markets.^34 A liberal might think that Ronald Reagan was a great president and that FDR was an abomination; a liberal might think that fDR was a great president and that RR was an abomination. 50. Liberals have divergent views about negative liberty (understood as freedom from coercion) and positive liberty (understood to include rights to certain goods, such as food and housing), and about whether there is a meaningful difference between them. Some liberals insist that properly understood, freedom entails a right not to be intruded on, above all by government. For them, freedom does not include a right to housing, education, employment, or subsistence. Some liberals answer that negative liberty requires a positive government, willing and able to protect people’s security. In their view, all rights are positive rights. Some liberals believe that nations should recognize rights to housing, education, welfare, and subsistence.

p12 - [as a part of #53], quoting Morton Horwitz, footnote 35 of Ch. 1.

I do not see how a Man of the Left can describe the rule of law an “an unqualified human good”! It undoubtedly restrains power, but it also prevents power’s benevolent exercise. It creates formal equality—a not inconsiderable virtue—but it promotes substantive inequality by creating a consciousness that radically separates law from politics, means from ends, processes from outcomes. By promoting procedural justice it enables the shrewd, the calculating, and the wealthy to manipulate its forms to their own advantage. And it ratifies and legitimates an adversarial, competitive, and atomistic conception of human relations.

C.S: Liberals do not agree with any of this. TB: I think there is room to disagree with Horwitz and C.S.; Rule of law is not immutable, and the rule itself is dependent on who is doing the ruling. We wouldn’t have considered Hitler’s rule to be an unqualified human good. We might consider it to be an unqualified human evil (I do). We would not consider the rule of law to create formal equality, as that rule exists today, at least. We would consider the current rule of law to promote substantive inequality, we would consider it to separate means from ends, we would consider it to facilitate and cater ways to the wealthy such that they may manipulate its forms to their advantage. These things are self-evident. Perhaps C.S. is discussing a conceptually perfect, hypothetical, rule of law. But that imagining is just that: imaginary.

p13 - 60. Liberals think that those on the left are illiberal if they are not (for example) committed to freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity. They do not like the idea of orthodoxy, including on university campuses. (TB: Perhaps C.S.’s lamentation of so-called ‘cancel culture’ – though his statement here conflicts with his idea of free markets, if we consider ideas to be on a marketplace. I think he is bristling against socio-cultural “market” pressures, and perhaps conflating them with the idea of a “rule of law”, such that he believes universities are somehow being subjected to orthodoxy. Of course, under the Trump administration, they are. And we do consider this illiberal.)

p14 - 64. Liberals notice that some “postliberals,” especially on the right, identify liberalism with something that almost all liberals reject—a commitment to pleasure-seeking and sexual hedonism, and a rejection of self-control and norms of civility and considerateness. Liberalism should not be identified with the Playboy philosophy (held by Hugh Hefner, the founder of that magazine). ==(TB: go and look up what HH’s “Playboy philosophy” was, if it was a formal thing at all.

p15- 68. If the objection is to certain claims for sexual liberty, liberals are likely to ask: What do you have in mind? Liberals believe in freedom of choice, but they do not believe in sexual assault, domestic violence, or child abuse. Liberals are highly likely to oppose criminal restrictions on same-sex behavior, but they will not want to require people to speak or act in ways that violate their religious convictions. Liberals are nowadays likely to accept same-sex marriage and to ask those who do oppose same-sex marriage to explain their opposition (without resorting to question-begging claims about what marriage is).

p17- 79. … Liberals emphasize the value and importance of constraints on individual choice via both norms and law.^45 Social norms might, for example, combat alcohol abuse and other forms of self-harm. Liberals also care about institutions; they are internationalists, even if they are wiling or eager to consider reforms to plenty of institutions.

p18- 81. Liberals insist on reason-giving in the public domain.^48 They see reason-giving as a check on authoritarianism. They know that authoritarians feel free to exercise power and to use force without justifying their choices.

Chapter 2

p27 - TB: discussion of freedom of religion, plurality of faiths. Gets into same-sex rels ofc. They would stand in the way of federal or state efforts to impose secular values, even widely held ones, on people whose religious traditions are inconsistent with those values. (TB: cites home schooling and constitutional right to parental choices about children’s education.) …Those who favor experiments of living constitutionalism would also be strongly inclined to rpotect contemporary rights of privacy, including the right to use contraceptives, the right to live with members of one’s family,^25 the right to engage in consensual sodomy,^26 and the right to same-sex marriage. … (Another paragraph talks about abortion and behavioral restraints, citing alcohol abuse, for ex…)

p31 - (discussion of stare decisis)

p37 - …a constitutional order that allowed racial segregation would be intolerably unjust, and we should not understand our constitutional order to authorize intolerable injustice unless we are required to do so. So long as a theory of interpretation is optional, we should not adopt one that allows intolerable injustice. What is taken as intolerably unjust by some is not so taken by others, which helps explain why different people have different fixed points.

Chapter 3

p44 - (paragraph describing Mill’s relationship – very good.)

p47 - …By rationalism, Hayek meant to refer to the hubristic view that with the aid of reason, human beings can plan a social order, subjecting it “to the control of individual human reason,” rather than relying on free markets, spontaneous orders, and the working of the invisible hand as described by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, a founding individualist.^36 Rationalists, in Hayek’s account, end up as collectivists, perhaps as fascists or communists. They foolishly think that human beings can effectively design rules and institutions, a “fatal conceit” that “always tends to develop into the opposite of individualism, namely socialism or collectivism.”^37 This fatal conceit leads to illiberalism, and to an obliteration of free markets. Still, Hayek did not believe in complete laissez-faire. He favored a guaranteed minimum for the poor (“some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work can be assured to everybody”^38) and even a comprehensive system of social insurance. His own conception of liberalism allowed all that (…) Nonetheless, he insisted that rationalism is both arrogant and dangerous, and he believed that Taylor moved Mill in its (illiberal) direction. (TB: Why such a fascination with individualism? Why do people have to go it alone? Why can’t a government be caring?)

Chapter 4

p53 - Even the president of the United States lacks the authority to deny people the right to some kind of hearing. (TB: apparently not? This depends on enforcement and checks and balances.)

p61 - Third, both rules and markets work against measures that impose inappropriate informational demands on government. Price-fixing is especially objectionable because it requires the government to do something that it lacks information to do well. The same argument can be invoked on behalf of (at least many) rules. By setting out rules of the road or requirements for the transfer of land, the government can appropriately allocate informational burdens between itself and others.

p65 - (discussion on precedent re: SCOTUS, but more generally about ruleless decisions and lack of consistency. Some stuff also on admin state s/a absence of clear rules –> agency regulation.)

Chapter 5

p71-72, quoting Justice Louis Brandeis:

…They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.^2

p72 - In another view, also with firm roots in the liberal tradition, freedom of speech is protected because (as Oliver Wendell Homes thought) the amrketplace of ideas is the best way of discovering truth. As he put it: “When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the ower of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution.”^4 TB: See previous note about marketplace of ideas. The marketplace cannot and nearly never has been lassez-faire. A key part of a marketplace of ideas is that the citizenry be equipped to contemplate those ideas. That is part of our need to offer a suitable education. Thus, standards must be maintained by the State towards effective education and effective minding of the marketplace of ideas. Importantly, this does not mean thought police, and banning subjects from discussion. It means ensuring that complex issues are presented competently, and in a considered way. It means, perhaps, restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. What would that doctrine look like, in today’s network-connected world? I am not sure, but it may start with regulations on social media and algorithmic engagement platforms that contribute to intense echo chambers, sometimes leading to intense echo chambers. On this, I think we should be open to creative thought and experimentation.

p78 - What is necessary, in short, is optimal chill—the right level of deterrence, considering whta happens to both falsehoods and truths. If an approach chills a very large number of very damaging falsehoods and a small number of not-very-important truths, we should probably adopt it. Recognition of a chilling effect on truth is important, but it does not tell us how to get close to the point of optimal chill. ¶ Liberals recognize this point, but insist on returning to fundamentals. If you punish falsehoods, you will deter truth. That is not a good reason never to punish falsehoods. But it is an excellent reason for government to tread lightly, and to allow people a lot of room to say things that turn out to be false.

p79 - TB: A lot on this page. Starting with a quote from Mill:

However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility, that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth . . . If the cultivation of the understanding consists in one thing more than in another, it is surely in learning the grounds of one’s own opinions. . . . He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refuse the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.^21

p79 - Mill added a separate point, fundamental to the liberal tradition, which is that false statements can bring about “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”^22 Mill’s point holds for a large number of false statements. If people are told that the moon landing was faked or that the Holocaust never happened, they can learn more about the truth of these matters—but only if the statements are not censored. Consider a classroom. If students make mistakes, the discussion might well be improved. Falsehoods put a spotlight on truth. They give it life. TB: I’m not sure if this is demonstrable. Even these two examples, the moon landing and the Holocaust, are not taken for truth in everyone, bizarrely. The holocaust, in particular, has been used by malignant actors to sow discord and distrust in history and institutions, via uncurtailed spreading of lies. C.S. says folks can go look things up, but when powerful actors discredit education, discredit media, discredit the very basis of reality, this fractures all understanding of the ground on which must be present for liberalism to function. C.S. continues: Mill’s point is sufficient to suggest that falsity, by itself, should not be taken to be a decisive reason to allow punishment or censorship. But again, and in Mill’s own spirit, it’s worth fussing a little. Mill’s argument is pretty abstract. For one thing, it may not apply to lies at all.^23 Mill’s own concern was limited to cases in which people were saying what they actually thought. Suppose that a politician proclaims that he was the Congressional Medal of Honor when he did not. Should we say that the politician’s lie helped people to discover a “living truth”?

p80 - TB: note on pluralistic ignorance - understood as ignorance about what other people actually think. Footnote 26.

p81 - TB: CS here is talking about counterspeech, making the point that a law restricting speech might backfire. CS: But in the abstract, we cannot rule out the possibility that from the standpoint of the very people who support that prohibition, freedom of speech would be better. One reason that suppression of speech might intensify people’s commitment to the very falsehoods that it contains. Another reason is that suppression might create a kind of forbidden fruit, broadening the appeal of those falsehoods. Yet another reason is that suppression might be taken as an attack on individual autonomy.

Chapter 6

p83 - Some of Hayek’s most important contributions to social thought are captured in his great (and short) 1945 essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society.^2

p85 - Cost-benefit analysis is central to one form of liberalism (in fact, it is central to my preferred form, though many liberals do not love it^10). . . . Do Hayek’s arguments count against cigarette taxes, or taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages? Do they amount to a general large-scale objection to paternalism? TB: CS goes on for a while on this. Talking essentially about sin taxes, but eventually referring to them by his beloved phrase, nudges.

p87 - Hayek roots his claim for liberty, his most cherished ideal, in the absence of “omniscient men.” If there were such men, we would be able to offer “little case for liberty.” I disagree with that view, for multiple reasons, and I doubt that Hayek really believed it either; but let us not let that point detain us here.

p88 TB: CS really starts getting into Behavioral Economics in this section. CS: [Hayek] often emphasized the extent to which each of us lives amid, and benefits from, a set of norms, cultural understandings, and institutions that were not designed by anyone, that have been built up over time, that serve essential functions, and that we do not and cannot understand: “What I want to show is that men are in their conduct never guided exclusively by their understanding of the causal connection between particular known means and certain desired ends, but always also by rules of conduct of which they are rarely aware, which they certainly have not consciously invented, and that to discern the function and significance of this is a difficult and only partially achieved task of scientific effort.”^22 . . . [a Hayekian theory of behavioral bias] might also emphasize that individuals might be prone to relying excessively on local information . . . TB: “not designed by anyone”—same or different from design by systems themselves? Many decisions over time to accomplish a goal. What do we consider design? Think about intentional norm pushing, boundary pushing, testing. These are things powerful people and orgs do to shift these systems.

p92 - In principle, the best approach, and an emphatically liberal one, would be to ask all five questions. Active choosers who are uninformed might blunder; the same is true of informed choosers who procrastinate or suffer from inertia. TB: He uses the word ‘blunder’ a fair bit.

p93 - 3. . . . If consumers choose or do not choose energy-efficient appliances in such circumstances, we will have learned something about what is likely to increase their welfare—not everything, but something. TB: In what temporal view? Later, CS: No liberal thinks that people get to choose whether to steal or to assault. In the face of a standard market failure, government intervention has a familiar justification; consider the problem of air pollution. It is true that even in such contexts, default rules may have an important role; consider the possibility of automatic enrollment in clean energy.^39 But the effects of defaults, taken by themselves, might well prove too modest for the problem at hand, and they hardly exhaust the repertoire of appropriate responses. TB: more from Nudge, and a gross understatement of “too modest.”

p97-98 He’s talking about educational labels as a sort of fix to insufficient information, calling them educative nudges. CS: And indeed, educative nudges are a key tool in the toolbox of the behaviorally informed policymaker. They might be seen as part of the same general program favored by those who prefer boosts, understood as efforts to inform and educate people so as to promote their own agency.^59 TB: These basically don’t work. I would describe them as “feckless” when they concern dangerous products.

p99 - quoting an argument from the U.S. government, this is the last of a bulleted list:

• In the case of vehicle fueld efficiency, and perhaps as a result of one or more forgoing factors, consumers may have relatively few choices to purchase vehicles with greater fuel economy once other characteristics, such as vehicle class, are chosen^64 TB: Not much consideration to temporal elements—such as cost of a vehicle now vs. cost of waiting to save.

p99 - Of course, liberals should be cautious about accepting behavioral argument on behalf of mandates or bans. Hayek himself was skeptical about the reliance on the wisdom of experts: “One thing, in fact, which the work on this book has taught me is that our freedom is threatened in many fields because of the fact that we are much too ready to leave the decision to the expert or to accept too uncritically his opinion about a problem of which he knows intimately only one little aspect.”^65

p99-100, a general note: think about how new, especially electric, cars will ‘turn off’ at intersections. Now think about someone who always had used cars—turning off at a stoplight is bad! Need education + exposure.

p101 - Re: fuel mandates example, again. CS: …we might oppose fuel economy mandates except insofar as they are meant to reduce externalities. Internalities should not be allowed to count. The question is whether Kantian strictures really should apply in cases in which consumers lack information or are acting on the basis of some kind of behavioral bias. There is a strong argument that they should not, and that government responses do not treat people disrespectfully^74 even if the presumption ought to be in favor of nudges rather than mandates. Reasonable liberals reasonably disagree on such questions.^75 TB: nudges put pressure on the citizen, hoping that citizens respond to them and in turn put market pressure on the people producing goods and services. Rather than regulating directly.

p101 - It is also true that for Hayekian reasons, the best approach to internalities should not be coercion but instead appropriate disclosure, designed to promote salience and to overcome limited attention.

p101 - The broadest point is that while the liberal presumption in favor of freedom of choice makes a great deal of sense, it is only a presumption. It might be overcome, especially when it can be shown that behavioral biases are having significant negative effects. TB: Think about access to market. Access as regulated by gov.

p101 - At least in the first instance, and possibly in the last, behaviorally informed policy ought to be based not on the preferences and values of social planners, but on learning from the choices of informed and unbiased choosers. TB: How about based on scientific fact?

p102 - TB: Okay, so C.S. is saying that the Hayekian value is to rely on choosers in general, rather than view of experts. I think this works in some places, not all, and only if you have a threshold grasp of fact and reality. Also, nudges don’t work. By his own example. Another? Nutritional labels. Look into effectiveness of anti-smoking warning labels in USA vs. AUS. Some of non-US versions verge into ‘coercion.’

Chapter 7

CS opens this chapter with a few quotes, the first from Montesquieu:

The alms given to a naked man inn the street do not fulfill the obligations of the state, which owes to every citizen a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health.

TB: This is actually a great counterpoint. If we say that the State owes a right to housing, will the state forfeit access by itself to market and thus abdicate their ability to fulfill that duty? Makes no sense to guarantee that right, then allow mad profit by corporations. In essence: corporations should not be permitted to profit off of the rights owed by the State to its citizenry. TB: actually, think this through for a bit. You’ve just destroyed newspapers.

p104, TB: Liberalism — personal choice to reasonable extents. But not complete choice. A corporation is not a person, and does not earn the same level of right to choice.

p105 - During World War II, Roosevelt and the nation saw an intimate connection between freedom from want and protection against external threats, captured in the notion of freedom from fear. in his words, “Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.”^8

p105 It was freedom, not equality, that motivated the second bill of rights.

p105 - We can go further. The United States continues to live, at least some of the time, under Roosevelt’s constitutional vision—his conception of liberalism. A consensus underlies several of the rights he listed, including the right to educate, the right to health care, the right to social security, and the right to be free from monopoly. When asked directly, most Americans support parts of the Second Bill. They even say that many of its provisions should be seen not as mere privileges but as rights to which each person is “entitled as a citizen.” Some contemporary leaders are committed, in principle, to freedom from want. But in terms of actual policy, the public commitment is often partial and ambivalent, even grudging. TB: But this is actually part of the problem with the premise — public support does not equal public action. Look at polling around Obamacare vs the Affordable Care Act.

p106 - Some of the time the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of what some people see as individualism This is an approach that endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and that respects political liberty, but claims to distrust “government intervention” and to insist that people must fend for themselves. This is a part of the liberal tradition; there is no doubt about it. But it was definitively rejected during the New Deal era, and it has no roots in America’s founding period. Its only brief period of success came early in the twentieth century. Roosevelt himself pointed to the essential problem as early as 1932: the exercise of “property rights might so interfere with the rights of the individual that the government, without whose assistance the property rights could not exist, must intervene, not to destroy individualism, but to protect it.”^10 TB: Some notes:

• Apply that property rights argument to current context around housing. Arguably, property “rights” applied to large corporate landlords, plus property rights for individuals operating short-term rentals, have cannibalized the market and raised costs to such an extent that housing is unattainable for the average person. Or, to be more specific, cite that state about housing affordability on minimum wage.
• I was buzzed reading this, and have written, “fuckin’ A right” in the margin.

Other general notes from 106:

• Infrastructure! re: “to make a long story short” ¶
• Government as compact, re last ¶

p108 - In connecting the two freedoms, he urged, first and foremost, that America could be free from fear only if the citizens of “all nations” were themselves free from want. External threats are often a product of extreme deprivation faced by those who make those threats. But Roosevelt also meant to remind the nation that citizens cannot be free from fear unless they have some protection against the most severe forms of want—that minimal security, coming from adequate education and decent opportunity, is itself a safeguard against fear. TB: direct analogy to current international immigration crisis.

p109 - [Roosevelt] began by pointing toward the postwar era: “It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known.”^22 He added that the nation “canot be content, no matte how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.”^24

p109 - But over time, these rights had proved inadequate. Unlike the Constitution’s framers, “we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”^26 As Roosevelt saw it, “necessitous men are not free men,”^27 not least because those who are hungry and jobless “are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”^28

p113, Roosevelt: “Let it be from now on the task of our party to break foolish traditions.”^42

p114 - . . . The problem with “laissez-faire” is not that it is unjust or harmful to poor people, but that it is a misdescription of any system of liberty, including free markets. Markets and wealth depend on government. ¶ The misunderstanding is not innocuous. It blinds people to the omnipresence of government help for those who are doing well and makes it appear that those who are doing poorly, and complaining about it, are seeking a set of handouts. . . . Doris Kearns Goodwin . . . misses the point when she says of the Second Bill: “Nor had he ever been so explicit in linking together the negative liberty from government achieved in the old Bill of Rights to the positive liberty through government to be achieved in the new Bill of Rights.”^49 This opposition between “liberty from government” and “liberty through government” misconceives what Roosevelt’s presidency was all about. TB: CS writes like this is a misunderstanding, but it isn’t. It’s a malicious bit of mythmaking. By the same powerful interests he’s discussed elsewhere.

p115 - If employees have to work long hours and receive little money, it is in large part because of the prevailing rules of property and contract. The realists believed that private property is fine, even good, but they denied that the rules of property could be identified with liberty.

p116 - CS quotes Robert Hale:

The right of ownership in a manufacturing plant is . . . a privilege to operate the plant, plus a privilege not to operate it, plus a right to keep others from operating, plus a power to acquire all the rights of ownership in the products. . . . This power is a power to release a pressure which the law of property exerts on the liberty of others. If the pressure is great, the owner may be able to compel the others to pay him a big price for their release; if the pressure is slight, he can collect but a small income from his ownership. In either case he is paid for releasing a pressure exerted by the government—the law. The law has delegated to him a discretionary power over the rights and duties of others.^54

(Bold mine, italics CS)

p116 - In free markets, people do not really have the right to work “without any other’s leave.” Because of property rights, people can work only with the “leave” of others. TB: do I think this is true?

p116 - re: property rights, CS: . . . Hale did not argue against property rights. Instead he sought to draw attention to the fact that property owners are, in effect, given a set of powers by law. If you have property, then you have sovereignty, a kind of official power vindicated by government, over that property.

p116-117 - quoting an unsigned essay form 1935: “Justification for this purported refusal to supervise the ethics of the market place is sought in doctrines of laisse-faire . . . In general, the freedom from regulation postulated by laissez faire adherents is demonstrably nonexistent and virtually inconceivable. Bargaining power exists only because of government protection of the property rights bargained, and is property subjected to government control.”^59 TB: bold mine, italics CS

p117 - Hayek himself reminded his readers that the functioning of competition “depends, above all, on the existence of an appropriate legal system, a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible.”^61 TB: bold mine. Hayek and CS go on here intermixed to express that legal frameworks must be continuously adjusted.

p119 - The real question is the pragmatic one: What form of intervention best promotes human interests?

p120 - TB: discussion here of a farm bill in the nature of an experiment. “If the darn thing doesn’t work, we can say so quite frankly, but at least try it.”^74 (quoting Roosevelt). Essentially, expressing a need for experimentation, being risk-aggressive, in other words. Roosevelt again: “The thing that matters in any industrial system is what it does actually to human beings.”^75

p124 - Americans had come to understand that whatever their rhetoric, no one is against government intervention, and that the idea of laissez-faire is a hopeless misdescription of their system. Those with wealth and property are advantaged, every day of every year, by government and by law. TB: reference Caro’s writing on LBJ, re: helping “the little guy” - or problems too big for any one small group, something I think from when he was talking about electrification of the hill country.

p124 - The task remains incomplete. To be sure, the Second Bill helps to account for central features of modern American government. . . . The Supreme Court has said that the federal Constitution itself gives some protection to [the right to education], and in any case the national government is committed, in broad principle, to ensuring a decent education for all. In the same vein, the right to be free from monopoly is a firmly established part of the contemporary government. The laws forbidding conspiracy in restraint of trade are nearly as secure as the right to free speech itself. So too, the Social Security Act has the essential characteristics of a commitment. In public life, no serious person can argue for its abolition. TB: The whole paragraph is gigantically optimistic, and seems totally unaware of contemporary events, which include wholesale dismantling of government bodies, with the Department of Education front and center there.

Chapter 8

((no notes))

Epilogue

p139 - You can believe in freedom of religion without knowing whether it is permissible to apply prohibitions on race and sex discrimination to religious schools. TB: You can???

p140 - In its early days, liberalism was full of fire. It is impossible to read Mill’s On Liberty (1859) without feeling that fire: “If all mankind minus one, were of the one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”^2 . . . I see this ¶ as contradicting the quote from p139.

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Outline

1. Introduction - how came upon book, short background of CS.
2. General Impressions of the book, introduce a few main critiques.
3. Main Point 1 - Economics
   1. Liberalism & Behavioral Economics, Nudges
   2. Corporations & Power. Ex: housing.
   3. Public support; fickle, look at Obamacare vs. ACA. Not against own interests, but captured by bandwidth concerns (cite Scarcity) and systemic pressures from Corporate designs.
4. Main Point 2 - Society
   1. Tribalism vs. Collective Action – CS argues against tribalism, but what constitutes tribalism? Discuss ‘identity politics’ – gay rights, progress. Take a bat to his stupid argument in Nudge about a concession for gay marriage. Solidarity - look at the miner’s strike ref in PRIDE.
   2. Power. Consider power in groups, ‘influencers’ – connect to cults of identity, some of the themes from MP1.
   3. Morality & Ethics – popular support does not define morality.
5. Main Point 3 - Institutions & Continuity
   1. CS cites “rule of law” as a provider of equality, but it has inherited centuries of engineered inequality. This is not a simple misunderstanding.
   2. Marketplace of ideas – connect to MP2 and MP1, build the case. What does it look like to have guardrails against lies and propaganda? Discuss the need for an educated citizenry.
   3. Optimism. Quote CS’s ¶ that I note as optimistic (p140) – cite ways in which these systems are deteriorating and / or intentionally under attack, including contemporaneously to the writing of this book. How can CS ignore these?
6. Conclusion – tie everything together. Moral center. Connect things maybe to JBMOD critiques, not sure.

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