We see this Document as a springboard for a larger, and more free-wheeling conversation, one that extends beyond the FEED site. "Marketing Freedom" is our contribution to the new BrainWave project, a collaboration with Salon, Electric Minds, and The Site. Each publication is hosting a discussion about Libertarianism, and we'll be cross-linking extensively between the various threads. You can see a daily overview of these conversations here.
"Right-wing libertarians...don't see that the
huge transnational corporations that own and control most of the world's wealth exercise a
parallel tyranny," argues Ellen Willis. Read the rest of her response.
REMOVING GOVERNMENT FROM ECONOMIC LIFE
Economic freedom is crucial, first, because you cannot restrict economic freedom without
restricting other expressions of freedom. It cannot be otherwise, for too many of the
apparently noneconomic choices we make from day to day are ultimately underwritten by
economic transactions. The more economic freedom is lost, the more widely and deeply every
other form of freedom is affected. [p. 24]
In the conduct of business, Congress shall make no law regarding the design, organization,
or conduct of the work-place, and shall make no law regarding the terms of employment of
workers except for strict protections against the use of force and fraud in presenting and
administering the terms of employment. [p. 60]
One federal function, education, would become much larger in dollar terms, because a $3,000
unrestricted tuition voucher would be provided annually for each child attending elementary
and secondary school -- an expenditure of about $150 billion a year. [p. 37]
In
her response, Paulina Borsook remarks: "I feel there's a kind of heartening but adolescent simplicity in Murray's cri de coeur; would that things really were that easy."
Omar Wasow responds,: "Both Murray and Friedman use the example of an individual trying
to articulate an unpopular idea to a mass audience...[but] this doesn't really capture how vital
economic freedom is to life outside of politics..."
"But the notion of a market free of government entanglement is a purely ideological construct, a utopian fiction," objects Ellen Willis.
Omar Wasow gives Murray a qualified thumbs up:
"I am a strong believer in school vouchers...I am convinced that few policies would do more to help create class mobility
for the poor..."
In his response , John Fund writes: "Murray proposes the ultimate challenge to the regulatory rigidities we have today: competition."
Why not make the thought experiment real? Politically the answer is simple: Once they are forced to think about it, the proponents of regulation will understand how many of the regulated products and services will disappear from the marketplace. In the real world hardly anyone cares about the things that fascinate the regulators. In the real world people will choose private third-party oversight. If the thought experiment is made real, the government regulation of products and services will wither away. [p. 76]
"To pick up on only one of the obvious problems with Murray's death-wishlist about the fading away of the State: there is no mention anywhere about the environment," says Borsook in her rejoinder.
For perspective on the latest Murray-sparked firestorm, it might help to re-visit the path of the last one. As Nicholas Lemann reports in Slate, it was only after the media moved on to new sensations that experts had a chance to really examine the findings of The Bell Curve, which, "it turns out, is full of mistakes ranging from sloppy reasoning to mis-citations of sources to outright mathematical errors." ""Fewer people will discriminate against you if you have the money to convince such discrimination will be costly to them," John Fund responds.
There is a growing acceptance that the reforms of the 1960s largely failed, and many readers
will not find it surprising that the trendline test shows that things generally got worse
rather than better. But the trendline test may be extended to many of the most sacred of the
achievements claimed for government programs, the ones still widely accepted as examples of
the programs that worked...
[Skeptics ask:] Didn't affirmative action at least open up professional jobs for blacks?
Blacks were increasing their representation in the professions before aggressive affirmative
action began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The steepest slope in the trendline occurs
in the early 1960s, before even the original Civil Rights Act of 1964. More broadly,
employment of blacks in white-collar and skilled blue-collar jobs was rising at the same
rate before and after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission went into action. The
single exception is clerical jobs, where a surge in government hiring drove up the numbers.
[pp. 50-51]
Go back to the newspaper indexes for the years immediately preceding the passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and you will find a steady sequence of stories about hotel
chains and restaurants and other service providers renouncing racial favoritism or
segregation in their operations. Replay the kinescopes of newscasts and documentaries or
read the civil-rights coverage in Time and Newsweek from the years just before 1964, and and
you will observe a nation run by whites coming to grips with the injustice of racial
prejudice in ways that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier. America did not
make progress against racism because Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Congress
passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because the nation was so committed to make [sic.]
progress against racism. [p. 87]
In her response, Borsook argues that ""Suppose his [Murray's] wife or daughter had been harassed by a creep at work -- and her line of work (physicist, medical specialist) did not make it easy for her to simply get a job some place else -- or start her own company? What then?"
In his response, Omar Wasow notes that: "...some kinds of hiring discrimination makes sense. And whether
we like it or not, most hiring decisions are affected by bias of one sort or another..."
"The most powerful social sanction is not government force but peer pressure," responds John Fund.
""No doubt Murray favors the abolition of gun control laws, the better to encourage those shotgun weddings, " ventures Willis in her response.
When I mentioned a few chapters back that landlords should discriminate, one issue I had in mind was the drug problem. Landlords, so much maligned, are actually a force for social good because of this one undoubted characteristic: They want responsible tenants who pay their rent on time and don't trash the property. Given their way, they tend to let good tenants be and to evict bad ones, and this is one of the most efficient forms of socialization known to a free society.
The process whereby landlords and tenants find each other is rich in social functions. Entire neighborhoods were once living embodiments of an intricate process whereby norms evolved. Expectations were set up among both landlords and prospective tenants, and money was often a relatively small part of the story. In Harlem in the 1940s the difference between the scruffy, hustling neighborhoods and the exactingly neat and orderly working-class neighborhoods was seldom a great difference in income among the tenants but a difference in norms and values. In the working-class neighborhoods, unless you presented yourself as being a certain kind of person, you weren't going to get in, even if you could pay the rent. In the scruffy neighborhoods you could get in, but landlords charged a premium to compensate for the damage they expected you to cause. Economists have technical descriptions for the equilibria that were reached, but the process was not really so different from the way in which human beings everywhere have historically tended to stratify themselves -- not just according to money, but according to tastes and values. [PP. 109-10]
Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz is the latest attempt to sell what is, if not a fully-fledged political movement, then at least an increasingly fashionable worldview. Boaz, Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, draws on Ayn Rand, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and other Fountain heads to advance his theories about the future of states and the state of the future.
"Just as the old Trotskyists of the thirties and forties became neoconservatives in the seventies and eighties, hippies of the sixties are becoming the vanguard of free-market digitalism in the nineties," wrote FEED's Gary Chapman in "Electrifying the Acid Test," a Feedline story from the fall of '95 that traced the rad hippie roots of cyberlibertarian culture.
For better or worse, Libertarianism is the closest thing the Web has to a home-grown political movement. The publication of Charles Murray's new book, What It Means to be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation, gives us occasion to reflect on the problems and possibilities of the Libertarian creed. We've invited a panel of critics -- author Paulina Borsook, essayist Ellen Willis, MSNBC's Omar Wasow, and The Wall Street Journal's John Fund -- to annotate passages from the book. As always, we invite FEED readers to send in their own comments, and we'll be included them in the margins of the main Document.
[One] aspect of freedom is economic freedom, which embraces the right to engage in
voluntary and informed exchanges of goods and services without restriction. Without economic
freedom, freedom of any other kind cannot exist except in a pinched and lifeless way.
Thinking otherwise has been one of the most pernicious mistakes of the left.
The proposal : As regards products and services, ratify a constitutional amendment to the
effect that (1) Congress shall provide for the enforcement of laws against fraud and
deceptive practice and shall provide for efficient administration of civil tort law, and (2)
Congress shall not otherwise abridge the right of persons and businesses to provide services
or to manufacture and sell products.
Read on.
DE-REGULATING THE MARKETPLACE
In a world where both regulated and unregulated goods are available, everyone may capture the advantages of regulation, real or imagined, by choosing to buy the regulated product. The self-proclaimed consumer advocates of the world may live just as securely in that world as they do in the one that exists now. They may continue to buy government-regulated products and services. They may also write angry articles, declaim on television, and take out advertisements in newspapers warning the public when they discern a danger. In so doing, they will add to the public's fund of knowledge and thereby perform a valuable service. Here is the difference: In the world of our thought experiment, the "consumer advocates" will not have the right to use the government to force everyone else to share their particular level of risk aversion. They will not have the right to run other people's lives for them.
CIVIL RIGHTS
Freely determined prices encourage equal treatment of people regardless of race,
ethnicity, religion, or social status. A free price system is a great leveler. Where the
economy is not free, you will find a version of the class system that prevailed in
aristocratic countries and communist countries alike: Access to certain goods was based not
on whether you could pay their monetary price, but on your status ... In a world where just
about everything has a price, the monetary price determined by free exchanges is the least
arbitrary, most accommodating to individual tastes, and least subject to abuse. [p. 26]
LANDLORDS AND TENANTS
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