One of the reasons I don’t think of myself as a libertarian even though they’re the group whose actual policy preferences most closely mirror mine is because of things like this. Legislation reflects a society’s moral values. In fact, it should reflect a society’s moral values, consistent with individual freedoms, because it is what a democratic polis is all about: a nation deciding by which rules it wants to live.

Government can’t and won’t “just get out of our lives”, simply because what you describe as “getting out of our lives” isn’t the same thing as what I describe as “getting out of our lives”, and, until Jim Manzi finally succeeds at creating evidence-based social science, there is no scientific way to decide what government should or should not do — and nor should there be.

So if you want to disincentivize smoking through sin taxes, that’s perfectly fine. It’s okay to have public policy that disincentivizes bad things just because they’re bad, without having to make budget projections over the next 30 years. I’m willing to pay extra to feed my addiction. But don’t lie about the real reason you’re doing it.

I wonder if they could make it into a movie …

… what many people–not just those naive youngsters–conclude is that the market does not, left to its own devices, magically solve our “complex economic problems.” What exactly is the “free market” solution to the fact that tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance? Or to environmental problems? Or to ensuring an adequate education for all kids? Funny how Microsoft and Cisco haven’t taken care of all this. Would these companies pick up the slack if we axed what Healy calls our “wealth-destroying Social Security system”?

Conservatives and libertarians are, of course, free to propose solutions to these problems that are more in keeping with their philosophy, but what they mostly do is deny that they are problems and/or that government has any role in addressing them. Liberals, progressives, social democrats, and others, by contrast, see a role for government in stepping into the gaps left by the market. If that’s statism, I’m happy to be counted among the statists.

As I’ve remarked before, though, this way of putting things also obscures more than it clarifies, since there are very few serious participants in our political debates who really think that there are no problems that government has a role in addressing. Hence the claim that taking such a position is what conservatives and libertarians “mostly do” strikes me as a caricature no more helpful than that suggested by talk of “statism”: the real debates are over what, in each instance that seems to call for a role for government, the appropriate role will be. And when it comes to such questions the differing inclinations of conservatives and libertarians on the one hand and progressives and social democrats on the other manage to underwrite substantive political debates like those concerning, say, cap and trade vs. straightforward carbon taxes, supply- vs. demand-side approaches to economic stimulus, and health care vouchers and health savings accounts vs. public options or single-payer systems. (And yes, there are also positions worth entertaining that reject carbon rationing, stimulus packages, or – much less reasonably, I think – federally-driven healthcare reform altogether.) It’s certainly unfair to peg all supporters of Obamacare or Social Security as closet Soviets, but it’s no more helpful to regard everyone on the other side as a believer in “magic” and an inflexible ideologue.

That said, some of these unhelpful labels are brought on by precisely the sort of rhetoric that Lee is criticizing Gene Healy for adopting. That Reagan line about government being the problem rather than the solution has got a lot of charm, and in many cases it’s pretty clearly right: but it isn’t always right, and indeed Reagan himself limited that diagnosis to the circumstances of the “present crisis”. And while Healy may be right to lament the preponderance of younger voters choosing “strong government” over “the free market” as the force best suited to handle “today’s complex economic problems”, it seems that the better response is simply to reject this false dichotomy altogether: for one of the greatest strengths of a truly strong government will lie in its willingness to be a guarantor of market freedoms, and not a competitor to them. Same goes for the millennial generation’s “romantic view of federal activism”, which conservatives and libertarians would do well not to replace with their own ultra-idealized vision of utter federal passivity. Support for menu labeling laws and government supervision of yoga instructors is pretty good evidence of the kind of inclination for which talk of statism may be appropriate, but those of us on the other side would do well not to devolve into self-caricatures of our own.

P.S. In a similar vein, see Conor.

If there’s an upside to this it’s that the first generation that can’t remember a time before the Internet does seem to at least to care about civil liberties. They tend to be anti-war, anti-drug war, cognizant of and alarmed by police misconduct, and while they put too much trust in government, they do seem to be be genuinely motivated to force government transparency and accountability, two inherent Internet values. And frankly, if that motivation doesn’t fade, what they discover–either through government disclosures or through its refusal to disclose–ought to be enough to shake at least a few of them from their broader faith in the state.

But as I suggested late last year in discussing Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie’s “Libertarian Moment” cover story from Reason, even this diagnosis seems to rely on a good deal more optimism than is warranted in this instance. Most of the internet generation – and yes, that’s me – is indeed implicitly small-“l” libertarian when it comes to things like drug policy and stupid foreign wars, but the specific kinds of privilege and virtual freedom that technologies like the internet afford us can easily breed a dangerous complacency and a willingness, as I put it, to “accept an unfree world so long as we can find some freedom within it”:

A generation accustomed to carving out its own private spheres of freedom no matter the external circumstances might ultimately be one that lacks the revolutionary impulse that Gillespie and Welch assume is the natural outgrowth of a “hyper-individualized” culture. This is especially true when it comes to things like military policy and the drug war, where the worst effects of our government’s actions are borne primarily by those in society’s lower echelons: so long as no one takes serious steps toward instituting a draft or arresting a third of our high school students for drug use, you won’t find many people agitating for revolt. And it’s not that easy to start a revolution when you can’t pull away from the X-Box.

This is, of course, not all that far from the point that my friend James Poulos is making when he talks about the coming “Pink Police State”, and to be frank it scares the shit out of me. And as Radley himself has known to point out, even the “transparency and accountability” that were supposed to be the Obama administration’s calling cards have been a bit … slow to materialize, but somehow I find it hard to believe that Generation Obama is going to throw the bum out over that. There’s quite a bit more than a few of us who will need to be shaken back to reality before it begins to make a difference.

… of course libertarian orthodoxy really does render most libertarians unwitting shills for corporate interests. Although also unintentionally so, the mainstream libertarian agenda is in effect largely a sop to corporate interests. If you could wave a magic wand and enact your average libertarian’s economic agenda, our corporate leaders would fall into a joy-induced stupor. The libertarian economic agenda, to a great degree, just is the corporate economic agenda.

There are times when Freddie can be a quite incisive observer, but this is decidedly not one of those. Indeed, as my friend Tim Carney has recently observed, the most libertarian members of Congress are actually among its least “business-friendly”, for the simple reason that they’re staunchly opposed to the kinds of taxpayer-sponsored corporate giveaways that make up approximately 95% of the daily business of Washington. The libertarian economic agenda includes neither bailouts nor handouts nor bizarro tax loopholes nor unnecessary wars and the associated channeling of billions of dollars and loads of influence into the hands of defense contractors. In a perfectly libertarian world there would be no regulatory creep for the simple reason that there would be very little regulation to speak of; no influence-peddling due to the government’s lack of, well, influence; no such thing as being too big to fail or too small to cut through the red tape; no more billions channeled to Midwestern farmers to produce wasteful and unnecessary corn ethanol; and so on. To me at least, this sounds very little like the sort of thing that sends corporatists into joy-induced stupors.

Now we can, of course, read Freddie’s words with an emphasis on “unwitting” and “unintentional”; he’s not really saying that libertarians are evil, but only that they’re a bit daft. And in fact I think there’s quite a lot to the observation that on the ground, the aspects of the libertarian political agenda that have the greatest political traction are the ones that are likely to get big-time corporate funding. But the problem with this criticism is that the same is true of everyone in politics; if libertarians are accidental shills for corporate elites, then by the same token liberals like Freddie are just a bunch of unknowing tools in the hands of unions, trial lawyers, energy interests salivating over the prospect of cap-and-trade, and dozens of other powerful lobbies besides. And many of those lobbies are – get this! – representatives of those dread “corporate interests”, aiming to use the liberal agenda as a means to tilt the economic playing field by regulating their competitors into oblivion, protect their backsides when things go wrong, siphon billions away from the government in the alleged service of “green” ends, and so on. Everyone gets played in this game, and so telling a realistic story about the politics of libertarians or conservatives means telling the same sort of story about those of standard-issue liberals. The idea that it’s the libertarians, of all people, who are insufficiently sensitive to “the banal truth of the everyday corruption of human power politics” is silly beyond belief.

These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them. But with industry itself footing the bill, some safety advocates worry that the approach could introduce new problems and new conflicts of interest. And they contend that the programs lack the rigor of a well-run federal inspection system.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

[…]

“Industry self-regulation didn’t protect our money, and industry self-regulation won’t protect our food,” said Carol L. Tucker-Foreman, a safety advocate with the Consumer Federation of America, in an e-mail message. “We want every inspector to be paid by and owe their loyalty to the people who eat, not to the owner of an unsanitary produce packing operation. You can’t work for both.”

Yes, because there are never problems or conflicts of interest when things are run by the government, are there? This is a case in which markets are working, in which the threat of safety hazards or bad publicity has led producers to develop a self-imposed regulatory regime and so bear on their own, rather than passing on to the taxpayers, the costs of responding to their customers’ perceived demands. If, in the face of all of this, you think that the desire to pass this burden on to the gummint is motivated more than a whit by a selfless desire to protect the public health, then you must be … well, you must be a Times reporter who ends up carrying water for the food industry, that’s who you must be.

As my friend Tim Carney has helpfully explained in connection with the Food Safety Modernization Act being pushed by the congressional Democrats (on which see more here), what’s going on in this case is every bit the rule rather than the exception:

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

For the record, my CSA sends out their spinach literally caked in mud, ensuring us that this actually makes things safer, by allowing nature’s defenses to do their work and keeping contamination from spreading. If such practices aren’t good enough for the Consumer Federation of America, that’s their problem, not mine; a quick rinse and then a dunk in cold salt water cleans those leaves off just fine. That this isn’t the result of state-enforced policy doesn’t show that these decisions are made in a “vacuum”, or that a “well-run [sic!] federal inspection system” could keep things any safer than the collective power of a highly-motivated consumer base. It’s regulation, not individual choice and corporate responsibility, that fails to be a “substitute” for the natural state that it aims to displace.

Earlier: I interviewed Tim, and a host of other luminaries, on regulatory capture and the politics of food safety in my Doublethink article on the war against unboiled milk.

Meanwhile, here’s how Goldberg responded to a reader who made some points similar to Sullum’s:

Let’s take drugs out of it. I’m in favor of the death penalty. Let’s assume blacks and white commit murder at identical rates but because blacks are poorer they get convicted and executed more than whites. I don’t think that fact alone means we should get rid of the death penalty. It means we should do a better job of executing white murderers. A justly convicted murderer should be punished regardless of his race. A justly convicted drug dealer should be punished, regardless of his race as well. If we’re punishing a disproportionately high number of blacks, that’s a sign we should crack down on more guilty whites, not give up on punishing crimes.

It’s really hard to follow the logic here. In the first place, the hypothetical crackdown that Goldberg proposes here is appropriate only if the laws in question deserve to be enforced; this is uncontroversial enough in the case of murder, but given that this very issue constitutes a huge part of what’s at stake in discussions of drug prohibition, it seems an unreasonable move to make. Moreover, doesn’t it seem that Goldberg has pretty much given up the game at this point? “Poor people are disproportionately affected by all sorts of things all the time”, he wrote earlier in this post, “and blacks are disproportionately poor. In most other spheres, libertarians don’t take that fact and bend their principles to it.” But that’s exactly what Goldberg is proposing to do in this hypothetical example! We’ve got the murder laws that we do, and they’ve got the effects that they have; whether those effects make life a bit more difficult for certain “identity politics groups” is supposed to be entirely beside the point, isn’t it? Or do Republicans only buy into identity-politicking when it can be used as an excuse for harsher sentencing penalties and enforcement of existing laws?

The more basic point, though, is this. What differentiates the case of the drug war from that of, say, the racially disproportionate effects of market capitalism or loan policies based on credit-worthiness is that drug policy is an aspect of our state-sponsored criminal justice system, and as such its societal function is essentially that of, well, doing justice, whereas private banks and the free market have only economic ends in mind. And so it’s simply astonishing to see Goldberg claiming that a government policy that leads blacks to be incarcerated at several times the rate of whites is somehow less troubling in its racial implications than affirmative-action policies that “keep Asians or Jews out of elite colleges”; neither situation is ideal, to be sure, but locking up a poor black man who couldn’t afford legal representation for selling dope on the corner is, shall we say, a bit more morally problematic than telling a Jewish kid from Scarsdale that he’ll have to go to Williams instead of Harvard. It is indeed the case that so far all this amounts to is an argument for serious and widespread drug policy reform, and not outright decriminalization; there’s nothing at all unlibertarian, however, about suggesting that one reason we might want to go one or the other of these routes is that an already disadvantaged racial group that still bears the scars of a long history of genuinely appalling treatment in this country might stand to benefit from it.

Well, that or you could just shut your mind to the facts and write, as one of Goldberg’s readers actually does, that the only evidence we need for the belief that drug dealers are disproportionately black is the disproportionate blackness of the “victims of drug dealing-related murders”. Because it’s certainly not as if there could be another explanation for that.

(Cross-posted at @TAC.)

In an open-source healthcare system, someone might go to vocational school for accreditation as the equivalent of a Chinese “barefoot doctor.” He could set fractures and deal with other basic traumas, and diagnose the more obvious infectious diseases. He might listen to your cough, do a sputum culture and maybe a chest x-ray, and give you a round of zithro for your pneumonia. But you can’t purchase such services by themselves without paying the full cost of a college and med school education plus residency.

The government having made some aspects of treatment artificially lucrative with its patent system and licensing cartel, the standards of practice naturally gravitate toward where the money is. The newly patented “me too” drugs crowd out drugs that are almost (if not entirely) as good, so that the cost of medicine is many times higher than necessary. The licensing cartel requires diagnosis and treatment by someone with an MD’s level of training, when something much less might be all that’s needed.

Result: radical monopoly. The state-sponsored crowding-out makes other, cheaper (and often more appropriate) forms of treatment less usable, and renders cheaper (but adequate) treatments artificially scarce.

Now that’s a libertarian, my friends. As with most of what Kevin writes, you ought to read the whole thing.

Earlier: I talked up a paper by Shirley Svorny on the economics of state-sponsored medical licensure, and Kevin left some “baby step” proposals for reform in the comments.

Elsewhere: Mike Riggs in Reason on the nefarious ADA; Kevin’s “Free Market Agenda for Healthcare Reform”; Roderick Long on false dichotomies in the health policy debate; and here is Kevin’s blog.

There is, I am comfortable saying, a whole host of good arguments in favor of legalizing pot. The argument that we should legalize pot because we can then aid the economy and make money for the government by taxing it is, however, decidedly NOT a member of that host. Want to know why Obama LOLed at your question last night, pro-legalization America? Maybe it’s because the idea that a tiny boost in GDP and the associated tax revenue comprise a sufficient reason to legalize a substance that millions of Americans stupidly think is dangerous is a laughable idea. Is it true that pot is nowhere near as dangerous or addictive as those tut-tutting parents, pols, and educators so sternly and solemnly say that it is? That the drug war is costly, dangerous, and patently unjust? That legalizing an already widely-used substance and so bringing its use out of the shadows is the best way to develop the social mores necessary to use it responsibly? That it’s generally best, all else being equal, not to ban those activities that don’t cause serious social harm? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. But then why, if there are so many arguments as good as these in favor of legalization, is the one that Obama’s web-based pesterers have repeatedly chosen to present him with an argument about tax revenue? Is it because they think that avoiding the moral questions altogether and instead dressing up their argument with dollar signs and fancy economic analysis would make their case look – what? – more serious? Less frivolous? Less about freedom and self-indulgence than the Very Serious Matter of the Health of America’s Economy? And if so, why in the world would they think that anyone would buy it? You’d almost think that the folks who came up with this strategy were on drugs or something …

Does anyone agree with me? Does everyone? Or is there something I’m missing here?

UPDATE: Reader Gherald L. has a very nice post laying out the economic case for legalization as it ought to be stated.

First, here’s Rod:

The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 attempts to streamline the unwieldy federal food regulation system, as does the similar Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2009. Both, however, are written as a “one size fits all” bill that would ramp up fees and regulation on all producers of food (and, in the case of the latter, drugs and cosmetics). The little guy who sells homegrown tomatoes or homemade soap at the farmers market would be subject to the same regulation as industrial giants, without the resources to implement it.

As those familiar with my earlier writing on food safety and related subjects will be unsurprised to hear, I think this is exactly right. I’ll turn in a minute to my diagnosis of a similar sort of problem in the battle over raw milk in California, but for now here’s what Mark Thompson wrote about the regulatory dynamic in his terrific Culture11 piece on the CPSIA controversy:

The effects of these new restrictions on small and medium-sized businesses are difficult to underestimate. […] And Woldenberg, whose company is more properly classified as “medium-sized,” says that he conservatively estimates a minimum increase of 30% in the overhead for his company to manufacture an average product.  In one instance, a testing company estimated that it would cost $24,000 in testing fees for one of Learning Resource’s children’s telescopes to comply with the law — even though the product contains no parts that could conceivably be considered hazardous. Because this product only generates $32,000 in gross sales per year, it will need to be discontinued. Similar problems will exist for just about every niche children’s product, for which large production runs are impractical, such as educational materials for special needs children.

Meanwhile, however, massive multi-national corporations will be relatively well-suited to adjust to the new law. Their huge economies of scale mean they can afford to staff a few lawyers to oversee compliance with the law, and it is only a minimal change to their business models for them to mass produce and import their products in a way that minimizes testing fees. In sum, the net effects of this law are that the largest businesses will be relatively able to cope with the changes, while small and medium-sized businesses (and really, any domestic business) will be disproportionately affected.

It should go without saying that the fact that in food safety and toy safety alike it is the larger companies rather than the smaller ones that tend to be responsible for the worst crises makes this a self-defeating response indeed: the companies with the greatest intrinsic incentive to do the right thing anyway get run out of business, while those that remain are only barely compliant with the new regulations and have that much less to fear from the efforts of the competition. Hence Rod:

Ironically, the food safety problems that cause such legitimate public concern are caused by large-scale, technology-driven industrial food production and distribution methods – precisely the sort of thing that local, sustainable farmers don’t engage in. Yet they are the ones who will suffer the most from these government attempts to solve a problem caused by bigness and technology by imposing more bigness and technology.

The problem, though, is that the food safety scares of the past few years have given us every reason to think that those industrial producers simply aren’t growing and distributing food that is sufficiently clean and safe: something needs to be done, goes the standard response, and the only option available to us is this one. If saving a few small farms means allowing our food system to be overrun by bacteria-infested and otherwise potentially harmful meat and tomatoes, then that’s a choice that not many of us are willing to make.

Rod tries, though, to argue that there’s room for a third way:

We do need better food safety regulation of major producers, but local family farms and artisans shouldn’t pay for sins they didn’t commit. Consumers need to have the small-farm alternative – and if they are going to preserve it, they have to contact federal and state legislators now.

What Rod wants, then, is a system that puts stringent regulations in place on the larger producers while granting exemptions for smaller farmers who can’t reasonably be expected to meet them. But granting that this sort of route is clearly possible in principle, is it politically feasible? In my Doublethink piece on raw milk, the dynamic I detected in the battle over regulation in California was essentially the same one that Mark found in his work on the CPSIA controversy: in stark contrast to the naive image of anti-regulatory businessmen squared off against the would-be food nannies in government, the actual relationship between business and government was much more, well, symbiotic than that; it was the corporations that were pushing for the new regulations, and it was hard not to think that they were doing so at least partly because they were cognizant of the effects that such regulation would have on the competition. “Regulation”, as Tim Carney put it to me in a quotation from that article, “always helps the big guys by creating barriers to entry, but there’s a more important dynamic here: When you give the government power, you give the lobbyists power. It also works the other way: When only a handful of businesses dominate an industry, bureaucrats and politicians find it easier to control that industry.”

Which brings me to Tim’s very important column:

The lineup of backers and opponents of these [new food safety] bills has surprised some observers, but it shouldn’t. Big food processors—including the makers of some recently recalled foods—support the legislation, while leading advocates of local produce, organic food, and farmers markets are vocally resisting the measures.

Science and environment writer Steve Nash in The New Republic Monday praised Durbin’s bill as a “good idea,” and expressed surprise that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, “who many decried as corporate, conventional, and something of a shill for Big-Ag” would come out for greater federal regulation, too.

But also supporting the Durbin bill, the DeLauro bill, or both, are Kraft Foods, General Mills, Kellogs, Pepsico (maker of Frito-Lay brand snacks), the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and the National Restaurant Associati
on.

[…] Galen Reser, vice president for government affairs at Pepsico, which processes snack food under its Frito-Lay brand, told this columnist “I think the industry is pretty comfortable with” the regulatory burden of Durbin’s bill, maintaining there are no significant “unnecessary costs.”

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

And ‘round and ‘round it goes.

So look: either you support a new regulatory regime that is equally strict across the board and so will lay undue burdens on smaller producers, or you push for exemptions and likely lose the support of the big corporations that currently think the proposed regulations are just dandy. You’re damned either way, and to be perfectly honest I don’t know where I come down. I’d love it, of course, if someone could make the case that the food safety scares of recent years haven’t been so serious after all; short of that, however, it’s hard even for a near-libertarian like me not think that the implementation of even an unfairly strict set of regulations would be better than the reachable alternatives. Sadly, the possible world where we get a menu of choices less horrid than these ones is quite a long way away, and involves a political system with a very different character than ours.