The Thinker

A “mind map” is approximately synonymous with a “concept map.” In a nutshell, it’s a visual representation for your thoughts and ideas. More formally, a mind map (and in particular, a concept map) is a diagram that shows concepts, entities, or ideas, and the relationships between them. Many have claimed that mind maps provide a superior way for note taking and learning than conventional text notes. Mind maps are also very useful for brainstorming and numerous other tasks. The power of a mind map or concept map is that it much more closely parallels the way we think and internally organize information than paragraphs of text. In fact, concept maps are often used by educators in planning curricula, to ensure that concepts are taught in the correct order.

Lifehack has posted this review of 11 free “mind mapping” applications. Wikipedia has another list of mind mapping software here.

Tags: Creativity, Decision Analysis, Problem Solving, Critical Thinking // Add Comment »

Okay, so technically this one isn’t really a cognitive bias; it’s a logical fallacy. But it’s related to the cognitive bias of wishful thinking, and I say that’s close enough, and it’s my blog.

The appeal to consequences fallacy (known formally as  argumentum ad consequentiam) is an argument that something must be true or false based on the desirability of the consequences of it being true or false. For example, if you choose to reject the theory of evolution as false because its truth would call certain of your religious beliefs into question, you are guilty of the appeal to consequences fallacy.

Via this post from Skeptico (which is in my blogroll) comes another great — and very recent — example of this fallacy. It seems that Indiana Rep. Mark Souder stated in an interview that his highlight of the year was appearing in the movie Expelled:

I personally believe that there is no issue more important to our society than intelligent design. I believe that if there wasn’t a purpose in designing you — regardless of who you view the designer as being — then, from my perspective, you can’t be fallen from that design. If you can’t be fallen from that design, there’s no point to evangelism.

As Skeptico correctly points out, Souder commits the appeal to consequences fallacy by virtue of believing in intelligent design because its falsehood would (in his mind) render evangelism as pointless, an outcome he finds unpalatable.

This would seem to be the fallacy most commonly committed by creationists. For creationism to be false is dangerous to them, because it calls into question the veracity of the rest of the Bible (at least in their minds). Consequently, creationism must be defended. And even those creationists who employ scientific arguments (to the extent that such can be done) against evolution have ultimately built their “critical thinking” arguments on a faith-based assertion. And mixing faith and critical thinking is usually — if not always — a bad idea. As I said in this post,“Whenever you are unwilling to critically examine one of your beliefs (whether faith-based or not), you CANNOT, by definition, be engaged in critical thinking.”

Tags: Creationism, Religion, Critical Thinking // 3 Comments »

The neglect of probability bias is the tendency to ignore probabilities when making decisions involving uncertain outcomes.

Wikipedia provides a good example of this bias:

“Susan and Jennifer are arguing about whether they should wear seat belts when they ride in a car. Susan says that you should. Jennifer says you shouldn’t. . . . Jennifer says that she heard of an accident where a car fell into a lake and a woman was kept from getting out in time because of wearing her seat belt, and another accident where a seat belt kept someone from getting out of the car in time when there was a fire.”

Jennifer is guilty of the neglect of probability bias because she has made her decision to not wear a seat belt based on anecdotal evidence, rather than considering the probability of being saved by the seat belt versus the probability of being hurt by the seat belt.

Anecdotal evidence plays a strong role in this particular example, and is itself an example of the “person who” fallacy (as in, “I know a person who…”), a.k.a. the hasty generalization.

Tags: Decision Analysis, Critical Thinking // Add Comment »

I feel a fisking coming on. And the target of my fisking is this article on TruthDig (a “progressive online magazine”) by Marie Cocco, who claims that “unions aren’t the problem.”

Here goes.

As Congress and the White House lurch toward possible approval of a loan package for the crippled auto industry, we are undoubtedly in store for more union-bashing. Note well that we did not hear any such tirades when vastly larger sums of taxpayer money—with fewer strings attached—were lavished upon the banks and financial industry wizards who created the credit crisis.

Um, if you did not hear any tirades about the $750B financial bailout, it must have been because you had your fingers in your ears going, “NA-NA-NA-NA-I-CAN’T-HEAR-YOU.” There was a LARGE outcry. I spoke out harshly against it myself, here and here and here and here.

But regarding union bashing… I’ll save mine for after the fisking.

And to blame the credit crisis on “the banks and financial industry wizards” is, at best, only partially correct, and at worst, indicative of a lack of understanding of the factors that caused this crisis.

Put aside for a moment the misinformation and outright untruths that characterize conservative attacks on the autoworkers’ unions. No one should be allowed to cast blame on workers who want nothing more than to maintain a middle-class life.

“No one should be allowed to cast blame?” Sorry, disagree. This is still America, and we still have free speech, and people should be allowed to cast blame where they want, even if they are wrong. Hell, Marie cast blame herself in her opening paragraph! (And she was wrong!)

Unions aren’t the problem. They are the solution.

Creating a viable middle class has been the goal of organized labor since labor first became organized. And it is this goal that was abandoned outright by American political and business leaders as they did all they could over the past three decades to encourage a relentless race to the bottom in wages and benefits.

I’m pretty sure that the original goal of organized labor was to protest against poor working conditions and the exploitation of workers. To the extent that this may have also helped to expand the middle class was an unintended side effect. So this goal was not “abandoned” by “American political and business leaders” because it was never a goal in the first place. And as far as them doing all they could “to encourage a relentless race to the bottom in wages and benefits,” this statement is just an unsubstantiated assertion that smacks of class warfare.

Strip away the financial mumbo jumbo and the credit crisis comes down to this: For decades, as wages and benefits for working and middle-class people stagnated or fell, the only way for them to purchase the goods that make the economy hum was through credit. This was true whether the item purchased was a home, a car—or all the unnecessary gizmos that retailers have been more than happy to tell consumers were the must-haves of the day. Until we understand that we are in the midst of two crises—one the short-term credit crisis and one the longer-term crisis in the failure to pay workers what they need to sustain themselves—we are doomed to repeat this horror.

The premise “For decades, as wages and benefits for working and middle-class people stagnated or fell” is patently false. The consequent — “the only way for them to purchase the goods… was through credit” — is therefore unsupported. She is trying to blame the current credit crisis on declining wages and benefits here, which is really quite sad, particularly because she already blamed it in her opening paragraph on banks and financial wizards. She can’t even make up her mind within her own article.

“If you are a man with only a high school education … your chances of making a wage or salary as good as what your father was making in the late 1970s are not good,” says Gary Gerstle, a Vanderbilt University historian. “We are looking at a deterioration in their life opportunities and living standards, at the same time that an enormous amount of wealth has accumulated at the top of the income ladder.”

This is an unsubstantiated assertion. It is also a false one; wage statistics have shown growths, not declines, in income. The statement also ignores income mobility. See, e.g., here and here.

It is true that some individuals were reckless in taking on debt. But it is equally valid that American workers simply haven’t been paid what it takes for them to spend enough to keep the American economy growing. “The economy needed levels of expenditure and consumption that most Americans literally could not afford,” Gerstle says.

“American workers… haven’t been paid what it takes for them… to keep the American economy growing” is a patently false statement, because the economy has been growing for quite some time. But even if it was a true statement (which it is not), it is not the responsibility of companies to pay workers what it takes to keep the economy growing; it is the responsibility of companies to maximize the value of the company for their shareholders. And the shareholders of companies in the U.S. are predominantly normal middle-class Americans, who own stock through their 401K plans and managed retirement accounts.

What do unions have to do with this? To start with, unionized workers make about $200 more per week than do nonunion workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The great expansion of the American middle class and an unprecedented rise in living standards occurred between the end of World War II and the 1970s—when unions were far more common and powerful than they are today. Beginning in the 1980s, an ideology of deregulation and anti-unionism took hold, with free-market capitalists arguing that no intervention in the markets—including labor’s intervention—was ever beneficial.

The fact that union workers make $200 more per week than nonunion workers is a big part of GM’s problem (and Ford’s, and other companies in other industries). Unionized companies cannot compete very well, in general, with non-union companies. The bottom line is that you don’t get something for nothing. (Or, as Robert A. Heinlein famously put it, TANSTAAFL.) You cannot expect to have the benefit of higher union pay without a commensurate negative consequence to the financial well being of the companies, and by extension to that of their shareholders (who are overwhelmingly members of the middle class themselves).

And to claim that unprecedented rises in living standards and expansion of the middle class is attributable to unions is to make the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. In other words, correlation does not imply causation. There were likely many factors which caused standards of living to rise post-WWII, and it’s not entirely clear that union labor had anything to do with it.

“The promise of deregulation was that this would create so much energy and dynamism at the top that it would all trickle down,” Gerstle says. “Not only would people on Wall Street make all kinds of money, but people on Main Street would find that there would be more dynamism in their lives, more opportunity, more wages.”

I’m not sure what particular deregulation he is talking about, since the author has taken these little quote snippets out of context without providing any of the necessary background.

Well, people on Wall Street did make all kinds of money. People on Main Street got depressed wages, the demise of guaranteed pensions and 401(k)s that crashed with the stock market. They got health insurance that is barely affordable, if they’ve got insurance at all.

Regarding depressed wages, see my earlier statements. Regarding health insurance, that is an entirely separate topic, and has more to do with government subsidies driving up the costs of health care, along with growth in malpractice insurance and numerous other factors that have little or nothing to do directly with Wall Street.

We are engulfed by an economic morass that holds the prospect of being the deepest and broadest downturn of the post-World War II era. It is no coincidence that the percentage of private-sector workers in unions—about 7 percent—is roughly the same as what it was before the Great Depression. Historically, Gerstle says, social movements have needed direct and often unsettling action to capture the public’s imagination and take hold.

“It is no coincidence…” is another occurrence of the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Yes, it is just a coincidence.

This is why we can only hope that events such as the unfolding peaceful occupation of a Chicago window factory by its newly laid-off workers is the start of something much, much bigger.

End of article. Thankfully.

Now for some union bashing.

The National Center for Policy Analysis has the following to say about unions:

While there are no doubt many individual members of labor unions who feel they have benefited from collective bargaining, the overall evidence is overwhelming that labor unions in contemporary America have had harmful aggregate effects on the economy.

• The economic cost of unions (determined by combining lost income and output over the period 1947 to 2000) exceeds $50 trillion, according to estimates by economists Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway.
• Unionization lowers incomes for all, albeit more in the relatively higher income states that on average have higher levels of unionization.
• A state with a 10 percent unionized work force can expect a 0.7 percent increase in its unemployment rate.
• For each four additional workers who become unionized, one less person works.

In the final years of the 1990s, the decline in union density in the private sector has been sharp, adding to the vitality of the economy at the beginning of the new century. As a result, there has been renewed economic growth and a rising proportion of the working age population that actually works.

Source: Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway, “Do Unions Help the Economy? The Economic Effects of Labor Unions Revisited,” Government Union Review, Volume 20, Number 4, December 2002, Public Service Research Foundation.

I should also add that unions serve the purpose of colluding on the price of labor, which should be prohibited in a free market economy.

Tags: Economics, Politics, Critical Thinking // 2 Comments »

This post in Overcoming Bias (which is in my blogroll) identifies and names a new cognitive bias: the hypocrisy-charge bias. Says Overcoming Bias contributor Mike Rappaport:

There is a type of a bias that is so common in political commentary that it deserves a name. An example of this bias is exhibited by Brian Tamanaha over at the Balkinization Blog. Tamanaha notes that many Republicans in 2003 asserted strong arguments against judicial filibusters. But now that the Republicans will only have a minority of the Senate, with a Democratic President, they will have an incentive to engage in judicial filibusters. Tamanaha sarcastically writes, there is “nothing to worry about” because the Republican will no doubt continue their previous position opposing judicial filibusters. Obviously Tamanaha is charging the Republicans with hypocrisy, predicting that they will not conform to their stated principles.

So far there is no bias, just a prediction of hypocrisy. The bias occurs when one realizes that the prediction of inconsistency is equally applicable to the Democrats. If the Republicans choose to filibuster, one could equally expect the Democrats to criticize such filibusters, even though the Democrats defended judicial filibusters in 2003.  So the charge of hypocrisy against the Republicans is equally applicable to the Democrats. Yet, Tamanaha says not a word about the Democrats. He can only see the hypocrisy of his opponents: hence the bias.

Once one identifies this bias – accusing one’s political opponents of inconsistency or hypocracy, but ignoring its equal application to one’s political friends – it seems to pop up everywhere. It is committed by Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and conservatives.

What is going on? Obviously, people are both good at discovering, and bothered by, the inconsistency of their political opponents. They are not so quick to discover their own team’s inconsistencies.

One way to think about this is that commentators who commit the hypocrisy-charge bias are not commenting on political events but are actually engaged in them. When Tamanaha suggests that the Republicans will not follow their stated principles, he is, as a Democrat, attacking Republicans. That his criticism also applies to Democrats does not matter. That is not his point. It is only a observer of political events who would be concerned in this situation with the fact that both parties are likely to change their principles because their interests have changed.

So, is this really a new bias? It could just be a form of the confirmation/disconfirmation bias: accepting uncritically any evidence which confirms your opinion, while ignoring or downplaying the significance of any evidence which contradicts your opinion. Assuming that you believe your own party to be less hypocritical than your opponent’s, then highlighting the hypocrisy of your own political adversaries while ignoring the hypocrisy among your own party would certainly seem to fit the confirmation/disconfirmation bias. But as commenters to the Overcoming Bias post have pointed out, this is really just a part of the political game and not necessarily a bias per se — any more than a basketball coach is biased for uncritically accepting a bad referee call in his team’s favor while protesting loudly against bad calls to his team’s detriment.

I suppose it’s really only a bias (whether the confirmation/disconfirmation bias or a new but related hypocrisy-charge bias) if you truly are of the opinion that your side is less hypocritical. I suspect this applies in many issues of today — and on both sides of the issue, for that matter. I’ll give one example: the global warming debate. Many (if not most?) of the “deniers” believe the alarmists to be hypocritical because they are forecasting doom while their grant renewals depend on a degree of alarmism about global warming. Conversely many (if not most?) of the alarmists believe the deniers to be either in the pockets of big oil companies or to be otherwise biased because of their loyalties to unfettered capitalism.

Tags: Politics, Global Warming, Critical Thinking // Add Comment »

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer himself, has said before that “people die from a lack of critical thinking.” Or words to that effect. The Skeptologists pilot trailer has apparently been pulled so I can’t find the exact quote. Anyway, I’ve always loved that line because it sums up very succinctly the dangers of not thinking critically.

Recently (via Bad Astronomy again, as it turns out) I learned of a web site that really brings this idea home. It’s called “Whats The Harm?“.

What’s The Harm? offers a multitude (over 225,000) of real-world examples that illustrate how people have been injured and even killed due to a lack of critical thinking. The intent is to call attention to the kinds of misinformation that has led to harm. The site is nicely organized by the major topic areas of Medical, Supernatural & Paranormal, Religion, Fears, Pseudoscience, Misinformation, and Miscellaneous, with multiple sub-topics under each. It’s a good resource for critical thinking advocates and woo-fighting skeptics, and I’ve added it to my blogroll.

Tags: Critical Thinking // 2 Comments »

Warren Meyer, of Coyote Blog fame, has opined that the federal government should NOT bail out GM. And recently he has caught quite a bit of flack for his position.

Says Warren, regarding a nasty spate of emails he’s received as of late:

You are welcome to write me about how I suck because your job at GM (or retirement, or health care, or all of the above) is important to you if that helps you psychologically to manage a terrible and stressful time. But, to cause me to back off my opinion about GM and the bailout, you need to tell me why your job is more important than someone else’s job. Because, unlike private enterprise, the government does not create wealth, but can only move it around (with a leaky bucket, at that). GM has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, so having the government invest money to save your job will likely cost >1 job somewhere else. Just because we don’t, and may never know, who that specific person is does not make this an ethical choice.

I could nit-pick at some of Warren’s assertions in this paragraph — for instance, his claim that the government does not create wealth. I would certainly stipulate it is a rare event, especially in comparison to wealth created by private enterprise, but it does happen once in a while. The Apollo program, for example, has been estimated by multiple independent studies to have paid for itself several times over, in federal tax revenues alone. (Okay, so I had to go back to the late 60’s/early 70’s for an example. Hey, I said it was a rare event!)

But the real force of Warren’s paragraph — the part that I do strongly agree with — is that saving jobs at GM by means of a huge bailout will cost jobs elsewhere. It’s hard to find fault with this assertion. If one reallocates billions of dollars to shore up GM , by necessity those billions are not being spent in other segments of the economy, on the kinds of things that keep people productively employed. Sure, the effect will be spread thin over the entire economy — a fast food worker let go here, a factory worker laid off there, perhaps an executive downsized over there — but the net result is that people are displaced from the workforce because Congress decided to vector a metric buttload of the taxpayer’s money to GM.

Tags: Economics, Politics, Critical Thinking // 2 Comments »

Skepticism is not exactly the same thing as critical thinking, and a skeptic isn’t exactly the same thing as a critical thinker.

Bear with me and I’ll explain.

First, I should note that I am using the terms “critical thinker” and “critical thinking” as I’ve used them before here on The Thinker. Critical thinking, as I defined in this post, is the set of practices and attitudes intended to get us as close as possible to the truth. In a practical sense (since the “truth” is typically unknowable), the goal of critical thinking is to arrive at the most defensible and justifiable opinions on particular issues under examination. In this post I provided a more detailed model of critical thinking and identified its components, including a set of cognitive skills (analysis, inference, logic, etc.), characteristic habits (intellectual humility, intellectual empathy, etc.), and commitments (i.e., to the truth rather than to the defense of one’s opinion or the glorification of one’s ego).

Second, by “skeptic”, I am referring to specific people such as members of the Skeptic’s Society. You can read their Skeptical Manifesto (excerpted from a book by the society’s director, Michael Shermer) for a rather lengthy and detailed description of how they would define skepticism, or you can go here for a more gentle introduction. These descriptions would apply for the most part to other self-described “skeptical” groups as well. In a nutshell, skepticism, as embodied by various skeptical groups, is the application of rational thinking and the scientific method to investigate controversial claims and ideas.

So skepticism is more than just critical thinking, and critical thinking is more than just skepticism. Although there is certainly a large overlap between them, I see two fundamental differences:

1. Skepticism is an organized movement; critical thinking is not.
2. Skepticism is focused on debunking unlikely claims such as conspiracy theories and the paranormal, whereas critical thinking is and should be more broadly applied to just about anything and everything.

It is safe to say that the overwhelming majority of skeptics are, by necessity, critical thinkers. And it’s also safe to say that a good critical thinker is, by nature, skeptical of unsubstantiated claims, just as a “skeptic” is. But the two points above illustrate the subtle but important differences.

Which leads to an interesting question. Should the skeptical movement be more broad than just debunking paranormal and pseudoscientific claims? Skeptics could, if they chose, be evangelists for critical thinking in general rather than just their historically more narrow focus.

In this post on Skeptic’s Play, Miller mentions a panel at the last Dragon*Con entitled “The Future of Skepticism,” prompted by Daniel Loxton’s essay “Where do we go from here.” Loxton thinks that skepticism should continue doing what it has been doing — debunking the woo — and he notes that particular brands of woo come into and out of favor over time. (Homeopathy, for example, has emerged recently in comparison to other forms of bunk.)

As far as skepticism/activism and critical thinking goes, Miller has this to say:

The panel also made me think about skepticism as a label. Personally, I don’t really care if people call themselves skeptics, or if they consider themselves part of the skeptical movement. Yes, we need activists, but we don’t need everyone to be an activist. And “skepticism” is just a word. I care that people realize that critical thinking is a vital tool for the modern age. I care that people recognize the importance of science, the importance of discerning truth from non-truth. The end-game of skepticism is not a world where everyone is a skeptic. There is no end-game at all, in fact. We just need to promote critical thinking as best we can, generation by generation. By its very nature, critical thinking is not something we simply accept and be done with. To think critically is a forever changing, nontrivial task.

So it would seem that I’m not the only [skeptic/critical thinker] pondering these types of issues. Miller seems to be leaning towards promotion of critical thinking as the answer to “where do we go from here,” although in an earlier post he agreed with Loxton’s opinion that skepticism should stick to its basic goal of debunking.

Just to be explicit, let me state that I consider myself to be first and foremost a critical thinker, and secondarily a “skeptic.” There are thousands of people involved in the skeptical movement who are already doing a pretty good job of debunking the various conspiracy theories, paranormal garbage, and pseusoscientific claims that crop up all the time. But there doesn’t seem to be anyone else doing what I’m trying to do: be an activist/evangelist for critical thinking in its more broad sense, as applied to anything and everything. In particular, as I said in the About page for this blog, there are some very important reasons for developing good critical thinking skills:

• Creative and critical thinking skills are fundamental success factors in almost every walk of life, including school, career, and everyday decision making.
• Critical thinking and creative approaches are required to cope with the increasingly complex problems we face in an increasingly complex world.
• Without good critical thinking skills, the public’s opinions on important issues are formed for them by others — by the media, by popularity and peer pressure, and by authority figures such as professors, politicians, and “the experts”. Critical thinking can enable everyday people to arm themselves against the persuasive powers of pundits, demagogues, and other propaganda artists.

The third of these reasons is in my opinion the most important, and consequently, has tended to be my primary focus here on The Thinker. But looking back on my posting history, I can see where this motivation has led me to get somewhat more political than I’ve intended to. It’s difficult to expose political demagoguery and propaganda without also exposing one’s own political views somewhat, even though I recognize that valid critical thinking can lead others to quite different political views. So if the skeptical movement as a whole took on a more broader push for critical thinking as I have done, they might get mired down in political debates and dilute their ability to combat the woo-woo.

If we instead regard skepticism as critical thinking applied to the specific domain of issues having to do with fantastical/unlikely claims (paranormal, pseudoscientific, and the like), then perhaps there are or should be some other related “-ism’s” that apply critical thinking to other domains. Maybe there should be an “-ism” that applies critical thinking to dazzling political oratory, propaganda, and demagoguery. Something like FactCheck.org writ large.

Thoughts/comments? Am I on the right track here? C’mon all you RSS feed receivers, click on the link and comment for once! I know you’re out there!

ADDENDUM: Steven Novella recently posted on SkepticBlog about the name “skeptic” (hat tip to Skeptic’s Play for the link). Dr. Novella defines a skeptic as follows:

A skeptic is one who prefers beliefs and conclusions that are reliable and valid to ones that are comforting or convenient, and therefore rigorously and openly applies the methods of science and reason to all empirical claims, especially their own. A skeptic provisionally proportions acceptance of any claim to valid logic and a fair and thorough assessment of available evidence, and studies the pitfalls of human reason and the mechanisms of deception so as to avoid being deceived by others or themselves. Skepticism values method over any particular conclusion.

This definition is strikingly similar to my definition/model of critical thinking. In the rest of his post, Dr. Novella refers to skepticism as a “movement” and refers to skeptics as “activists.” Consequently I think we would be in agreement that skepticism is critical thinking applied within the context of an activist movement focused on debunking nonsense and educating the public.

Tags: Politics, Critical Thinking // 2 Comments »

Via Newsweek comes this editorial by George Will, who says it was never the founding fathers’ intention that the president be chosen in the manner used today.

Says Will:

Under their plan, the nomination of candidates and the election of the president were to occur simultaneously. Electors [referring here to the electoral college] meeting in their respective states, in numbers equal to their states’ senators and representatives, would vote for two people for president. The electors’ winnowing of aspirants was the nomination process. When the votes were opened in the U.S. House of Representatives, the candidate with a majority would become president, the runner-up would become vice president. If no person achieved a majority of electoral votes, the House would pick from among the top five vote getters. Note well: The selection of presidential nominees was to be controlled by the Constitution.

In other words, it was the founders’ intent that the electoral college would nominate candidates and Congress would then select a president and a vice president from those candidates.

Will continues:

The Founders’ intent, Ceaser writes, was to prevent the selection of a president from being determined by the “popular arts” of campaigning, such as rhetoric. The Founders, Ceaser says, “were deeply fearful of leaders deploying popular oratory as the means of winning distinction.” That deployment would invite demagoguery, which subverts moderation. “Brilliant appearances,” wrote John Jay in The Federalist Papers 64, “… sometimes mislead as well as dazzle.” By telling members of the political class how not to get considered for the presidency, the Founders hoped to (in Ceaser’s words) “make virtue the ally of interest” and shape the behavior of that class.

Since the early days of our nation, the electoral college system has evolved through six different formats, ending with the current presidential selection process. And with this current process, wherein each state’s electoral votes all go to the candidate winning that state’s popular vote, the Founders’ fears have been realized.

May the best demagogue win. (Yeah, I know, he already did.)

Tags: Politics, Critical Thinking // 6 Comments »

In this post I talked about the lead essay for this month’s topic on Cato Unbound (which is in my blogroll). In that essay, Roderick Long (bio here) takes on the question of whether it is fair for libertarians to be characterized as corporate shills and big-business apologists.

Now the first reaction essay has been posted, titled Politics Compromises the Libertarian Project, wherein Matthew Yglesias (bio here) makes the claim stated in the essay’s title.

From his essay:

Thinkers affiliated with the libertarian movement have had many smart things to say on individual topics, but the overall concept of a state apparatus that simply sits on the sideline watching the free market roll along is impossibly utopian. People are going to try to manipulate the state to advance their own ends

…

What there aren’t are places where politics just somehow doesn’t happen. The libertarian utopia is no more realistic than the socialist utopia of a perfectly informed and perfectly benevolent central planner.

As long as there is power to be manipulated, people will try to manipulate it to their advantage, whether those people are politicians, or corporate CEO’s, or any particular special interest group. This is just human nature. But it does not logically follow that the notion of a government that doesn’t interfere in free markets is “impossibly utopian.” We did at one time have something closely approaching the libertarian ideal in this country. Our founding fathers, recognizing human nature for what it is, tried to provide us a limited government to protect us insofar as is possible from abuses of power. It may be politically difficult to return to such a state of affairs, but it’s unfair to characterize it as an unobtainable utopia. In contrast, the socialist utopia has been shown repeatedly throughout human history to fail. It has NEVER worked. Not once. If you think I’m wrong, please post your counterexample in the comments and we’ll discuss.

Part of the problem — and one that Yglesias fails to credit libertarians for recognizing and speaking out strongly against — is that the size and scope of government have grown to the point where the dysfunctional relationship between government and the corporate world is possible in the first place. If not for the unconstitutional powers the federal government has taken on, increasingly, over the past 100+ years, lobbying the government for favors and making backroom deals with politicians wouldn’t be such attractive options. The problem isn’t the desire to manipulate power; the problem is the accumulation of power that even makes this possible. And even with the powers the government has taken on, it may still be feasible (albeit politically inexpedient) to erect a “wall of separation” between state and industry, like that which exists between state and religion.

…the larger problem is that libertarianism, even at its very best, tends to suffer from an impoverished set of ideas about how corporate domination of the public policy space might be prevented. The political left has, by contrast, the tradition of community organizing, a set of public interest advocacy organizations, allies in the trade union movement, efforts to improve the quality and independence of the civil service, and various notions about changing the methods by which campaigns are financed in the United States. This is hardly a perfect toolkit, and it can be enhanced in some ways by drawing on libertarian insights, but it’s something. And libertarians tend to be either indifferent or hostile to it, campaigning against public financing, strong labor unions, and the civil service.

In practice, libertarianism seems to have little to say about how to bring about political change except to work hand-in-hand with business lobbies when the interests of business and free markets are aligned, or else when business interests are masquerading as libertarianism.

Yglesias offers some fair criticisms here. The libertarians can preach against the evils of government growth and market interference, but some practical ideas to reverse the situation would be nice too. But he also seems to be implying that the political left’s idea, by contrast with the libertarians’, are not “impoverished,” an assertion with which most libertarians would disagree (as he correctly states). Trade unions, for example, create a monopoly on labor that distorts the way labor prices would otherwise be set. Look no further than how the Big Three automakers are faring these days for a good example of why this is destructive. Why is it okay for labor to form a monopoly but not producers? Answer: In a true free market, it is wrong for EITHER to form a monopoly. But in our current culture, with a big steaming pile of government power just waiting to be bartered for votes, it’s all too easy for the left to cater to the large voting block represented by the unions, in the guise of protecting workers from exploitative corporations. (Just like it’s too easy for those on the right to cater to corporatist interests.) These types of liberal ideas are every bit as hindering to a true free market as the dysfunctional corporatism that Yglesias would have liberals and libertarians join forces to combat.

In short, Yglesias’ essay takes libertarians to task for their lack of good ideas, and fails to take liberals to task for their abundance of bad ones.

Tags: Economics, Politics, Critical Thinking // 1 Comment »