I like their broad philosophy:

“We’ve been running deficits for years, and we’ve been saying we’re doing it to win the Cold War or to fight terrorism and fight poverty,” says Michael Towns, 33, a linguist from Tallahassee who was among those surveyed. “I think our Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves because they never would conceive that we would do this.”

I just don’t think the movement merits serious examination until it fleshes out what it’s actually for.

The absurdity of “I’m going to dismiss you because you’re not for anything” should be self-evident: successfully opposing bad things is good, and it’s good whether or not you do other good things above and beyond successfully opposing those bad things. But for some reason the “what are you for” question sounds good to a lot of people, so let’s take this slow.

First, it’s worth pointing out one small but actually pretty important accomplishment of analytic philosophy: encouraging people to think in terms of propositions, that is to particular claims about the world that are either true or false. When we think in these terms, we naturally avoid vague and often unmanageable questions like “how do we solve the problem of perception?” and can focus on questions like “is such-and-such claim true?” On those kind of questions, there are only two possible answers, yes and no, and it’s obviously silly for proponents of the “yes” to complain “oh, the proponents of the ‘no,’ are just being negative!” This is especially true, because questions can always be rephrased to switch the “yes” and the “no” positions–if necessary, this can be done by making the question “is such-and-such claim false?” but English often provides better resources for doing this, as in the couplet “should we allow deficit spending to continue?” / “should we balance the budget?”

If you think there’s any value in getting questions right, it should also be obvious that if the “no” is right on some point, they can at least claim to have that advantage over the “yes” even if they don’t have much else to contribute. If you know very little about the world but realize fairies don’t exist, you are better off than someone who is both ignorant and a believer in fairies. It is always a stupid retort to say “Perhaps we’re wrong to think the emperor is wearing clothes, but telling us we’re wrong isn’t going to do you any good unless you have something you’re for, now, is it?”

In principle, the “what are you for?” question might make sense in cases where the question is what to do, and it’s obvious that doing nothing is not an option. In a situation like that, a critic might successfully point out a dozen problems with a proposed solution, and yet the solution could remain the best because the critic has proposed no other. In debates about government policy, though, this is not typically the situation we face. There are a few areas where society could not function without the government, but public policy fights tend to happen over issues where government inaction would not be a catastrophe. This is especially true when people talk about “fixing” economic problems. Economic prosperity is something that happens on its own without specific government attempts to create it, and if the government never did anything every again specifically designed to boost the economy, the U.S. economy would not therefore collapse. This means doing nothing clearly is an option, and it makes no sense for defenders of a particular intervention in the economy to complain about lack of alternatives.

After all that, I feel like I still must be missing something here. There has to be some better way to interpret a line as popular as “what are you for?,” or at the very least there has to be a satisfying Hansonian explanation for why people like it. Does anyone have any insight into this?

On the other hand, it’s become expected that if you like the health care reform, then you ought to be the sort of person who can at least smile and nod when someone talks about how capitalism is evil. This is a mindset I can sort of understand; I used to sympathize with it. Then I learned about basic economics, and entered high school shortly thereafter. (This does not stop me from regularly telling Ayn Rand’s fans that I find her unreadable).

In the case of PZ’s post, the weirdest part is this paragraph:

The alternative to regulation of basic services by the government is privatizing them and giving more power to corporations — whose goal is to increase profits. Personally, I like to see the Invisible Hand shackled and restricted to doing useful work, rather than picking pockets.

The first bit is gibberish: privatization isn’t a an alternative to regulation, because private enterprise can be regulated. Does PZ want “basic services” to be private but regulated, or does he want them to be government run? I suspect he means the latter but wants to give the impression he’s only talking about the former, hence the incoherence.

Then we get an announcement that corporations are trying to make money, as if this is supposed to surprise us and make us realize that corporations are evil. This is of course nonsense. We all benefit constantly from people trying to make a buck off of us: I got up this morning (in a room in a house I’m renting from a guy who wants my money) and put on clothes (that I bought at capitalist clothing stores that were trying to make a buck) and read a book (bought from the corporation Amazon.com and written by a guy trying to make money) and then went down stairs to eat my lunch (food purchased at a grocery store trying to make a buck) and am now typing this blog post on my laptop (made by the capitalist Toshiba corporation). Tonight I plan on going out to a bar (whose owner is trying to make a buck of people like me) and perhaps meet a girl who will ask me how I keep my hair in such good condition, which will prompt me to say “with the cheapest stuff I can find” (cheapest, because some corporation wants me to give my money to them rather than to the guys with the next-most-expensive brand).

Also contra PZ, I’ve never heard of corporations organizing teams of pickpockets. Or burglars for that matter. Bad behavior by capitalists tends to top out at giving consumers something not as advertised, but I doubt PZ is trying to make an anti-anarchist point about the importance of having government for fraud protection. He pays lip service to Adam Smith, but doesn’t seem to get that in non-fraudulent free market exchanges, what ensures that some good comes out of the exchange is not shackles, but the fact that people can pass on deals that they don’t believe they will benefit from. They can even walk away from deals that would benefit them, if they think they could get a better deal elsewhere (this is much of the reason why Amazon.com, the sale I got my laptop at, and cheap generic hair products all exist).

Sure, it’s possible to get carried away in marketing hype, or impulse buy crap you don’t need. But the number of times that’s happened to me is far smaller than the number of times my life has been made easier because someone was trying to make money providing the most attractive product at the best price. Broader experience shows that this system tends to bring cheap and readily available goods, while command economies suffer from chronic shortages.

The essence of the weirdness of PZ’s post is that he both demonizes private industry while avoiding saying the government should take over even “basic services,” that he both implies profit is evil and goes through the motions of endorsing the “invisible hand.” This is the paradox of the rhetoric about capitalism that’s fashionable in self-identified “liberal” circles: it tends to amount to simultaneous insistence that capitalism is evil and that the speaker understands the merits of capitalism. This is never done Churchhill-esque ironic way.

So, underneath all the rhetoric, how many of the people spouting it really think socialism is a good idea?

Earlier in the post you said of the global warming debate that you “haven’t taken the time to study it”. Later in the post you say that “If the issue is truly important enough, the experts will sort that out themselves”. But unless you want to do your own armchair climate science, which I think would be a real mistake, the practical questions become who we identify as the experts, and what process do we require for them to “sort it out”.

When it comes to specific technical questions, the experts that I identify are those who have spent years studying the relevant topic areas at recognized universities and research centers, have published peer-reviewed technical articles, and can point to specific scientific results. The narrow process that I support for “sorting it out” is the scientific method, requiring replicated research, peer-review, falsification testing of claims and so forth. The broader process that sits around this must include some NRC-like entity, as I described in my prior post, that has leading scientific experts from other fields to do another layer of review to minimize groupthink and self-dealing. This method, like all others, is imperfect and takes time to work, but is superior to any practical alternative, and has worked out pretty well for America and the Western world across many, many such questions for a long time.

[snip]

If we end up opposing many of the same policies, why, then, don’t I just quiet down? There are two ways to answer that.

The first is that we all have our jobs to do. The job of a writer is to do his best to write things that he believes to be correct. This has been my motivation (as far as it is possible to know my own mind) in writing what I have on the topic.

There is one definite claim that seems to drive Edis’ posts, though, stated in the first post:

So, from the perspective of someone trying to keep public order, or someone devising a political philosophy that can smooth interactions between different groups, secular liberalism is hardly the only option. Keeping the peace requires that communities defined by religion and ethnicity have tolerably equal access to resources—not just economic opportunity but also public respect and the means to cultural reproduction. In this context, protection from insult becomes particularly important: whether others can get away with publicly disrespecting a group is an accurate, easily available public signal of the status of a group.

In spite of Edis’ later clarification, the anti-free speech implications of this are obvious, and in spite of Blackford’s attempt to talk Edis down from this kind of thinking by saying it “detracts from what he actually wants to discuss,” it seems fairly central to Edis’ position (indeed, it’s the one part I have a clear grasp on).

Unfortunately, Edis’ statement here seems just obviously false. Yes, humans are naturally status-obsessed and may resort to violence to protect their status or in retaliation for perceived attacks on their status, and yes, part of the motivation for some of the violence done in the name of religion may be the erosion of certain cultural values. But it’s just silly to say that maintaining public order is impossible unless all communities are respected and can keep their culture going. Not every low status individual or group becomes violent. Part of what it means to have law and order is convincing people not to automatically resort to violence over insults, and when they do, the reasonable response is to try to minimize the harm done and punish the perpetrators to discourage others from imitating them in the future. The “cultural replication” stuff is even sillier, since cultures change all the time without breakdowns in public order.

Some of the consequences Edis draws from this aren’t crazy; he gives an example of a Muslim neighborhood banning the sale of alcohol within it. I personally think that allowing such local vice-bans would make small towns less pleasant places to live and amplify the tendency of people who don’t fit in in small towns to move to big cities. But the effects wouldn’t be terrible. On the other hand, at one point he does take it in a really pernicious direction: Ophelia Benson suggests the example of a teenage girl being forced into a marriage she doesn’t want as a potential bad consequence of “community autonomy.” Edis’ reply is just to say that “You’re again arguing as if liberal, individualist assumptions are shared by everybody in the broader political debate”–which is, I’m sorry, idiotic. Her point wasn’t that everyone agrees that forced marriages are bad, her point was that they are bad. Just because some people disagree doesn’t mean we have to seriously consider adjusting our political order to accommodate them. Edis is displaying a very deep confusion that validates the worst stereotypes of multiculturalism, and he should be embarrassed to be doing so.

In other news, a member of Obama’s administration is being attacked as an “anti-Catholic biggot.” Because he criticized the Pope over the Pope’s claim that condoms spread AIDS, and criticized the Knights of Columbus for supporting Prop 8. The only question I have about this story is why anybody thinks throwing out the word “bigot” is a good response to criticisms of things Catholics do. My best guess is that for many years in this country, the loudest critics of the Catholic Church were Jack Chick-style whackjobs who thought the Catholic Church was a Satanic conspiracy. But the reason Jack Chick is crazy is that Satan doesn’t exist, not that the Catholic Church is perfect.

Plenty of people were upset when the Bush administration declared it had the power to arrest people arbitrarily, but now the Obama administration says it can kill people arbitrarily. The idea that the government can’t do that is one of those things that’s supposed to keep America from turning into a Stalin-style police state if the wrong people get elected. It’s nice to see a few semi-prominent people complaining about this, but if general outrage doesn’t develop eventually, I’ll be calling hypocrisy on the liberals who were freaked out by the things Bush did. Remember guys, in three years time it may be President Palin wielding this power. (Though Republicans also deserve our contempt for pushing absurd criticisms of Obama while not pouncing on this).

I strongly recommend reading Will Wilkinson, Timothy Lee, Matt Welch, and most of all Glen Greenwald on this issue (hat tip on Greenwald goes to Andrew Sullivan). A number of people have pointed out that liberals don’t actually want to deny freedom of speech to groups–we want the ACLU to be able to engage in advocacy on important issues. But Greenwald makes a good case that the “money isn’t speech” argument is even worse:

Anyone who believes that would have to say that there’s no First Amendment problem with any law that restricts the spending of money for political purposes, such as:

“It shall be illegal for anyone to spend money to criticize laws enacted by the Congress; all citizens shall still be free to express their views on such laws, provided no money is spent;” or

“It shall be illegal for anyone to spend money advocating Constitutional rights for accused terrorists; all citizens shall still be free to express their views on such matters, provided no money is spent”; or

“It shall be illegal for anyone to spend money promoting a candidate not registered with either the Democratic or Republican Party; all citizens shall still be free to advocate for such candidates, provided no money is spent.”

Robin Hanson has proposed a status-based explanation which makes it sound like liberals oppose the Supreme Court’s decision because they think they’re too cool to hang out with corporate lawyers. In this case, though, I disagree with Robin–I think this is an example of the much uglier human tendency towards tribalism, towards believing that members of the out-group don’t deserve any moral consideration at all. You see this all the time in right-wing attacks on free speech; it’s distressing to see it coming from liberals. This makes me think that the right to free-speech is even more fragile than I realized.

However, I don’t agree with Adam Lee’s comment that Wilders is a hypocrite, and that the proposals he defends are just as wrong as the decision to prosecute him. To my knowledge, Wilders has never said anything as nasty as what’s found in the worst part of the Qur’an. If–like many European lawmakers–you accept that books like Mein Kampf should be banned, it’s hard to explain why the same doesn’t go for the Qur’an. On the other hand, Wilders’ prosecution is a good example of why letting the government regulate what people are allowed to say is a bad idea–not because it is necessarily unjustified in all circumstances, but because that power invariably ends up in the hands of fools.