Libertarianism

Live Long or Live Well

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Over at Hit and Run, Jacob Sullum skewers William F. Buckly for comparing people who refuse to support smoking bans to those who provide Zyklon-B to Nazi Death camps Sullum observes:

There’s no need to speculate about the reasons for Buckley’s newfound anti-tobacco faith. He himself ascribes it to his wife’s recent death (“technically from an infection, but manifestly, at least in part, from a body weakened by 60 years of nonstop smoking”) and his own emphysema, caused by “the idiocy of cigars inhaled.”

So, she died at the age of what, 80+, after receiving the benefits and pleasures of 60 freaking years of smoking? I am reminded of the quip made when Julia Child died at 91, “if she hadn’t eaten all that wonderful fat rich food, she might have made it to 92.”

Every action has tradeoffs. Things that bring enjoyment today have costs tomorrow. Stop to smell the roses and it takes you longer to reach your destination.

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Moralism as a Response to a Free-Rider Problem

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From the perspective of evolutionary game theory, moralism presents something of a dilemma.

Evolutionary game theory is a branch of mathematics that seeks to explain the behavior of animals and humans based on the assumption that all behavior ultimately must arise from the imperatives imposed by natural selection. From this perspective, human behavior originates largely in selfish motives and true altruism becomes the most difficult behavior of all to evoke.

Moralists exist in all cultures and in all cultures the moralist seeks to persuade or coerce other members of the culture into obeying the moral codes of the culture. Moralists concentrate on suppressing behaviors that do not cause immediate harm to others. Indeed, most moralists target self-destructive behaviors. Both individuals and societies spend a great deal of time and energy moralizing.

The evolutionary game theorist is forced to ask: Why bother? What is in it for the moralist?

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The Laissez-Faire Left

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Historically, one cannot find more passionate and consistent defenders of laissez-faire capitalism than most leftist, articulate intellectuals.

Throughout the last two centuries, leftists fought ardently to protect the freedom of producers to create and sell as they thought best, and the right of consumers to purchase the products they thought best served their needs, without fear of government coercion or even informal social sanction. Whenever the unenlightened or economically naive threatened the voluntary choices of producers and consumers, leftists have always been the first in the fight to protect this most basic of human economic rights: the right to choose what one creates and the right to consume what one wishes.

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What are You Going to Do About It?

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David Foster’s post got me to thinking about the ex-Mayor of Bogota. Unfortunately, my real world experiences are closer to this guy’s observations than what happened in Bogota. In general, I like the Mockus approach to re-establishing an atmosphere of intolerance for incivility. Being a libertarian, I prefer to rely on social opprobrium to discourage behavior that I think is fairly negative, but not negative enough to warrant giving the government more power to regulate.

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Ideology and Adaptation

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I’ve never been one for ideological purity.

For one thing, ideologies represents only imperfect models for how reality works and no real-world model will ever cover all contingencies. So always, in the back of my mind, I look at any given ideology and wonder, “What circumstances will this ideology not account for? When will it work best and when will it not?”

More importantly, though, the science of biology influences all my thinking. In biology, a strategy succeeds based on how well it adapts (from the latin for “to fit”) to the immediate environment. What works for a penguin in the Antarctic won’t work for a camel in the Sahara.

Of course, we don’t like to think of our ideologies as specific adaptations to specific environments. We prefer to think of them as eternal truths that remain the best choices in all times, places and circumstances. We look at solutions that worked in the past and think they will work now. We look at solutions that work now and think they would have worked at some arbitrary point in the past.

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