RedStateEclectic

Immigration and Freedom (9/10) - II. Feasible Freedom and Early US Immigration Politics (1776 - 1900)

Image credit. Continued from Immigration and Freedom (8/10):

Studying politics and the state from an angle that reveals them as an emergent order may be instrumental in overcoming the liberal’s or indeed anybody’s sweepingly hostile presumption against them. A change of perspective of this kind may enable us to discern among the tangle and turmoil of politics moves as if by an invisible hand, bringing to the fore the benign effects of practices habitually dismissed as corrupt or underhanded. Consider political opportunism.

2.1 The Indeterminacy of Freedom and Heuristic Opportunism

What lends the system of political freedom an often sordid and even corrupt quality, namely the opportunism of shifting and duplicitous positions, makes it also more flexible and representative. After all, in an adaptable political order, there is a need for trial, error, and error elimination, demanding a kind of responsiveness that leaves behind patterns both of apparent and real opportunism. Introducing erratic and unpredictable conduct into politics and thus dividing contestants, such patterns of opportunism may eventually mark a path that brings foes together or at least allows for pacific competition. There is a fine line between genuine opportunism, on one hand, and political learning and experimentation, on the other. In large measure, politics is about reconciling the irreconcilable. Indeed, politics is the art of finding compromises and forms of power sharing suitable to sustain repeated games that, in turn, produce a durable atmosphere of effective trust.

2.2 Opportunism, Political Learning and Effective Trust

Effective trust is attained when people act as if they trusted one another, without entering into relationships of personal trust. Entrusting one’s political enemy with a high political office is a case in point. Effective trust is brought about not by personal encounters and the subsequent discovery of mutual congeniality but rather by virtue of the constraining effects of institutions that ensure fairness and prevent vicious and costly retribution. Office and person become separable. The political and the private personae are assigned distinct spheres. People cooperate peacefully and productively in one sphere - say as employer and employee - while being fundamentally at odds with each other in a different sphere where they act as political partisans.

The classical liberal expectation that social order may be derived from observing firm principles and certain generally applicable rules of just conduct represents a necessary, yet not a sufficient condition for citizenship in civil society. The classical liberal’s overly pronounced confidence in static rules is unrealistic because patterns of apparent and real opportunism play a key role in balancing (1) the right to disagree with one another in a free society against (2) the need to establish effective trust and peaceable conditions. Political reality is subtle. Behaviour that gives the appearance of opportunism and duplicity may be beneficial in helping to feel one’s way in unchartered terrain, sound out the popular consensus and its tolerance for innovation and nonconformity, forge alliances on issues of lesser weight to gain support on questions deemed more significant, withdraw from or reduce the impact of infelicitous political experiments etc. Political manoeuvring is not exhaustively captured when viewed solely under the aspects of mischief and bad faith. Moreover, a measure of deviousness on the part of the politically active may be inevitable and even required to effect the benefit of living in a society that supports (1) high levels of rivalry alongside (2) a condition of robust pacification.

3.0 Path Dependent Consolidation (1800 - 1900) – Establishing Effective Trust, the Invisible Hand of Politics, and Feasible Freedom

From a divisive plurality of views on immigration emerges in the 18th century a range of conditions ensuring a preponderance and continuity of policies that favour immigration in the U.S. While ineffective in terms of asserting their preferred policies in that period, as becomes clear with hindsight, nativist and other restrictionist forces always maintained a significant presence in the political process and never ceased to search for opportunities to gain the upper hand. Before we look at the factors supporting the path dependent unfolding of a pro-immigration consensus in early U.S. policy regimes, three fundamental starting conditions merit attention.

While the Constitution (1) outlines the framework for political competition and the political discovery process in the new republic, it is (2) parsimonious in regard to specific substantive issues, avoiding preconceptions on controversial subjects like immigration. Add to this that (3) the Constitution has been prepared, ratified and actualised in a manner highly democratic by historical comparison and, in that way, inclusive of the main interests and protagonists invested in immigration. As a result, political competition and discovery were made credible as fair processes. creating an environment for trust-building repeated games and credible commitment, which, in turn, encourage loyalty to the political order not only by the winners but also by the losers in a given episode of political decision making. By reinforcing trust in the rules of the new political game, it was possible to meet the defining conditions of feasible freedom: namely the ability of strike a balance between the two pans of the scales of liberty: maximal dissension, on the one side, and, on the other, peaceableness during competition and later in the face of policy enforcement. This is a result that is as subtle as it is important and powerful: it reflects the transrational mechanisms of politics in a free society – an aspect that falls in the category of “moves by the invisible hand of politics and the state.” Having reached an insurmountable impasse on the rational level, with neither of the parties willing to give up on their views concerning immigration (abortion, capital punishment etc.), irreconcilability and emotional tension are reduced by converting them into effective trust in a repeated game that may yield disappointing outcomes on individual issues but promises a net gain in terms of long-term overall coexistence.
While Jeffersonians steadfastly continued to translate “pro-immigrant polices into foreign-born votes” (p. 55), the Federalists, later the Whigs and still later the Republicans grappled with a legacy of nativism and other anti-immigrant positions. It proved an inheritance hard to shed, partly for reasons of conviction, partly for reasons of credibility, and partly for reasons of electoral calculation.

Until its total demise in the 1820s, the Federalist Party was split on the immigration issue, with its leader Alexander Hamilton urging the need to accommodate immigrant voters by advocating open immigration policies, a position resonating strongly with Federalists in the urban centres where immigrant voting blocs were substantial.

Dissension among the Federalists is indicative of the discovery and learning process that political agents are subjected to by changing circumstances and competing proposals of adapting to them. With unprecedented mass immigration setting in, there were opportunities to profit from xenophobic propaganda, notably during the 1837 depression. Especially Catholics and the Irish were subjected to venomous attacks. But the long-term trend in favour of the newcomers could not be reversed. During the 1844 presidential campaign, the Whigs ran for the last time on an anti-immigrant platform, only to conclude eventually that their narrow defeat had been due to a lack of immigrant support. From then on, the Whigs dissociated themselves from nativist currents. With that, the party system closed itself off from anti-immigrant constituencies. From 1820 to 1860, immigrants as a proportion of the total population had grown from 4.4% to 31.5 %.

Path dependent patterns of generous immigration conditions were boosted when the expansion of U.S. territory thanks to the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Mexican-American War (1846/47) significantly increased demand for settlers and labourers. Receptivity for immigrants was further strengthened with the spread of industrialisation in the New World. Indubitably, the most basic and weighty factor, however, helping to turn the first hundred years of the U.S. into an era of accommodating immigration policies is to be found in the “extraordinary shift in American government from … “a regime of notables” to the world’s first mass-based democracy in which universal white male suffrage, party organizations, and competitive elections predominated.” (p.59)

Continued at Immigration and Freedom (10/10).

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Freedom Limits Liberalism

Competing for Liberty (1/3)

Negotiable Freedom

Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) - Illiberalism within Liberalism - The Liberal Virus of Pessimism

Immigration and Freedom (8/10) - I. Feasible Freedom and Early US Immigration Politics (1776 - 1900)

Image credit.

From the draft of an unpublished paper that I have recently presented at a Conference on immigration:

1.1 Classical Liberalism, Feasible Freedom, and Immigration Politics in the US (1776 – 1900)

While the classical liberal tradition from Locke to Hayek is united by an emphasis on the self-organising features of free societies, it entirely fails to account for politics and the state as a spontaneous order, thus missing the political nature of liberty. Hayek correctly describes economic competition as a discovery procedure, yet neglects to appreciate that politics too is a discovery procedure, in the absence of which freedom is impossible. Thus, owing to an inability to understand that political practices and institutions lie at the heart of freedom, classical liberalism suffers from nothing less than a misconception of her central value, its normative vision of liberty being blind to the conditions of feasible freedom.

In this paper we wish to highlight some of the pivotal features of freedom overlooked by classical liberalism and sketch the contours of a theory of feasible freedom. To this purpose, we are drawing upon evidence from immigration politics as it was to unfold during the first 120 years after the founding of the United States of America. The history of the new American republic, which was strongly inspired by the ideas of classical liberalism, promises to yield interesting insights into the advancement of feasible freedom.

2.0 Trend Finding (1776 - 1800) – Political Competition as a Discovery Process

“Americans have been ambivalent about immigration since the earliest days of their republic. The founding generation grew up in British North American colonies that had contrasting traditions of governing European immigration. Some colonies were routinely hostile to outsiders; some granted entry and equal membership to immigrants who shared their ecclesiastical goals; some recruited immigrant labor but limited the rights newcomers enjoyed; and still others extended generous terms of immigration and membership to all white male settlers […]” (p.49f.)

This and all subsequent page references in the present selective draft paper refer to Tichenor, D.J. (2002), Dividing Lines. The Politics of Immigration Control in America, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton Paperbacks.

In 1781, Thomas Jefferson expressed apprehension about European immigration doubting that newcomers would be able to renounce their Old World loyalties to “absolute monarchy.” He did not believe that new waves of immigrants were capable of honouring republican principles, individual liberty and self-government. In order to avert the danger, he advocated constraints on future admissions.

By contrast, Thomas Paine urged “the nation to adopt the cosmopolitan individualism of Pennsylvania, where the equal membership of English, Dutch, Germans and Swedes showed that <we surmount the force of local prejudice as we enlarge our acquaintance with the world>.” (p.51). Paine’s universalist cosmopolitanism was echoed in George Washington’s pronouncement of 1783 that “America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions.” (p.51)

In a summer of closed meetings in Philadelphia, when America’s leading statesmen were deliberating the Constitution which they finally published in the same year on September 17, 1787, the debate revealed significant differences of opinion and among them also rather ambiguous positions. George Mason, for instance, hailed the economic benefits of alien labour, while opposing broad political rights to “foreigners and adventurers.” (p.52) By contrast, James Madison was worried that denial of public office to immigrants would “give a tincture of illiberality to the Constitution.” (p.52). In the end, the delegates to the convention struck a compromise by determining the foreign-born to be ineligible only for the presidency, while resolving on modest residency requirements for congressional office. (p.52)

The framers did not touch on the subject of immigration in the text of the Constitution (except indirectly, as noted above). It was wise of them not to prejudge the issue, as, we conjecture, their restraint kept the political discovery process open, a condition vital to political stability in the early years of the new republic. At the time, however, the founding fathers had tactical options to consider. To all intents and purposes, practical immigration issues were handled by the states, which the framers did not wish to alienate by pre-emptive constitutional determinations. Also, it appears, in remaining seemingly neutral, they effectively relied on the expectation that the states would continue to pursue policies of pragmatic leniency toward immigrants. Only a few years later, the first Congress in 1790 enacted a uniform rule of naturalization that made citizenship very easy to acquire for European men. It provided that <free white persons> who resided in the United States for as little as two years could be naturalized by <any common law court of record in any of the States.> (p.53)

At once, the restrictionists prepared to strike back. During the 1790s, the atmosphere for immigration grew inclement. The Anglo-French conflict fuelled support for restrictionist demands. One of the two leading parties at the time, the Federalists denounced French and Irish immigrants for putatively aligning themselves with the ideals of the French Revolution and fostering factionalism by participating in democratic clubs. What is more, the Federalists were alerted by the fact that in large cities, Irish and other immigrants would tend to cast their votes in favour of the other large party: the Democratic Republicans. Thus, taking advantage of congressional majorities, the Federalists enacted laws curbing access of European aliens to citizenship and enfranchisement. In 1798, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts which increased the residency requirement for eligibility to citizenship to 14 years, and allowed the president to imprison or deport aliens considered "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" at any time. An effort at forestalling the political decline of the Federalists, the Acts did not have the intended effect, and strengthened the bond between foreign-born voters and the Democratic-Republican party. With their help, Jefferson won the presidential election in 1800, and proceeded quickly to rescind the restrictionist legislation of the Federalists. He presided over the return of control of alien admissions to the states and the restoration of generous conditions of naturalisation. Once a man of nativist inclinations, Jefferson emerged as a staunch defender of the rights of white male immigrants, cementing the pro-immigration trend of the 18th century and handing a structure of expansionist path dependency on to the new century.

The political search for a dominant trend was accompanied by uncertainty and erratic turns. By the late-eighteenth century, however, compelling circumstances and pragmatic considerations predisposed a preponderance of political forces to embrace European immigration: (1) a paucity of labour, (2) abundant territory and (3) a vibrant desire for rapid settlement and economic development along the advancing frontiers of the United States.

Jefferson and other leading political figures, such as Benjamin Franklin, betrayed duplicity, opportunism and even full reversal of opinion in the matter of immigration. Why? The political discovery process of a free society confronted them with new evidence, forcing them to learn and adjust their public-facing agendas.

Continued at Immigration and Freedom (9/10) - II. Feasible Freedom and Eraly US Immigration Politics (1776-1900)

See also Immigration and Freedom (6/10) - Political Scarcity and the Indeterminacy of Freedom and Negotiable Freedom.

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Democracy and Freedom

Liberty in Danger

Image credit. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." (Edmund Burke, 1729-97)

Time to think of liberty not as a partisan good, but as a tradition whose defence requires co-operation beyond party lines.

See also Senator Ebke Pushes for Historic Legislation, and Mark Levin - The Liberty Amendments. And Steven Kate's feisty Living in a Postmodern World.

 

And:

 

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Violence, Sustenance, and Faith - Civil Society and Social Cohesion - (Ernest Gellner) (4/4)

The Miracle of Freedom

Scarce Justice - When What Is "Just" Is Not Known

Negotiable Freedom

Image credit.

"Negotiable freedom" sounds like a phrase used in selling out to the enemies of liberty, when in fact it points to a fundamental feature and one of the biggest advantages of liberty.

In preparation of a conference paper, I have recently noted down these ideas:

Classical liberalism has been politically ineffective and intellectually marginalised since declining precipitously from its zenith of influence in the mid 19^th century. At the same time, liberty has prospered along with the political opponents of liberalism. This constitutes the paradox of freedom, the phrase chosen for the title of our paper presented at the first X conference: “The Paradox of Freedom – F.A. Hayek and the Crisis of Liberalism.”

We have identified an inability to comprehend the role of politics and the state in a free society as the chief reason why classical liberalism has failed to marshal the popular support requisite to achieve substantial political weight.

Among the robust conditions of freedom - the conditions indispensable if feasible freedom is to be attained - is political freedom, the possibility for every citizen to participate in the political processes through which many of the most important forms of social governance are being shaped. Classical liberalism does not appreciate that the spontaneous order of politics and the state drives the future shape and meaning of liberty.

Classical liberalism is inclined to overlook the political nature of the forces and processes that define feasible liberty for two reasons in particular: [In the present post, I am concerned with only the first of the two reasons, G.T.]

Robust Conditions of Freedom – A Pool of Elements with (Re-)Negotiable Relations and Alterable Mutual Effects

In the first place, classical liberalism tends to be inspired by the presumption that liberty

(1) is rooted in a number of inalterable and non-negotiable basic premises and demands, and

(2) is to be achieved only to the extent that these fundamental precepts are being honoured in human interaction.

While it is true that feasible liberty depends on the presence of certain indispensable conditions, the latter represent nonetheless a set of features that are relational to one another, being subject to mutual trade-offs rather than absolute, complete and immutable in their meaning and implications.

Within the set of robust conditions of liberty, we address different subsets and seek different relative weightings of the relevant conditions depending on

(1) the specific nature of an issue, and

(2) the outcomes of our political handling of them.

For instance: on introducing minimum wages, we witness a stronger weighting of political freedom vis-à-vis contractual freedom. The supporters of national minimum wage laws having prevailed in the process of political legitimisation, are entitled to override certain aspects that otherwise would be protected under contractual freedom.

In a different context, say, the question of using employer resources to express one’s political preferences, there tends to be a stronger weighting of contractual freedom than political freedom, i.e. the wish of the employer not to be forced to support with his company's resources (other than indirectly by wage payments) an employee's political activism is generally protected by contractual freedom and unenforceable by appeal to political freedom.

The set of robust conditions of freedom is constantly reshuffled, whereby its elements assume different relations and proportions vis-à-vis one another, depending on the issue at hand, as well as the political acumen and dexterity of the negotiating parties.

The dynamism and negotiability of the permutations formed by the indispensable conditions of freedom is not recognised in classical liberalism. Hence a large number of policies and significant social developments based on internal trade-offs among robust conditions of freedom are perceived by classical liberals as violations of freedom.

The fact that we still enjoy high levels of freedom in societies permeated by such violations (from a classical liberal perspective) speaks to the resilience of freedom in the face of changing permutations of relative weightings among her robust conditions.

Mechanisms That Aren’t Mechanisms – But Politically Induced Outcomes

The most seminal shared heritage in classical liberal thought over a period of 300 years has a modern name: spontaneous order.

From John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek, the belief that order can be achieved in human society by observance of appropriate rules rather than by authoritarian fiat is the differentia specifica of the classical liberal vision of “the good society.” This vision gives rise to an entirely new paradigm of the ideal society.

If by following the correct set of generally applicable rules we can ensure a better outcome for all members of society than by bowing down to the edicts and whims of a ruler or a ruling elite, we are faced with an entirely new model of society, one in which there is a standard by which to rationally criticise and limit the discretion of authorities; one in which, every person matters, for she is a welcome and integral part of a community whose collective compliance with rules of a certain nature produces a better world. This is tantamount to an enormous upgrading of the individual and her emancipation in a number of important aspects, not the least of which being her right to take part in the ruling of society.

The individual becomes a player in a game whose outcome is freedom. She is tied to the game through rights, individual rights. How exactly the individual is related to her rights proves contentious and decisive concerning the view one holds of liberty.

Monadic "Freedom" Versus Relational Freedom

In using subsequently the term monadic, I mean: "relating to the individual alone," as opposed to "relational, i.e. regarding the relationship between two or more individuals." In their monadic construal, rights defining liberty are absolute and inhere solely in the individual. That is, by virtue of vesting a right in the individual, it can no longer change or loose its meaning simply owing to an alteration in the relationship of that individual with other individuals. Thus, if the individual has an absolute right to contractual freedom, no circumstances can modify this entitlement, including contrary demands of political freedom.

In reality, people are forced to and often quite like to engage in a trade of the components that make up the precise and viable meaning of their rights - "I will sell part of my property to you, if you let me use the driveway you are planing to built." In fact, the insistence on the monadic nature of liberty rights (think "rugged individualism") is the reason why political freedom, the very lever of relational rights and negotiable freedom, is so poorly integrated into the world view of classical liberalism.

Spontaneous Order and Feasible Liberty

Ultimately, it is the monadic construal of liberal precepts that proves detrimental to the career of liberalism’s most basic idea: spontaneous order. The latter is thought to be a mechanism, an automatism, something that runs by itself, an "automobile" in the broadest sense of the term. But that is certainly not what the spontaneous order of a free society is.

Sure enough, there is a strong temptation to commit the fallacy of composition by taking the automatic processes of a spontaneous order, say, in the form of a reasonably free economy, to represent the whole, when it is only one aspect embedded in more formative aspects.

What is not seen is the political depth structure of the spontaneous order.

What is not seen is that the possibility for every individual to participate in negotiating the conditions of order in human interaction and a congenial negotiation process itself are core features of freedom.

What lends classical liberal recommendations an unpalatable flavour for so many people is the blanket consent they are asked to grant in too many cases and with promises painted in too broad strokes not to act by their own discretion but to stand back and await the benefits of an automatism.

Of course, the classical liberal overkill in terms of restricting political deliberateness encourages an overkill by political pragmatists in terms of dysfunctional intervention.

Risks and Costs of Liberty

Fair enough, liberal political abstention can never be the proximate cause of societal catastrophe, only excessive mal-intervention can play that role.

Though I do not think that the destruction of liberty can ever be ruled out, still in the freest countries the safeguards against such an event are substantial. But, we cannot have freedom without the costs and risks involved in living out her possibilities, which dangers are especially pertinent with respect to political freedom. For more see Costs and Benefits of Freedom.

However, if I see it right, the best we can achieve is to make the mistakes we are prone to make within (not outside!) the framework of robust conditions of freedom which strengthen and expedite our capacity of correction, recovery and renaissance.

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The Idea(s) of Freedom - Uniform Meaning versus Dispersed Meanings

The Classical Liberal Constitution (2/2)

The Idea(s) of Freedom (2/3) - The Loss of Social Realism

Immigration and Freedom (6/10) - Political Scarcity and the Indeterminacy of Freedom

  Image credit. I am not always particularly conscious of a logical link between the images at the top of my posts and the written content underneath them, though mostly, I think, I would be able to explain some sort of association. The present picture has been chosen as an allusion to the wishful thinking underlying Bryan Caplan's immigration policy proposals. Once one assumes a certain depth of conviction, the belief system one subscribes to tends to develop a logic with its own dynamic. For instance: if you believe in advantageous spontaneous processes firmly enough, it might appear perfectly reasonable that immigration can be turned into a spontaneous order, upon which exhilarating prospect one may develop a selective fervour in search of data and theories that confirm the vision so beautifully in sync with one's dearest presumptions. I suspect, this is the psychological backdrop to Bryan Caplan's wishful thinking on immigration, in which regard it is indeed of a libertarian nature -, being, at the same time, not philosophically, but practically almost identical with Angela Merkel's recent political whim to declare Germany and Europe an area of open borders - err, to Syrians, err to who exactly is not really clear. Like Caplan, she proposes a general invitation, only to be qualified, when reality replaces rhetoric, by a mess of arbitrary ad hoc conditions.

The Indeterminacy of Immigration

In a recent post, I maintain that Bryan Caplan's libertarian take on immigration is flawed. In the meantime, I have had second thoughts as to whether it is accurate to describe Caplan's policy proposal as libertarian at all. My doubts are of a duplex nature: first, Caplan does not seem to derive his position from libertarian principles. Rather, his stance is based on a wish, namely that

unconditionally open borders ought to be recognised as

(1) a moral necessity, and

(2) a doable way of alleviating world misery superior in its outcomes both for the guests and hosts to any other outcome.

In explaining his "solution," Caplan is strangely confident in the well-functioning and benignity of the state.

Suddenly, the state is unproblematic in that host countries are not inhibited in their immigration-qua-deliverance by government-induced deficiencies that might frustrate the absorption of unlimited numbers of immigrant.

Suddenly, Caplan happily relies on government as it is to provide the kind of environment in which it is possible to easily cope with the migration of millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions of immigrants. While in all other respects the government is held to be a botcher of catastrophic import.

Suddenly, to top it all, he insists that should problems occur - a state of affairs which Caplan precludes, but toys with in a thought-experiment intended to assuage his critics - we have a state at our disposal that can be used to add any number of ad-hoc laws and policies capable of amending what difficulties may emerge.

In a word: Caplan relies on an enormous amount of confidence in the governmental status quo to be able to carry out his vision of immigration. In this sense, his proposal is hardly congenial to the libertarian or minarchist ethos, but rather of pronounced leftist pedigree - à la: since I have a good idea - which, I am sure, makes me morally superior to my opponents, - my proposition must be feasible, into the bargain.

There Is No Such Thing as a Uniquely Valid Libertarian Position on Immigration

These sceptical observations inspired in me another doubt: namely, that there cannot be any such thing as THE LIBERTARIAN POSITION on immigration.

Why not?

Consider this historic scene - borrowed from Borjas: US president Carter and Dengxiao Ping meet in the oval office - a great act of rapprochement between the US and communist China. Carter comes in heavily laden with folders documenting anti-humanitarian cases detected in China. The American president loses no time to explain his Chinese counterpart that China must not keep its population as if in a prison, and should rather open its borders, so that those unhappy with the bad state of human rights in China are free to leave the country and come to the US.

Upon this reproach, Dengxiao Ping turns pensive for a while, before suddenly a smile appears on his face, and he replies: "You are right, absolutely right, Mister President. Just tell me, how many Chinese do you plan to welcome to your country? 20 million? 50 million? 200 million? We shall be happy to oblige." And that is not even considering billions of other people living in countries with a gruesome human rights record. Little wonder, Carter quickly changed the subject.

To cut a long story short: the issue is how many people is a host nation willing to and capable of absorbing, and which people are to be invited? And what is easily overlooked: whatever decision is taken, inumerous ramifications and consequences are making themselves felt as soon

At this point, it transpires that there cannot be any such thing as THE LIBERTARIAN POSITION - as no one is able to provide us with a set of libertarian premisses that deliver a unique answer to these questions: how many people, and who to include and who not to include, subject to which conditions.

If there is not a unique libertarian answer to the question of immigration, then neither - by implication is there a state of liberty uniquely corresponding with THE right immigration policy. This holds true when we go on to admit any doctrine that claims to represent the requirements of freedom. Careful, this is not tantamount to saying that all immigration policies are equally good. What I am saying is that there cannot be any such thing as an immigration policy uniquely determined as right and indispensable in terms of this or that doctrine outlining the needs of a free society.

Freedom is more about the way in which we ought to play the game of political dissent so as to ensure we cope with the tensions inherent in political strife than it is a nucleus from which to extract  determinate solutions to specific questions embodying explosive political scarcity.

See also Demos and Freedom - Robust and Non-Robust Conditions of Liberty, The Libertarian Triangle of Oblivion, and Competing for Liberty (1/6).

Political Scarcity

Immigration is a severe case of political scarcity.

Political scarcity occurs when there is more than one way of looking at an issue that affects a group of people who are not easily persuaded to give up their differing views in order to come up with a common, a mutually agreed position. A group may be as large as the American electorate, and the number of issues that create political scarcity is infinite, while the issues are not amenable to bilateral negotiation and resolution, but require political compromise, collective decision-making, and ultimately the credible threat of coercion. Generally, the mitigation of political scarcity may be perfect in that it avoids violence, but otherwise it will tend to be regarded as rather imperfect since in a free society differences of opinion will proliferate and be allowed to prevail in the presence of a more or less transient, politically dominant compromise.

Liberalism (in all its variants) is not identical with freedom. Liberalism is a set of hypotheses, some of which are being refuted by freedom, which latter includes integrally political freedom, and hence the right of non-liberals to compete for and gain transient political dominance. Freedom is an amalgam of different political views, a fusion more or less visible in most of her institutions and policies.

Maximalist libertarian demands appear convincing only if one overlooks the nature of political freedom, which is often traded off against some of the other robust conditions of freedom - as when contractual freedom is restricted in certain cases, because the legitimate processes of political freedom authenticate a certain policy, say the minimum wage, as being entitled to transient and contestable political dominance. What is overlooked are the innumerable cases where political freedom is restricted by contractual freedom - or are you allowed to use the resources of your employer against her will to advertise the promises of communism?

The various indispensable (= robust) conditions of freedom form a pulsating cloud of interrelated particles that by affecting one another wax and wane, pulsate, stretch and contract dynamically. If one treats contractual freedom as an absolute, as opposed to a relational right that is sculpted by many interrelated forces, one misses the essential resilience of freedom and sees instead catastrophic violations of her all over the place.

No society is free from political scarcity. Freedom cannot achieve the abolition of political scarcity, she is an effort to handle political scarcity as best as we can. Her ability to manage political scarcity well is among the prime reasons to value and defend liberty.

See also:

Immigration and Freedom (1/10), Immigration and Freedom (2/10),  Immigration and Freedom (3/10), Immigration and Freedom (4/10), Immigration and Freedom (5/10).

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Scarce Justice - When What Is "Just" Is Not Known

The Miracle of Freedom

Importing A Civilizational Crisis

Violence, Sustenance, and Faith - Civil Society and Social Cohesion - (Ernest Gellner) (4/4)

Immigration and Freedom (5/10) - Caplan's Libertarian Case for Open Borders

Mark Levin - The Liberty Amendments

The various "branches of government have their roles, but it's time to give us some of our government back, to embrace our heritage, and to breath life back into our constitutional system," thus argues Mark Levin, whose book "The Liberty Amendments" Ed Stevens has recommended to me to better understand the LR 35 initiative.

It seems to me an exceedingly commendable initiative, for nothing is more important than keeping the public aware of and actively participating in the constitutional framework of American politics.

You may disagree with Levin on this or that issue, or not; in any case, the initiative offers an excellent opportunity to compete politically in the context of a set of needful and constructive categories such as living federalism and true subsidiarity.

And it is recognised across party lines that we need to engage in a discussion that restores the respect for the fundamental principles of a constitutional republic:

 

Liberty, Micro-Freedoms, Micro-Unfreedoms, and the Warren-Samuels-Constellation

Image credit.

There are ways in which one may try and even manage to change a given distribution of assets and chances in society, for better or for worse. However successful and whatever the resultant pattern, politics and the state will always be involved in constituting  what I like to call the Warren-Samuels-constellation.

Part I - The Warren-Samuels-Constellation

In order to ensure a certain outcome - say, an immigration policy or millions of other generally obligatory regulations -, the government will be reverted to in order to fix and enforce the requisite rules, relative to which some people will claim to be disadvantaged, with others pleading for the justice and necessity of the intervention, and relative to which it is possible to describe

an asymmetry of

• coercion (in favour of some and to the disadvantage of others), and

• entitlement (expanding rights for some and curtailing them for others).

In a Warren-Samuels-constellation, the choice is not between a solution with and one without government involvement; instead the difference between the status quo and the new situation (brought about, say, by a court ruling or a legislative act) consists in a shift in the asymmetry, a new arrangement of state-enforceable coercion in favour of this party and to the disadvantage of that party.

Micro-Freedom and Micro-Unfreedom

The micro-freedom of one is the micro-unfreedom of another.

Consider this example: initially, my red cedars are protected against destruction on your part, although they spread a deadly disease to your apple trees - coercion is on my side, my freedom to keep my cedars is your unfreedom to safe your apple trees. But then, under a new legal regime, the balance of coercion alters, in your favour: your apple trees are now legally protected - your newly acquired micro-freedom - against the deadly effect emanating from my red cedars, which latter I am now legally required to eliminate - my newly imposed micro-unfreedom.

This kind of give-and-take is going on all the time in a free society. How could it not, as politics - the admission, confrontation and management of incompatible interests - is inevitable and, indeed, an important requirement of freedom? By no means is liberty at large necessarily compromised by the permanent competitive and compromise-seeking readjustment of patterns of micro-freedoms and micro-unfreedoms among millions of parties.

For more see: Red Cedars and Apple Trees - The Political Character of the Economic Process.

Liberty, Micro Freedoms, and Micro Unfreedoms

What I am driving at in the below comment is that in a free society large scale political issues that affect an entire population will inevitably draw activists into politics, who endeavour (a) to retain from their maximum demands as much micro-freedoms as possible and - if (a) requires this - (b) impose as much micro-unfreedoms on others as the balance of the competing forces will bear.

I find it hard to imagine how things could possibly be different in a society where everyone is free to participate in politics.

Thus, far from demanding the suspension of this mechanism of political competition and compromise, liberty is the application of this mechanism by virtue of exercising political freedom.

By contrast, the libertarian insinuates: see, what terrible states of affairs are brought about by politicians - typically overlooking the fact that politicians usually deal in fundamentally controversial issues, while also typically assuming that there are incontrovertible liberal principles which make for unequivocal solutions. And so the libertarian demands: if only we were to cut out politics and leave matters to the personal initiative of individuals we would automatically live in a better world.

That, however, is a false promise, based on a nirvana fallacy.

Part II - Are Libertarian Individuals Necessarily More Effective Than Politically Negotiated Public Services ?

From Arnold Kling`s Contemporary Segregation, where he reproduces this quote:

Segregation of upper-middle-class and affluent families from all others increased the most. In 2010, families with incomes in the top 10 percent of the national income distribution lived in the most homogenous districts, with other affluent families like them. In contrast, we found that poor families have become slightly more integrated by income between school districts. However, given that high-income families have distanced themselves from others, poor families are likely integrating with working-poor or lower-middle-class families rather than the affluent.

Arnold Kling comments:

As I have said, the affluent folks advocating for more Syrian refugees are unlikely to end up living next to them.

I have submitted the below comment, which unusually has not been published at Kling's blog, as yet, in fact, I have not even received the message: "your comment awaits moderation." After three attempts at posting, I finally received this note: “Duplicate comment detected. It looks as though you’ve already said that.” I have little reason to think we are facing a technical glitch, other commentators posting their ideas without difficulties. Rather, it appears that my access to the comments is being consciously barred. Am I too inconvenient? Is this "taking the most charitable view of those who disagree," as the subtitle of Arnold Kling's blog announces?

You write, "the affluent folks advocating for more Syrian refugees are unlikely to end up living next to them."

Do you wish to change this situation? If so, how?

In your post Three Axes of Refugees

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/three-axes-of-refugees/

you write: "Imagine the decisions about taking in Middle Easterners being made by individuals, rather than by government. That is, imagine that it were up to individual households to take them in."

Given the way you describe the behaviour of the affluent, would this not mean worse chances for refugees?

Or, to the extent they care for refugees, would not the affluent (eager for a neat neighbourhood etc.) and the non-affluent (lacking the means to support refugees) turn (for outsourcing solutions) to politicians and the state to deal with the refugee challenge - which is pretty much the situation that we have at present.

(Incidentally, my last comment at Three Axes of Refugees is still awaiting moderation.)

See also the following posts which contain many of the comments I submitted at Kling's blog. Immigration and Freedom (5/10) - Caplan's Libertarian Case for Open Borders, The Denial of Politics - Wrong Track, Politics and Planning, A Reply Concerning Ancient Trade and Trust, A Modern Story - Politics and the State in Ancient Greece, Layered Identities - The Many Lives of Markets,

A Reply Concerning Ancient Trade and Trust

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As a reaction to my comment here, I received these two replies, the first of which I cannot work with, as I neither know the commentator nor his standards of persuasiveness, the second of which providing more surface to dock on to.

You have said nothing persuasive yet.

States win the monopoly on sovereign violence. That’s all.

Immediately followed by:

And they win because someone has to win. And the state wins because we call,the winner of the competition “the state.”

To which I replied:

We may describe one among many aspects of the state as the possession of a monopoly of coercion. Mind you, that "monopoly" consists of a bundle of competencies that change all the time and are subject to acute competition among powerful and resourceful parties trying to add or subtract to that bundle. In some places in the US, the state is not even able to exercise its right to carry out capital punishment - because it is subject to severe contestation on that central matter of "monopolistic" coercion.

More generally, I cannot convince myself of the state being a uniform entity with a uniform utility function against which it might make sense to speak of the state as "the winner of the competition."

Also, the state is often tasked with facilitative projects rather than the pursuit of a final aim. The state is not supposed to decide an election but facilitate its implementation - in fact, one wonders, if the state is to be conceived of as a uniform winner-entity, what political party does "the state" belong to?

The state consists of individuals, factions, departments etc that represent differing and often competing notions of success.

Large and important parts of the state are specifically set up to accommodate competitive and compromise-building processes, including players with very different goals, values and notions of success.

The state is, among its many functions, a set of institutions with the purpose of having the most diverse opinions and interests compete among each other; it is itself open to permanent contestation and competition for temporary governance - on countless levels down to municipal affairs.

Personally, I find it hard to conceive of the modern liberal state as anything but a means for preventing total or permanent victory by any one person, group or institution.

The Achilles heel of libertarianism is (1) a preconception according to which the state is evil, dysfunctional and destructive, (2) an attendant attitude according to which "we know all about the state," and (3) a practice according to which one does not bother to look carefully at the complex phenomenon of the state with its innumerable surprises and subtleties - and its outstanding significance for freedom.

The source.

See also A Modern Story - Politics and the State in Ancient Greece.

Related articles

Scarce Justice - When What Is "Just" Is Not Known

The Miracle of Freedom

Violence, Sustenance, and Faith - Civil Society and Social Cohesion - (Ernest Gellner) (4/4)

Learning Liberty?

Image credit.

Yes or no!?

First question: Is it moral to force others to give to the cause of your choice?

Second question: Is it moral for the government to force others to give to the cause of your choice?

Well, I would argue, it is misleading to insinuate that the two questions are logically and morally analogous, as is the strategy of the philosopher-interviewer in the below video.

Missing the difference does not strike me as the sign of a particularly good philosopher. It would appear rather to be an indication of political bias taking the place of meticulous philosophical inquiry.

The state is a modern technology whose emergence made and makes contemporary freedom possible.

Among the government's unique "social-technological" capabilities is a substantial reduction of violence in the territory under its protection, fostering an equally substantial increase of trust in societies populated mostly by people who are complete strangers to one another.

This is only one "social-technological" capability that no single individual can possibly provide to the community. This capability is unique to an institution - the state - which is radically distinct from an individual.

Corresponding to the state's unique features that single it out for special treatment as compared with individual citizens are specific rights that are therefore granted to it, but not to citizens.

In order to fulfil its unique functions, like peacemaking, the state requires resources; for which reason one works out procedures that allow the state to collect contributions ("taxes") and enforce this right -

in such a manner as to keep the state-technology-as-a-whole a worthwhile proposition to the population (which qualification points to many other issues that cannot be dealt with here, one of which being the fact that the taxation right is embedded in a host of other duties and restrictions to be honoured by government).

Individuals are not granted this same right, because they are incapable of providing the requisite return service.

Of course, if my neighbour were capable of providing the above helpful services offered by the state, we would have no reason to hesitate in devolving the same special rights to her as an individual rather than to a whole set of complicated institutions.

Thus, it appears to me, the discussion wilfully triggered in the video by means of the two above questions is not primarily one of morality, but one of empirical evidence. By which I mean: if my explanation of the unique capabilities of the state can be empirically corroborated and thus legitimately used as a premise, the moral issue evaporates. Sure, new puzzles present themselves; but probably less painful ones on balance than when mankind for some reason did not have the ability to create the social technology called the modern state.

Government is a difficult and dangerous instrument; we should dedicate our energy to keeping an eye on it (as citizens) and managing it knowledgeably (as politicians), instead of allowing ourselves to be sent into a maze of philosophical trickery and "gotcha questions."

 

Related articles

Violence, Sustenance, and Faith - Civil Society and Social Cohesion - (Ernest Gellner) (4/4)

Violence, Sustenance, and Faith - Civil Society and Social Cohesion - (Ernest Gellner) (3/4)

Scarce Justice - When What Is "Just" Is Not Known

Scarce Justice - When What Is "Just" Is Not Known (2/2)

Image credit.

Justice - Scarce and Abundant

I can think of a number of reasons why justice is (made deliberately) scarce in a free society. Justice is expensive; to have it one must incur transaction costs. There are diminishing returns to justice; the costs of having more justice may exceed the benefits - one may overlegislate a society, both by stifling a community through regulation in the modern bureaucratic-dirigiste sense of a state that is too meddlesome, as well as by cultural regimentation such that a person is becoming inordinately other-directed by custom and status, almost like a puppet on a string.

The greater the freedom of an individual to develop his own conceptions of life and his own ways of living, the larger the number of issues on which people may diverge and at some point come to disagree perhaps in direct conflict with one another. When by justice we mean the determination by generally accepted precepts of what is right and may be done and what is wrong and may not be done in a particular situation, then by increasing the number of such determinations one will tend to reduce the options for free individual choice.

In that sense, it is accurate to say that in feudal and other highly regimented societies there used to be an abundance of justice.

Abundant Justice

A person's life was regulated in minute detail by distinctions of what she was to do and what she was not to do. What clothes to wear, when and how to speak, who to obey and who to command. When to do what with whom, where, why, how and when.

It was not just for A to wear a hat at all, and B, who was supposed to wear one, in order to heed justice, had to take his headgear off when X appeared, but not when Y turned up. Life was regulated by a tight net of justice, that is: by generally accepted and generally heeded distinctions between the absolutely requisite and the absolutely inadmissible.

Scarce Justice and Politics in a Free Society

By comparison, a free society tends toward the utmost scarcity of justice. In a free society we seek to reduce the number of determinations that prescribe what a person must do and what she must not do in order to avoid penalisation.

I suspect that in a free society, politics is so important not only because it is

• formative in establishing justice - a justice shaped by a citizenry invited to influence government and the legislation by which the executive is guided - but also because politics is

• a helpful complement and effective substitute for justice, a welcome means for economising on justice.

In Scarce Justice (1/2), I have tried to argue that politics has a role to play in making compromises possible that have not yet attained the status of being just (i.e. being generally accepted as just) but are good enough to pass as being legitimate (i.e. being arrived at by procedures thought to be just).

I reckon, it is exceedingly important to be able to avail oneself of such a transrational mechanism in a society promoting and protecting the right of every citizen to contradict and challenge every other citizen, including those in positions of special authority and power. 

There is a shift of justice from the level of concrete situations and specific determinations minutely specified by custom to the level of procedure and more general criteria of admissibility with more space to be filled in by individual preferences rather than cultural conventions.

There is more room for individual demands and bilateral stipulations, for contractual obligations by private parities and associations originating obligations that are

• mainly rooted in a specific relationship (even just a transaction or a limited set of transactions) between a small number of private, personally autonomous agents, and

• only loosely or very selectively tied to the minimal morality (scarce justice) shared in a society.

There is a decline in the number of activities that are regulated by a tight, coherent, and common texture of concrete dos and don'ts.

Advantages of Parsimonious Morality

The new environment of more parsimonious morality enables immediate, individualised ("modular") compromises regarding specific issues that are impossible to achieve when ultimate justice is at stake. Moral parsimony enables a watered down, a supple "justice" that plays out over repetitive games. Any one decision may not be just, but it will be regarded as legitimate in helping to abet a long-term atmosphere of justice, an enduring balance of moral expectations.

We are more flexible, comfortable, and effective when we can act sensibly and peacefully, even though we do not know what is just or do not share a common perception of justice.

The problem of pre-contractural, pre-individualistic status society is that "everything" is a question of justice. There is a lot less to figure out and compromise about bilaterally in order to get on with things in effective ways.

Justice is a precious thing, which is why we do not mess with it easily. We do not suffer those who are facile and disrespectful about it, and this earnest attitude means we are prepared to resort to violence and severe penalisation so that justice be protected from desecration.

A greater scarcity of justice unburdens the citizen from the need to be careful of unjust misconduct at every turn. Life becomes less violent, more relaxed, richer in options. People become more tolerant, more capable of separating the plane of social interaction from the sphere of privacy.

In the past, the norms of justice may have been like traffic rules, perhaps even like military orders, plentiful, specific, and omnipresent. They were invasive, detailed, patronising, a guide to one's identity and station in life. Hemming in personal freedom. In a free society justice is more wide-meshed. Rather than an instrument of tutelage, it is being designed to minimise conflict while leaving vast spaces for personal and bilateral discretion. Working tacitly, it more rarely becomes conspicuous, chiefly when people lose orientation and non-important expectations conflict between two or more parties.

Justice is scarce, and it is supposed to be so. For in a free society, justice has been privatised to far larger an extent than we tend to be aware of. There is a supra-jurisdiction - the law. But within that supra-jurisdiction, there are sub-jurisdictions, the "vast spaces for personal and bilateral discretion," which are used by people to transact their own living law.

Politics and Law in a Free Society

Politics emancipates free citizens from the necessity to "make moves" (enact policies) only when covered by a concurrent majoritarian or culturally uniform sense of justice, providing instead a pre-stage of justice, legitimate resolutions and policies that add up to an atmosphere of long-term justice built on a credible succession of multidimensional acts of give-and-take, mutual accommodation, monitoring, and restraint. 

Law in a free society democratises the emergence of justice by extending the range of tributaries, inviting millions of people to work out for themselves what is (going to be) or comes close to being just. A free society emancipates people to regulate matters between them without the intervention of an anti-individualist higher authority enforcing a coerced and stifling common cultural bond. Law in a free society is designed to make justice an instrument of parsimonious use and last resort, and to outsource to the sub-jurisdiction of the citizenry (empowered by private property and freedom of contract) much of what used to be regulated under a close-mesh net of rigid common standards of justice, and so much more of what would have been ruled out or entirely inconceivable under "the abundance of justice" characteristic of a status-based social order.

See also Why Law ? (2/2).

Related articles

Scarce Justice - When What Is "Just" Is Not Known

The Miracle of Freedom

Violence, Sustenance, and Faith - Civil Society and Social Cohesion - (Ernest Gellner) (1/4)

Immigration and Freedom (3/10) - Borjas on Implications of Economics for Immigratiion