Dear Nationalism

I tried a similar speech on my neighborhood mugger. I think you’ll get comparable response from Nationalism.

Writing a letter to an “‘ism” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: who’s going to reply?

I think you should write a “Dear Nation” letter. At least then people know where you are coming from and, hey, you might get a reply.

@ Pajser,

Could you not argue the case for private and against collective property rights based on the widespread problems of collective action associated with the latter? Collective-action problems have implications also for moral philosophy.

I am thinking that individuals face very many ethical problems and have limited time, and so they will attempt to solve those problems which are of greatest importance and on which their action is likeliest to be pivotal.

So if property is privately held, this ensures that whatever moral thought one gives problems associated with one’s private property is certainly going to matter, but if property is collectively held, one’s efforts at its ethical use are unlikely to matter much.

Thus, the moral case for free immigration (or whatever one wishes to call it) gets no fair hearing because the vast majority of “property owners” face vastly more important problems, to which they rightly devote much more time. The more the sphere of collective property expands, the more moral thought is diluted.

[Comment removed for multiple policy violations. –Econlib Ed.]

Bedarz:

If someone extorts me to buy a cookie and I then eat the cookie, I’m still being extorted right? It’s the same for whatever the government provides.

I’m doubtful that Caplan could secure his own property. However, if hiring humans is an effective strategy to that end, Caplan could do that. On the other hand, if hiring humans is not an effective strategy then the government isn’t really providing the security you speak of.

I get that the context seems naive, but I like this post.

Dear Bryan Caplan,

Hi, it’s Nationalism. I don’t know why you had to call the rest of your roommates by this abstract collective term when you posted your ‘breakup notice’ on our refrigerator. You could just move to another apartment, you know? And this is especially odd for a Libertarian who is supposed to regard the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis. But, whatever, me and the other folks read your letter and they all asked me to tape this response next to yours.

First, look, the feeling is totally mutual. You’ve never been a very good roommate. We respect that you just want to be left alone in your sublet room and and never come out and socialize with the rest of it, and you pay your share of the rent and internet bill on time, so that’s fine. But we’d prefer to live with someone who has more natural friendly feelings towards us and who we feel we can trust.

Whenever we try to figure out how we’re going to set the house rules and share common spaces and chores and get along harmoniously, you are always arguing against the very ‘legitimacy’ of our efforts. Look man, I know you don’t like scrubbing the toilet, but somebody’s got to do it, the rest of us do it without grumbling about oppression and coercion because that’s fair and reasonable, and once a week is not too much to ask!

Look, if it were up to me, I would make it easy for you to go get your own apartment, or to break this big mansion up into a duplex so you could hand out with your Virginian friends on your own half, and you could call yourselves by your own ism over there. More power to you! You should be helping me try to convince the rest of the roommates that this is a good idea, instead of undermining the very concept of ‘isms’.

Because what you call ‘Nationalism’ the rest of us roommates call trying to get along with each other as well as possible and as more than just strangers no closer to each other than to anyone else in the world. Social cohesion and the elements which contribute to it is very important to the rest of us, even if it’s not to people like you. Why should your views prevail over what most of your neighbors want and feel they benefit from?

Look, no one likes being pressured to conform to any community standard, we get it, it’s part of the inherent frustration and tension between the individual living in a community. But that doesn’t mean the standard itself is not a solution to a coordination problem that it social welfare / utility improving. The standard that helps a majority people will occasionally rub a minority the wrong way, but with some special exemptions for discrete and insular minorities, that is what happens both under democracy (we know you’re not a big fan), but also out of a net social welfare analysis.

Bryan,

Your open borders advocacy is an attack on the traditional concept of the nation state, as you well know. So who is aggressing against whom here? Who won’t leave the other alone?

Greg: “Could you not argue the case for private and against collective property rights based on the widespread problems of collective action associated with the latter? Collective-action problems have implications also for moral philosophy.”

But you do not claim that collective action problems are so big that they invalidate all collective actions, do you? If you don’t, then you do not argue against collective property rights, but against overuse of collective action. Which is as principle acceptable even to most rigid Stalinists.

If you believe that there is no beneficial collective action under the sun, look at my answer to MikeP bellow.

MikeP: “Private property allows individual actors the maximum control of the product of their capital and labor, and property over land is no exception.”

Yes, you wrote that, but I thought I already answered you. You claim that private property allows maximal efficiency, while in fact it allows practically zero economic efficiency, if there is no state to limit private property rights. For those who didn’t read my answer: every industrial production, mechanized agriculture and transport generates some chemical and electromagnetic pollution. If every individual is allowed to ban pollution of his property, it is enough to find few anarcho-primitivists, religious fanatics, psychopats … who do not allow any pollution of their property (because pollution is not only negative externality, it is aggression) and they can stop whole industry on USA territory. Existing solution for the problem is that state nationalize some individual property rights and then allow reasonable pollution.

So, either you accept state property, and there is nothing left to prove for me, or efficiency of private property is practically zero, in which case it is easy to show that state can organize economy more efficiently.

“But you do not claim that collective action problems are so big that they invalidate all collective actions, do you? If you don’t, then you do not argue against collective property rights, but against overuse of collective action. Which is as principle acceptable even to most rigid Stalinists.”

My claim is that, if one wants to argue that private property is morally more justifiable than is collective property, a finding to the effect that private property rights are much less likely to lead to morally heinous results than are collective ones would constitute an argument against the latter and in favour of the former.

Since moral thought is diluted when no individual is very likely to be pivotal in a decision – as is the case for collectively held property – I believe that what I proposed in my first response to you above is such an argument.

I don’t think I need to argue here that the problems of collective action are big enough to invalidate any idea of collective property. They are certainly big enough to justify drastic reductions in what the state (“the collective”) is allowed to decide (i.e. reductions in collective property).

My argument supports shrinking the realm of collective property. I am not sure how far, but certainly, collective property should not extend to issues pertaining to migration.

You almost never blog about specifically anarchism that I can recall. This is pretty close.

“If you don’t like it, then you can just get out”.

Where am I supposed to live, the ocean?

“Should have thought of that before you were born and raised as a citizen.”

If there’s option A, and then there’s option-give-up-everything-you’ve-ever-known-or-loved, that’s a good hint the decision might not be strictly voluntary.

MikeP: “Rather the solution is that the state mediates some individual property rights conflicts with the goal of maximizing freedom and wealth. “

It would be true if every individual owner agreed about mediation. But it isn’t the case – the state will define allowed pollution even for those who do not want any mediation. So, it is not only mediation. It can be legally formulated on different ways, but it is essentially, nationalization of some property rights.

“And unavoidable pollution on neighboring property can be fully compensated for in a Coasian bargain from the profits of a factory even over the objection of psychotic holdouts.”

What happens to anarchoprimitivists who do not want to bargain? Polluter ignores their property rights? Possible, but then we do not have property rights, we have the right of the strongest.

Greg Heslop: “I don’t think I need to argue here that the problems of collective action are big enough to invalidate any idea of collective property. They are certainly big enough to justify drastic reductions in what the state (“the collective”) is allowed to decide (i.e. reductions in collective property).”

You don’t know that a priori. You must list arguments pro and contra for every proposed political decision to estimate whether collective action is overall beneficial or not, where you can include argument you have against collective decision on your side. You cannot disqualify political process on the base of that argument, but you can use it in political process to influence decision in more libertarian direction. However, if conditions change, it is rational that state reconsider its previous decision. And it is possible only if state still owns the territory. Still, you have your argument; not against state ownership of the territory but for more libertarian laws.

Is it possible to turn the importance of pivotal role of individual against private property? Many individual actions have externalities. Externalities are small, numerous and noone has pivotal role (or he doesn’t he have that role) in development of the consequences. Under assumption that pivotal role is important, people do not invest time and effort to understand the externalities. Isn’t it rational, solely on the base of pivotal role argument to appoint someone to calculate cost and benefits of externalities and limit private property if he finds benefits for society are higher than cost? Such person would have pivotal role.

What happens to anarchoprimitivists who do not want to bargain? Polluter ignores their property rights? Possible, but then we do not have property rights, we have the right of the strongest.

You seem to think property rights over land are whatever the owner of the land says they are. Airspace over land? The land owner’s to restrict. Radio waves crossing the land? The land owner’s to restrict. Nominal but not unhealthy pollution? The land owner’s to restrict. And the only alternative you see to such an absolutist formulation is that the state has property rights over its territory.

I’m sorry to fell your strawman, but I don’t believe in absolutist property rights. That’s why my prior comments explicitly expressed a rules consequentialist viewpoint.

If someone figures out how to fly an airplane high over someone’s property, or pass radio waves through someone’s property, or build a modestly polluting factory with great enough producer surplus that the 95th percentile neighbor is happy with a Coasian bargain, the holdout property owner cannot rightfully induce market failure simply by overstating the cost of these activities to him. He needs to prove the cost before he can prevent these activities. Hence the state’s role here is adjudication among the conflicting rights.

Note that nothing in this construction requires the state to have any property interest in this whatsoever. It is individuals’ property rights that are being adjudicated, not the state’s.

The comments are getting downright amusing.

Bryan is not stating a problem with the fact that nations exist or with the product of nations. He objects to Nationalism — i.e., the holding of the collective defined as a nation above other collectives and, specifically, above individuals.

“Anglo-Saxon nationalism” is almost a self parody, as its name combines two conquering peoples that were completely conquered by a third and a fourth, and then ascribes the subsequent contributions to nationalism. The cultural contributions cited would be better called “Islandism”, since the only thing in common were that they arose in Britain. (Don’t forget Scotland’s part in those contributions!)

How about “Briton-Roman-Anglo-Saxon-Dane-Norman-Pict-Scot nationalism”? That’s at least more accurate.

I read it in the voice of Allen Ginsberg, it kind of reminds me of his poem America; feels like you’re addressing the same people. Though his a bit more poetic…

It turns that evil individuals use their property rights to turn off cell phones.

I’ll take this to mean that they place on their property a device that jams cellular signals crossing their land.

Then, legislative body proclaims “everyone can use cell phones.”

From a rule consequentialist standpoint, this is not the role of the legislature. This determination would be the result of common law derived from courts adjudicating cases brought by those who thought they were wronged by the jamming. But I’ll grant that the result is the same: property owners cannot jam cell phone signals crossing their land.

Obviously, individual owners lost one property right over land. But who has that property right now?

I would argue that no one lost any property right over land. Some jerks find out that cell phone signals cross their land and intentionally go out of their way to block those signals. But before cell phone signals existed, it never occurred to anyone to block such signals. Therefore doing so is not exercising a property right over land.

Indeed, those who brought cell phones — and radio transmission in general — into being effectively invented new property rights, namely, the right to transmit over a certain frequency over a certain large geographic area. People who intentionally block those signals because they happen to harmlessly cross their land are violating that new right.

Just as human ingenuity brings new resources from nothing, so human ingenuity might bring new property rights from nothing. These rights accrue because a newly invented property exists to protect. They do not accrue from transfer of existing property rights in land in some zero-sum rights game.

And, once again, nothing here requires the state to have any property right whatsoever. By adjudicating in favor of the cell phone company, the state merely recognizes the cell phone company’s right to transmit a harmless signal across the aggrieved party’s land.

I just love stereotypes based on pre-1950s research on the Spanish Inquisition. Of course, all research on the topic was “settled” at that time and has not been conducted in earnest since.

Oh wait: http://www.amazon.com/The-Spanish-Inquisition-Historical-Revision/dp/0300078803

Otherwise, great “letter.” Economic nationalism is destructive.

Pajser,

This morning NPR had a very timely piece on drone operators trying to claim a slice of altitude they could freely fly in. The fact that that slice exists was introduced by examples exactly analogous to my two cell phone interference examples.

The question at the core of the battle: who owns the air?

It’s a question that goes back to the middle ages, to a Latin phrase that translates to “he owns the soil owns up to the heavens.” In England, this phrase was the law of the land for centuries, and it worked well when disputes involved simple things like overhanging tree branches and lopsided buildings.

Here is your position: that private property in land means a property right over every conceivable thing, known or unknown, that can be conceivably bound to or measured by that land.

But once hot air balloons and airplanes came into the picture, things got a lot more complicated. In 1926, Congress created what we now call the FAA, and declared that the air above 500 feet is the public domain.

This is the trivial case. Someone invents something useful that causes no harm to someone’s use of their property in land, so they are allowed to use it — even at the cost of part of a prior formulation of a property right that has no use and was never exercised.

And note that the high altitudes are public domain — not state property, but a commons. The state does not require a property right at all: it merely adjudicates others’ property rights.

But what about the air below that?

Thomas Causby was a chicken farmer in North Carolina who lived near a tiny airport. During World War II, the army took over the airport, and suddenly big military planes were flying over Causby’s chicken coops all the time. The planes scared Causby’s chickens. They flew into the walls of the coop and they died.

Causby sued the government, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In the end, the Court sided with Causby, ruling that landowners own the sky above their homes up to at least 83 feet.

Here we have the interesting case. The new devices that fly in the air are actually interfering with a prior exercised use of the land below. And here is where the state’s role to adjudicate conflicting rights really comes into play. The courts decided that the right to property in land meant aircraft have to stay at least 25 meters above it.

Again, no claim by the state of any property right over its territory is implied or required.

Greg: “I don’t think this objection works. My argument claimed that private property makes individuals more invested in decisions of moral importance which are relevant to their property. So any externality which comes out of how I use my property will affect how I use my property, since I am concerned about moral issues.”

But you don’t have pivotal role. Your argument is that without certainty that individual decision matters, individual is not interested in the problem. For instance, individual sells tobacco in his shop. He have heard about externalities, but he does not have pivotal role. If he stop selling tobacco, the consumer will buy it in other shop. Under your assumption, people who sell tobacco do not invest much time in thinking about morality. But individual appointed to regulate tobacco trade think more seriously about subject, because his decision matters.

Mike P.: “Indeed, those who brought cell phones — and radio transmission in general — into being effectively invented new property rights, namely, the right to transmit over a certain frequency over a certain large geographic area. People who intentionally block those signals because they happen to harmlessly cross their land are violating that new right.”

I agree that radio transmission, when invented, had potential to develop into completely new domain of the property rights. But I don’t think there was no overlap with property rights existing before. Owners of the land had the right to prevent physical contact with their land, even if it is harmless. One cannot trespass my land without my permission because it makes him more efficient and he doesn’t hurt me. Hence, every judgment on the base of property rights had to be against emitters. That is where we disagree. You believe that court can make pro-emitter decisions without new, property restricting law.

Greg:

If you are satisfied with pivotal role in contribution to the solution of some externality problem, then there is a symmetry with voting. Individual who doesn’t drive car because such pollution causes small number of cancers has pivotal role in his own decision, but in outcome – number of people who’ll get cancer – likely not. Individual who votes for restriction of the car use contributes to the outcome. He has pivotal role in his own contribution. Whether his contribution will be pivotal in outcome – likely not.

“This means that the appointed regulator is likely to be the one most appealing to the extremely diluted moral thought of the average voter.”

Actually, it is true only for small number of politically charged issues. The state make thousands of complicated decisions daily, and few voters have the clue about these decisions. They only want that these are made by uncorrupted experts, who have, in that case, pivotal role. So, pivotal role can be used in support of the reduction of private property.

Greg: “I’m not sure about this. If few people have any idea what’s going on, why would they – not being pivotal – even begin to check whether decisions really are made by uncorrupted experts? “

It is the bright side of collective action. Issue is simple, there is consensus that corruption and incompetence is bad. Hence, for each case of corruption or incompetence brought to voters attention, by media or personal experience, voters need only to react on “gut level” – and ruling party loses some votes. In the best political systems people made, one can disagree with government policy, but there is little remaining incompetence and corruption in government.

“Relatedly, how pivotal is an individual elected politician likely to be? “

For instance, in parliamentary systems, leader of the ruling party is usually prime minister and he also controls the parliament. (Members of parliament and his party who do not obey his decisions are expelled from party and have little chance on next elections.) He has pivotal role in most important decisions. But one of his incentives is to be popular in party and public. So, one can say that he is not “truly pivotal” but then we need some term for that.

“It is the bright side of collective action. Issue is simple, there is consensus that corruption and incompetence is bad. Hence, for each case of corruption or incompetence brought to voters attention, by media or personal experience, voters need only to react on “gut level” – and ruling party loses some votes. In the best political systems people made, one can disagree with government policy, but there is little remaining incompetence and corruption in government.”

I think this is much too rosy a picture. I can easily come up with examples of corruption and incompetence among politicians being positive forces in the world. For instance, if it is very difficult to start a new business, a small bribe can save an entrepreneur plenty of time. It would be better to make it easier to start a new business, but failing that, bribery is probably “good”. If the relevant politician is too incompetent to do his job, that saves the bribe and so would be even better.

Whether incompetence and corruption are “bad” really depends on what legislation there is to begin with, issues on which, again, no-one has an incentive to spend a lot of moral thought.

“For instance, in parliamentary systems, leader of the ruling party is usually prime minister and he also controls the parliament. (Members of parliament and his party who do not obey his decisions are expelled from party and have little chance on next elections.) He has pivotal role in most important decisions. But one of his incentives is to be popular in party and public. So, one can say that he is not “truly pivotal” but then we need some term for that.”

Thanks for the info. I may look further into these things in future. But based on what little I do know, I would say expulsion for disagreeing with heads of parties is not very common, and that such disagreement will sometimes benefit the politician. (Maybe this varies by country?)

I think your final two sentences that I quoted may turn out to be quite important. If even the PM is not “truly pivotal”, maybe many common circumstances make his opinion rather inconsequential?

Also, as you say, the PM must appeal to the public, whose every individual member has very little incentive to excert moral thought when making the decision on whom to elect as Prime Minister. This sounds to me like a situation conducive to generating Prime Ministers of less-than-average ethical judgement.