Pointed.ly

In recent years, my political persuasion has drifted. I used to favor liberalism, in the sense of finely-woven safety nets, strict campaign financing laws, public ownership of natural resources and so on. Now I call myself a libertarian (always with a small L) to indicate that I’d prefer to see more private enterprise, less onerous regulation, and of course lower taxes. In character, I’ve changed little: I still feel the same pangs when I witness the horrors of poverty; I haven’t become any more miserly or judgmental. So, what happened?

I reversed one assumption: If a cause is just, then it is morally admirable to spend someone else’s money on it.

This is the defining difference between liberals and libertarians. Call it the Axiom of Redistribution. It’s the political equivalent of the Axiom of Choice: Those who accept it and those who reject it are fiercely opposed, despite the vast number of common axioms they agree on (freedom of speech, transparent elections, an independent judiciary…). Also like the Axiom of Choice, either accepting it or rejecting it leads to bizarre, almost paradoxical consequences. How do libertarians allow for taxes at all? Why don’t liberals favor an absolute income cap?

FDR may have been responsible for injecting this axiom into the political mainstream. Before his election, advocating the overt redistribution of wealth was déclassé at best. 13 years later, the American people were persuaded that he’d managed to solve not one but two epic crises by taxing the rich at unprecedented levels. Never mind that this violated the supposed intellectual underpinnings of the New Deal, Keynesianism, which would have entailed borrowing the money for public works rather than snatching it from private employers. The taxes were justified on fairness grounds rather than by sound economics. And fairness is a wholly artificial construct, subjective and malleable. To alter the popular conception of fairness is to open Pandora’s box.

Modern liberals pine for the sense of shared sacrifice that characterized those dark days. George W. Bush was excoriated in the New York Times editorial pages for telling Americans to go shopping,¹ rather than focusing the energies of the briefly united populace toward some more worthy goal. Of course, to Bush, Iraq was that goal, but that was too audacious to say flat-out even in 2002.

Is the Axiom of Redistribution decidable?

“Shared sacrifice” strikes me as a poor substitute for individual sacrifice. I’ve been mocked for performing small acts of charity, which are seen as inconsistent with my opposition to the welfare state. Do I care about the less fortunate, or don’t I? The perceived inconsistency arises from failing to make a distinction between giving your time or money to a good cause and giving someone else’s.

If you accept the Axiom of Redistribution, then whatever moral obligations you feel can be sated at the ballot box. Some wealthier individual will take care of them. It’s unsurprising that those who accept the Axiom of Redistribution appear to be less charitable, on average, than those who reject it. Individual responsibility is a powerful force. Collective responsibility is an oxymoron.

But this is only an empirical argument, subject to endless debates about the true meaning of the data. Can the Axiom of Redistribution actually be disproved a priori? No. In fact, it’s easy to conjure up a scenario in which redistribution is clearly justified. (Stealing bread to feed a starving family is the classic example.) That was why I used to embrace the Axiom. It seemed wrong to me that the rich were getting richer while the poor were getting poorer. Actually, I had my facts wrong: In a free economy, when the rich get richer, the poor also get richer. Recently, the rich have gotten poorer as the poor have gotten poorer. Their fates are intertwined.

What I claim is that in this time and place, the Axiom of Redistribution is false. It is, in fact, morally suspect to take someone else’s property for any cause, except the cause of preventing anarchy. Call this the Axiom of Stability, a weaker variant on the Axiom of Redistribution. I say “suspect” rather than “wrong,” because a policy might be justified on practical grounds. Maybe some tasks can be performed more efficiently by a public entity than a private one. But in any particular case, this needs to be treated as an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary proof.

Economics and utilitarianism

Economists tend to be far more libertarian than other academics, because economics trains you to think about two things: hidden costs and marginal returns. Increasing taxes on the rich to improve public schools sounds like a lofty goal, but an economist would view it with skepticism. First, those taxes will affect many people’s lives, not just the fat cats of political rhetoric. The rich play an important role in our society—as investors, philanthropists, and as connectors—and steep taxes limit their ability to play those roles. Second, would more money greatly improve public schools? D.C. schools have some of the highest spending per pupil in the country, yet some of the lowest graduation rates.

The economist Steven Landsburg raised a furor by writing an article² suggesting that it’s irrational to give money to more than one cause. There has to be one charity that would get the most bang for your buck, and splitting your funds across multiple charities means giving less on net, due to the costs of processing your donations and, worse, adding you to their mailing list. There are exceptions—if you’re Bill Gates, giving all of your money to any single cause would be absurd—but for any small chunk of money, the logic is sound.

Now apply that reasoning to government spending. Public schools are a good cause, but are they the best cause, ceteris paribus? You can’t just support everything that sounds nice. Moral and political thought must be grounded in mathematics. When I first discovered economics in high school, my reaction was, This is applied utilitarianism! Microeconomic theory provides a neat, rigorous framework for thinking about questions in practical philosophy. Often, it clarifies issues in unexpected ways. Should people be allowed to sell their organs, such as kidneys? Through the lens of economics, we need only ask two questions: Would such a deal make the seller better off? And would it make the buyer better off? The answer to both must be “yes,” or else they wouldn’t have consented to the transaction.

The axioms we choose

What is your greatest influence? I don’t have an answer to this question. I suspect most people don’t. I could point to Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, which felt like a revelation, but I suspect I’d have found a similar influence without it. Conversely, many people have encountered the same book and finished it unconvinced. I was somehow seeded with assumptions that made me receptive to its themes. No single person provided me with all of those assumptions. No one I grew up with espoused libertarianism.

Programmers use something called a “trace” that lets them observe the flow of a program up to a certain point. Humans are, of course, far less deterministic than software. But I’d like to believe that there is an answer to the question, How did this person become who they are? This is the holy grail of education, because knowing how a person develops intellectually would allow others to affect that development. We’re now fond of looking at brain scans, seeing some difference that roughly correlates with a personality trait and saying, “Ah, that explains it.” This feels like a step backward to me. Neurological explanations are compelling, but are they of practical value?

The detailed, introspective diary tracing the arc of one’s life has fallen out of fashion. In hindsight, I wish I’d kept one all these years. It’s not that I don’t understand myself well enough; it’s that I don’t understand the causes of myself. I’d like to have passed those causes on to my children one day, if only to leaven the inevitable alienation with a dose of understanding: “I know where you’re coming from, because I’ve read your tracings.”

Nothing I write now could possibly convey my earlier self with any accuracy. I could try to write a memoir describing a series of epiphanies, but no one’s life is like that. We emerge gradually. Aristotle said it best: “We are what we repeatedly do.” So instead I wrote a story for myself, the story of me, and an economics textbook, and an axiom. It’s good enough, I suppose. But of course it didn’t happen like that. No one consciously builds their moral framework from first principles. The foundation of the structure is built after the walls and spires are already in place, and a few contradictions always go unnoticed.

1. Bush never actually used the phrase “go shopping,” but it’s deeply ingrained in the popular imagination. [↩]
2. “Giving Your All,” originally published on Slate and later included in the absurdly titled but highly recommended More Sex Is Safer Sex. [↩]