Should We Let Things Get So Bad They Finally Get Better?

A snippet I wrote for the March 2010 issue of Liberty Magazine in the Reflections section under the title “Story Time”:

I’ve heard people say that the only way to achieve a truly free society is to let things get so bad that they finally get better. If we hit rock bottom and live in a fully socialist world people will see how bad it is and realize how much better a free economy would be. They will not have to struggle to understand the unseen because they will be living in the world that free-market advocates warned against. People will embrace liberty only after learning the hard way.

I wish to dispel that idea. This strategy would be disastrous, for two reasons.

First, there is no guarantee we will hit rock bottom. The city of Detroit has been in an economic freefall for 50 years. I’ve heard many times that the city can fall no farther and its bloated government will have to loosen its grip. As far as I can tell, the city is still in freefall.

There are countries that have been mired in socialist mediocrity or worse for decades and show few signs of a free-market revolution. Apparently they haven’t hit bottom either.

Second, if things actually did bottom out, there is no guarantee that people would understand why. After the stock and housing markets tanked in 2008, was there a general awareness of the failures of central banking and interventionism? Was the response a swift move toward a freer market? Government created the crisis, yet there was little agreement among Americans about whom to blame and what to do next.

Few see a cause-effect relationship between government activity and the Great Depression. When they do see such a relationship, it’s often that of reverse causality; they believe intervention cured rather than caused the depression.

Waiting to hit rock bottom is not the key to a classical-liberal resurgence. What is?

Narrative.

Whether you think the future is bright or dim, no favorable long-term change will occur unless we tell the right story.

Most narratives place the blame for crises on free markets. The story during the Great Depression was that capitalism had failed. With a few notable exceptions, it was only many years after the histories had been written that alternative explanations entered the discussion. How many bad policies were (and still are) enacted because of false narratives of the Depression?

Shaping narrative is more important than winning policy battles. A good policy in which the public has no faith will be charged with crimes it did not commit. A bad policy which the public loves will be credited with successes it did not achieve. Policy follows paths blazed by belief.

I do not believe we are headed for rock bottom. Market liberals have been in the limelight with the right story about the financial crisis. They may not have the loudest voices, but they have discredited simplistic antimarket explanations and forced further discussion.

But even if we are on a death spiral toward socialism, the only way back is clear and continuous communication of the causal connection between intervention and economic stagnation. Only if people hear the correct narrative on the way down will they know why they hit bottom and how to climb out.

In my weaker moments I think I’d love to see socialists live in the world their policies would create. But as long as I have to share that world, I don’t want to let it happen. Neither should you. Tell the right story.

Strategies for Advancing Liberty

I just read an excellent article by Murray Rothbard (circa 1989) called, “Four Strategies for Libertarian Change“.  Strategies for social change have long fascinated me. (I ran a student colloquium on the topic when I was with the Mackinac Center’s Students for a Free Economy)

In the article Rothbard describes four approaches with four historical examples and discusses the pros and cons of each.  The piece is entertaining and well worth a read on its own, but coupled with the response by my current colleague Steve Davies (starting on page 13 of the linked article) it is especially savory.  Davies largely finds Rothbard on point but happily advances the discussion further.  He corrects a few of Rothbard’s historical characterizations (Rothbard’s histories are always engaging, but often portray events and figures as more libertarian than they probably were), and adds a dose of Public Choice realism. Most interesting to me, however, is the addition of other potential strategies.

Davies mentions the seldom attempted but often fantasized strategy of letting things get so bad they eventually get better (which I briefly address in this Liberty Magazine Reflection, “Story Time“), and wisely warns against it.  He mentions the possibility of violent revolution and rightly dismisses it out of hand.  He mentions the libertopian approach of a mass defection from current societal arrangements but, Seasteaders not withstanding, considers this highly impractical if not fundamentally flawed.

The final strategy that Prof. Davies mentions is to me the most promising and intriguing, and probably has the best track-record historically, though it often goes unnoticed.  That is the idea that existing coercive institutions can be toppled not primarily by direct attack, but by subterfuge.  Rather than convincing people they should give up the status quo, which means convincing them to drop the perceived security of the known and embrace an unknowable future, or overturning it by force or via an elite cadre, instead create the alternative.  Convince the world that non-coercive institutions and solutions to social problems are preferable by showing them.  If this is done well the act of formally removing state institutions becomes almost a foregone conclusion or a mere formality.

Though Hayek espoused a more ideas-based view of social change in The Intellectuals and Socialism, the Davies approach is quite Hayekian in that it is more of a spontaneous than a planned order.  That makes is somewhat unsatisfying to us as libertarian “elite” intellectuals.  It’s messy, slow, unpredictable, and nearly always lacks that single climactic moment when freedom defeats statism.

Illustrative of how unsatisfying it can be, consider that we may be witnessing an example of this approach unfolding before our eyes in mail delivery.  Public Choice realities being what they are, the likelihood of toppling the state postal monopoly with any amount of education, policy paper publication, or direct civil disobedience is very slim.  (Ask Lysander Spooner.)  These efforts are not futile and, as Davies points out, work to compliment and aid the undermining process, but ultimately they cannot win the day alone.

We’ve seen the Post Office’s monopoly weaken with the advent of UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc.  We’ve seen it’s importance wane with new technologies like email.  Sure, policy battles have played a part in this process, but the real impetus was self-interest on the part of parcel delivery entrepreneurs.

It is likely that the Post Office will die a slow death – or maybe never even completely disappear on paper – but one day we will be so used to other methods of delivering goods and information that we will forget it ever existed.  I would not be surprised to see the public education system undermined in the same way.

The beauty of this method is that it does not require the agents of change to themselves be libertarian, only self-interested entrepreneurs.  Libertarian ideas still play a key role, as do policy and legal efforts, activism and education, but the real change comes when the alternatives to state programs are implemented rather than just talked about as possibilities.

Now a little twist.  This approach can be very powerful on an individual level when combined with Rothbard’s first strategy, a sort of Taoist retreatism.  In order to make society a happier and freer place, it helps to make oneself happier and freer first.  (This is the nut of an argument I made against worrying about elections and reading the news.)  We ought to focus less on what makes us unhappy and thwarts our freedom, and more on how to be as free as possible as individuals.  Just like UPS undermines the Post Office, we can undermine our own oppressive mindsets and internal institutions by building up freer alternatives underneath them.

I do not mean to be cute or self-helpish.  I genuinely believe that a social movement led by unhappy or internally unfree people is doomed to failure.  Occasionally retreating from the things we wish to change in the world and realizing that true freedom is not contingent on other people not only improves our own quality of life, but makes us much more attractive to the freedom philosophy’s would-be converts.

First free yourself.  Then work towards societal freedom by creating competing solutions to those offered by the state.  Simple, right?

Published in Libertarian Papers: Milton’s Areopagitica and Economic Freedom

My paper on John Milton’s Areopagitica was just published in Libertarian Papers: An Online Journal for Libertarian Scholarship.

Abstract: This article draws general economic arguments against central planning, state licensure and regulation from Milton’s Areopagitica, a 17th Century pamphlet on free-speech. Though Milton’s work was written primarily as a defense for moral man and a warning against religious encroachment by government it provides some of the best and most foundational general arguments, both moral and practical, against government intervention in any field. Milton’s accessible and persuasive style and his ability to combine practical and moral arguments made his work a monumental case against censorship. However, the work has more to offer than a defense of free-speech. Libertarian economists can find in Milton many compelling arguments against central planning, licensure and regulation which have been and should continue to be reiterated.

Check it out.