Freedom
Human freedom is historically rare. Most people who have ever lived were some form of subject of a ruler, with very few formal limits on what he could do to them. This kind of social structure is selected for by the forces that produced settled societies, with only a few inspirational exceptions.
It is no coincidence that the first slow, hesitant, frequently undone steps toward an ideal of universal rights and the efficiency of free markets coincided with the gradual Early Modern improvement of material standards of living, and that the Industrial Revolution came and grew as those ideals became more complete and practiced. This did not only produce material prosperity for Europeans or white Americans: the institutions those societies established increasingly welcomed those of other origins, first in theory, then in practice.
Freedom benefits people because they know their own preferences and their relative importance better than anyone else, and because they have the strongest incentive to maximize their own utility. In most cases, then, interference by others with one’s choices, whether by violent coercion or just social pressure, reduces one’s utility; those interfering either reduce the interferee’s utility for their own gain, or are optimizing based on insufficient information or thought (both inherently, and because their incentive to make good choices for a third party is lesser). Where property rights are well-defined and secure, this creates external benefits: by exploring new practices and ideas, individuals make discoveries that can be communicated to others and produce goods and services beneficial to them.
Even if people make suboptimal decisions about their own lives, these are at least their own decisions. It is not controversial to say that utility includes more than happiness, and it is reasonable to include a freedom component. What makes us as humans more than animals is the capacity for thought: to reason about one’s life and how one might improve it through one’s choices. A person who does not use that ability, because the state, society, or family makes all those choices for them, is lacking in an essential part of how we experience more utility than animals, and what it is to be a human being.
I consider myself the candidate who actually stands for free markets and free enterprise. Don Leonard advocates socialism, and Mike Carey as a “MAGA” Republican supports crony capitalism and a nationalist form of socialism. Both are collectivist mentalities, which assume that decisions should be made collectively by an economic class or nation, which are fictions with no real existence, and then enforced on the populace by government. The reality is that classes and nations are arbitrary groups of individuals, all of whom have their own sets of conflicting goals and values. Classes, nations, and governments cannot, and should not be pretended to have, rights. Individual people exist, and the role of government is to protect their rights.
This is why my slogan is “Freedom Is Optimal”.
Accountability and Personal Responsibility
One of the most insightful things I’ve heard someone say: “If you tell me the incentives, I can tell you the result.” While it is true that real humans are not automatically strategic, there is always at least a gradual drift towards behavior that is rewarded or subsidized, and away from behavior that is effectively punished.
This is the basic reason for the principle of accountability or personal responsibility: those who violate the rights of others must be made to pay compensation, either to the victim or to society.1 () This, and property rights, achieves what should be: people are made to pay for the costs they create, and allowed to capture the benefits they generate. Not only is this just, it means that one is incentivized to behave in socially beneficial ways, paying for not doing so and being paid for doing so. However, what is socially beneficial should be determined by the market, i.e., other citizens’ preferences in aggregate, not central planners or social engineers. Money reveals preferences, and expresses their strength, much better than votes.
I do not believe that someone should be considered the originator of costs at the end of causal chains passing through other people. For example, in Columbus, City Attorney Zack Klein has brought legal action against property owners for allowing homeless people on their own property, demanding the hiring of expensive security services or large financial penalties. One rationale for deeming this a nuisance was that those in the camp stole or damaged property in surrounding areas. But responsibility for this lies with the people living in the camps, who chose to commit theft or vandalism. The proper policy remedy is to arrest the thieves and vandals, and compel them to work to pay for the value of what they stole or damaged, or into mental health or drug addiction treatment if that is not possible given their mental state. (This has the additional advantage of allowing homeless people who are not criminals a stable place to stay.)
Something like pollution stands in contrast, where the result is an outcome of physical processes such that no other person than the polluter is responsible for the pollution’s effects. Pollution is aggression, as it intrudes on the property of others, and the collective property of humanity in the atmosphere and oceans, without their consent. Polluters should be made to compensate those whose property, including shared property such as the atmosphere, is negatively affected by their pollution.
Decentralization
I support the principle articulated in the Tenth Amendment: that power is only delegated to government by the people to the extent it acts in their self-interest, and should be able to be freely revoked from same at any time.
It is true that the states and their borders are largely path-dependent, and all but perhaps the two most recently admitted have massively transformed culturally, economically, and demographically since then. It is reasonable, then, to ask what significance these arbitrary units, ships of Theseus many times over, hold.
The legalistic answer is that this is the structure of our Constitutional order, but that is not a satisfactory answer. The Constitution was structured in that way to induce states to assent to it; if we wished, we could by an amendment or new constitutional convention overturn that system and create a unitary state like that of France. My point: this would be very inadvisable.
The United States of America is not, and never has been, a nation-state. At the time of the American Revolution, even those descended from English colonists had huge cultural differences: a person comparing the residents of western Virginia, Massachusetts, and South Carolina in 1740 by behavior and not appearance would be surprised to learn they come from the same country. There were other racial and cultural minorities: the Dutch in Pennsylvania and New York, French speakers in Maine, and free Africans throughout the country, some of which have never fully assimilated into a mainstream white American culture. Later cultural enclaves such as Irish and Italian neighborhoods or towns, African-American communities in the South and urban neighborhoods, Chinatowns, and distinct German areas persist to this day. To be sure, some of these places are characterized by violence, poverty, and other dysfunction. But I describe the reality of what America is, not whether things would be “better” if a magic wand could make everyone have the same culture.
This is the true logic of decentralization. The government in Washington DC does not and cannot understand these distinct communities. Erroneous assumptions made by lawmakers about how people will respond to the incentives laws create often have disastrous results, such as literally burning neighborhoods to the ground. Welfare programs cause some people to become permanent government dependents, while other groups don’t get the help they need because they’re too proud or afraid of community shame to ask for it in the prescribed manner. (SNAP destroyed the culture of food self-sufficiency through traditional hunting and fishing of Alaska Natives by causing reliance on processed food paid for by the government.) The interstate highway system destroyed existing communities both directly and through its huge implicit subsidy for the profoundly wasteful land and resource use that is suburban sprawl.
Further, the greater the variation in governance, the stronger the selection pressures. People will be free to “vote with their feet”, moving to states which have lower tax burdens, better public services, and governments that share their values.
The usual argument against this is the “race to the bottom”: that states will be forced to compete to slash regulations, taxes, and services. But as the private sector is better at providing most services than government, this is not a race to the bottom, but a race to the top. A real form of the problem is competition to provide special privileges for particular industries or businesses: subsidies, tax exemptions, and regulatory exemptions (either those not granted to other actors and thus creating unfair competition, or those which externalize costs such as pollution onto others). But this is already true, and it is limited by the ability of voters to reject paying higher taxes to fund such exemptions, and productive taxpayers’ ability to leave for other states.
- In contrast, prison sentences are intended to deter the behavior through punishment, or prevent the offender from committing similar offenses. The former is inefficient, and the latter is clearly ineffective given the nature of existence in prison. ↩︎