Why do we disagree?

This question matters.  It determines the scope of debate and helps us understand differing viewpoints.  It is also answered with confusion or misinformation with hilarious frequency.  I'll touch on how to think about these disagreements and briefly highlight some examples of confusion in the tax and voter ID debates.  Anyway, why do we disagree?

In politics, it seems to come down to a few things:

1. Differing, empirically testable, ideas about the world (facts)
2. Differing, empirically testable, ideas about how the world works (models)
3. Differing ideas about the proper values and goals of society 
4. Differing ideas about the proper powers of government

or, if you like:

1. What is the world like?
2. What can we do about it?
3. What should we do about it?
4. How shouldn't we do it?

None of that is terribly controversial, but I think that people often confuse the origins of their disagreement.  

I often, for instance, hear conservatives saying that the government shouldn't raise taxes on the rich, but depending on who you talk to, the answer to why varies a lot.  For some it is "because they are job creators", but for others it is "because it isn't fair".  These world views have the same conclusion, but different implications.  We can, to some extent, test the proposition that raising taxes will mean less job creation.  If a person genuinely believes this to be the primary reason not to raise taxes on the rich, then empirical arguments are the most appropriate forum of discussion.  For the "it isn't fair" person, the proper arguments are philosophical--diminishing marginal utility, &c.  Of course, people often convolve many different types of reasons, or simply hold positions as an aspect of group identity, but the basic point still stands.

Now, I don't think it is impossible to convince people to change their positions in 3 & 4 type disagreements, but it's substantially harder.  It is, however, possible to give people better access to facts, and in many cases that changes the nature of the discussion for the better.

Presenting evidence of the extremely low incidence of voter ID fraud, for instance, seems to have shifted the debate from "we need to curb rampant voter ID fraud" to "it is right and proper for voters to show ID in order to vote".  In other words, the debate has shifted from an empirical one to an ideological one.  From my perspective, that is good, because ideological questions are the only valid questions to ask voters in my idealized constitutional anarchy model of government.   Voters are, in fact, quite bad at discerning which facts and models best reflect the real world.  But, they are excellent at determining what they think are good goals to focus on as a society, and what they think are categorically unacceptable ways of achieving those goals.

I'll have more on practical applications of this idea, and ways in which it might help move the debate forward in a later post.

A Libertarian model for Government Funding

Libertarian morality basically works around two fundamental property rights.  Each person owns their own body, and the bounty of nature is owned by all.  By trade, and by fair access to the bounty of nature, things are produced, exchanged, and improved, and the engines of capitalism start to fire.  In this model, the important thing is to ensure that property rights and contract law (which is really just an extension of property right to include the right to exchange) are protected.  Interestingly, this provides a clear area for the proper operation and implementation of government - counter to the anarcho-capitalist ideas that seem to follow necessarily from libertarianism.  Note, that the libertarian arguments for anarchism differ starkly from the arguments I have presented here earlier.  Frankly, I find the moral autonomy argument for anarchism much stronger than that of libertarianism, but I think it's worth exploring the libertarian ideas because they seem to dominate political discourse in a lot of ways.

The fundamental moral logic behind libertarianism is that each person possesses his or her own body, and all the things s/he creates using things fairly traded or gotten from the bounty of nature.  Now, the commonly recognized flaw in this kind of morality is that the "bounty" of nature isn't all that bountiful when you compare it to the entire needs of the human race over all of history.  In some sense, libertarians concede that we collectively own natural resources, but argue that they aren't scarce enough to spend time fighting over.  Unsurprisingly, this causes some issues when the resources in question really are scarce.  Another way of thinking about this is that libertarians believe that the only truly scarce resource is human labor.  Anyway, this collective ownership of natural resources combined with the scarcity problem provides what I see as an interesting niche for government.  Here's the plan.

Each nation is the sole owner of "nature" within its borders.  In other words, it owns all the land, all the air, all the sea, all the wildlife, basically all the stuff that isn't people or made by people.  It derives this right because it represents the people not just now but in the past and future... those people who collectively own all of nature's bounty.  They then rent the use of portions of that natural bounty to the entrepreneurs who want to use it.  They levy this rent... let's call it a tax... based on the market value of the nature, and on the expected risk of damage to nature by the tenant.  Just as landlords charge premiums for pets, the government might charge premiums for, say, high pollution.  The government then can invest this money in the protection and improvement of its property.  They improve their property by making it a more attractive place to live... increasing competition for the property and allowing them to increase rents. Offering universal healthcare, or utilities, or cleaner facilities, or safer business environments to occupants might all be value increasing ways to spend that money.  Now, in some sense, the government is a monopolist, but since the people who are competing for the resources it provides are in fact the owners of the government, the monopoly doesn't provide the leverage necessary to properly enable extortionary pricing. I think we can reasonably argue about whether or not this is the best way to manage the shared ownership of nature, but it does seem to be fundamentally compatible with libertarianism, which is win enough for me.  Any problems?

Bounds on Taxation (part 1)

I was recently asked to put some concrete bounds on what I think acceptable levels of taxation are.  This seems like a reasonable question, and I put out so much pie-in-the-sky stuff that I figure it's worthwhile to lay out what sort of constraints I tend to think under.  So, first some general principles:

1. Taxes should never make you earn less money when you make more money.
2. No one should ever have to choose between paying taxes and purchasing essential goods and services... if you can't afford a place to live and food to eat you shouldn't have to pay taxes
3. Governance without taxation is clearly impossible, so let's not pretend that 0% taxes across the board are possible or desirable.

Together, these principles suggest a stepped tax code basically similar to the one we have today.  It protects the poor from having to choose between obeying the law and eating, and it protects the rich from losing money by making money.  Now, this isn't terribly constructive, since no serious proposal violates these constraints, so let's see if I can't get further into things next time.

Practical Anarchy

Last post I discussed Wolff's book In Defense of Anarchism and promised to talk about a potential way out of his assertion that no practical government can have moral legitimacy.  Now I'm following through on that promise.  So Wolff puts forth that Unanimous Direct Democracy can have authority without undermining personal moral autonomy.  Within that section, he points out that even arbitration can be codified within such a system.  Those two points are the basis for my idea of a practical form of governance by practical direct democracy.  I need a catchy term for this form of government.  Here are the ingredients I think we need to make this work.

1. Unanimous passage of items in a bill of rights.
2. Unanimous passage of a process for ascertaining the best ways to guarantee these rights.

It seems to me that the vast majority of politics isn't about the right thing to do, it's about the right way to do it.  Democrats and Republicans alike agree that people have a right to life, for instance, and that the taking of a life without due process and control is unacceptable, they disagree on the best way of ensuring that life taking is minimized.  In our government, there is no mechanism for finding the best way, testing enacted laws to verify they are in fact improving the situation, or rigorously studying the impact of our legal strategies at all.

I think that a large and diverse group of people could agree upon a significant number of fundamental rights if asked to consider merely the right thing without concern for its implications or practical significance.

Then comes the tricky part.  This group of people would need to agree on a mechanism for developing procedures to protect the rights they have codified.  This is akin to an arbitration process.  Personally, I would advocate the scientific method.  Allow people to propose mechanisms for enhancing protections of the codified rights.  Require rigor in these proposals.  In other words, place the burden on the bill writer to demonstrate that the bill does not contradict existing rights, and has a plausible mechanism for enhancing the support or protection of one of those rights, and provides metrics by which the impact of the bill could be measured.  Select several proposals at random, and apply them to test groups determined in an appropriately random and statistically rigorous manner.  If the law is found to violate existing rights by some unintended consequence it is immediately abolished.  If, after an appropriate trial period, the law is found not to significantly improve the metric(s) it provided, it is abolished.  If it succeeds in improving its metrics appropriately, its scope is progressively expanded, its impacts reverified, and its consistency with the bill of rights reevaluated, until such time as it is implemented nationwide.  Following nationwide implementation, bills are periodically reviewed for consistency with the bill of rights (though their efficacy is no longer tested as there is no control population).

I think that a large number of people could agree to this strategy or one like it, and I think that such a governance strategy would create a government capable of developing a recognizable and appropriately far reaching legal code without undermining the moral autonomy of the population.  Let's call it a Constitutional Anarchy.  This is my current best effort with regards to an ideal form of governance, and it is basically going to be the yardstick by which I judge ongoing legal and political discussions in the US.

Here are the questions I would ask of any law or political policy.

1. Does it attempt to protect or enhance a universally acknowledged right? (answer should be yes)
2. Does it impede any universally acknowledged rights? (answer should be no)
3. Does it provide rigorous support for its chosen strategy? (answer should be yes)
4. Does it provide for the measurement of its impact, and repeal if shown to be ineffective? (answer should be yes)

I think those are in order of importance, but I'd say that giving the wrong answer to any of 1-3 should be a deal breaker.