The circumstances of time, context, and perspective are like delicate filaments that connect the economic actor to the world. We risk destroying these with too many aggregates and abstractions.
The question of “moral truth” is inseparable from questions about the factual status of values – a value being some principle that must be chosen to sustain life. This is the starting point for Ayn Rand, who emphasizes the objective necessity of values for a creature of volitional consciousness. Whatever anyone may say about old Alice Rosenbaum, she got that much right.
Similarly, Sam Harris says that “Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.” That's pretty weak tea, since any offered example admits of obvious counter-examples.
Kant must have been dissatisfied with his own efforts to establish moral truth, since he offered several versions of his Moral Imperative, none of them compelling.
On the other hand, it seems dishonest to follow Hume, who defines “virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.” This statement weirdly admits the possibility of virtue in the absence of any objective moral truth. (Was this the seed of “existentialism”?)
Here is the problem: Those who ask for a “moral truth” typically want a truth of the same nature as a mathematical truth, that is, a truth universally true for all objective instances. But while 2+2=4 is always true for any objects offered for counting, it's impossible to give one universal prescription for every offered moral scenario. Nevertheless, I do hold that there are “moral truths,” but not of that nature.
If I had to give a formulaic answer, I'd say: A moral truth is any value recognized as promoting man's life as a rational animal.
If I were allowed a more suggestive answer – which gets at your question “‘recognized’ by whom?” – I'd say: Like a quantum particle that's objectively known by measuring one of its many aspects, we have partial knowledge of a moral truth by its being practiced by all those in a small community.
You're probably going to throw tomatoes at me when my Hume post comes out next week. I don't spill over too much into questions of metaethics, though, at least not yet. But I'm pretty Humean in this regard, too. I look forward to your insights, then.
The concept of subjective value in economics is important, and this discussion shows a strong understanding of it. To that extent, bravo!
BUT the article reminds me at times of someone driving a fire engine to an emergency site and spraying hoses, only it happens to be the site of a flood. Our society doesn't really suffer from too little deference to subjective value. We face a vast array of choices almost all the time, far more we could possibly assess. That's often innocuous, but sometimes distracting or confusing. And it tends to make community formation hard because people have so little in common. And many people ruin their lives through bad choices against which society hardly even warned them, being so relativistic and deferential to individual preferences and choices.
People are irrational in systematic ways that policy can exacerbate or exploit. I'm very reluctant to coerce from paternalistic motives, but if you can really be a "libertarian paternalist" and influence people for their good simply by structuring choices, that's worth doing. And exhortation, persuasion, advocacy, good self-help books -- that's all fine, and praiseworthy and valuable if the advice is good. Don't let subjective value theory dissuade the wise from imposing their values on the young through persuasion! We need more of that!
Oh my, "Don't let subjective value theory dissuade the wise from imposing their values on the young through persuasion! We need more of that!" I worry about the term "imposing," but I certainly agree. You're evidently a latecomer to Underthrow, and I have spilled a lot of pixels here on moral reasoning and moral practice--and wisdom.
Now, It would be one thing to persuade people of what they ought to do in the sense of instrumental rationality, something like: "if you want to live a long time, you ought not to smoke" or "If you want your children to grow up healthy and increase their likelihood of success, you ought to endeavor to work through problems with your spouse and stay in their lives." And there are, of course, purely normative claims that are sound advice, too. There are certainly wise people who make good suggestions and offer good advice. Seeking wisdom and counsel is something more people ought to do! "Imposing" regulatory nudges on 325 million people from Washington, say, is probably not a good idea, especially through the tax code. The thing is, there is a vast gulf between offering someone wise counsel and setting up a default choice architecture that raises the costs for them to make the right choice FOR THEM. The sad fact is, once you give the philosopher kings, Platonists, and paternalists set the power to set choice architectures for everyone, they will invariably apply crude Rationalism that runs counter to considerations Oakeshott and Hayek understood, for example. There is a deeply local and communitarian and context-dependent dimension to wisdom and good advice. Nudging can threaten that.
"And there are, of course, purely normative claims that are sound advice, too."
Is that claim incompatible with subjectivism about values?
On "regulatory nudges" via the tax code, I would quibble on merely semantic grounds. What's interesting about the concept of a "nudge," and the ideas of "libertarian paternalism" that it encapsulates, is that it claims to offer ways that policy can usefully influence behavior without coercion. But the tax code is coercive. So does incentivization of good behavior through the tax code qualify as a "nudge?" In general, "libertarian paternalism" seems fairly innocuous but rather vacuous, unless it's just a Trojan horse for a larger statist agenda, as might sometimes be the case.
But more generally, I think the idea of subjective value, which is valid and helpful in a limited way, is one that our society has somewhat overlearned, to its cost. Many questions related to self-binding, to the imposition of obligations on future selves by present selves, illustrate the problem. We don't allow people to sell themselves into slavery, rightly, although pure "freedom of contract" would imply that we should. We allow no-fault divorce, which is another way to say that we don't allow people to really bind themselves into a marriage, as most other societies *have* allowed them to do, and that has done great damage. And yet policy has tended to encourage indebtedness for certain purposes, for homeownership or school, and we have overridden old taboos against lending at interest, for good (entrepreneurship) and ill (payday lending to spendthrifts with poor impulse control). It's all a muddle, and the way to rationalize it isn't to go to extremes but to bring to these interconnected questions of self-binding a robust concept of human *telos* that can help us discern whether particular kinds of promises tend to contribute to genuine human flourishing, and should be condoned and given legal force, or don't, and should be left to the private sphere and not given the backing of the law. But our excessive agnosticism about what the good life for man consists in leaves us unable to do that.
1. It depends on whether you mean metaethics or normative ethics. I am a skeptic on the first -- there is no such thing as an objective value -- but I believe we can contrive intersubjective agreement to practice a form of normative ethics, perhaps via instrumental rationality. So, instead of YOU OUGHT DO X BECAUSE X IS OBJECTIVELY WRONG, you get IF YOU WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WITH X, you ought to do Y, as Y is more likely to bring about Z. I realize this seems a bit consequentialist, but more on duties and virtues later. I like 'em all. Still a skeptic about second-order ethics, or objective moral properties, though.
2. What I mean by nudges in the tax code is not that taxation is not coercive, but that it creates incentives through deductions and benefits. So, for example, you can choose not to avail yourself of a home mortgage deduction, but most people take 'em. There are myriad other nudges like this in the tax code, which are libertarian paternalist carrots, whereas taxation writ large is of course, one great big stick.
3. The idea that no-fault divorce or mutual dissolution of marriage "has done great damage" has also arguably done great good. Now, you might say that 'studies show children of families fare better when parents stay married,' (or I should say FORCED to stay married), or 'encourages infidelity,' or whatever... Forgive me or saying so, but it's a very heavy-handed Christian way of thinking, one that goes back to these bedeviling aggregates, and Lord help me, the very idea of a collective human telos that doesn't exist. Even if we stipulate that 56% of people who are forced to do x fare well and 44% do not, that could be millions of people who are denied flourishing, I dare say teloi, that you couldn't possible understand, much less Cass Sunstein -- you know, like the wife of a philandering wife beater or caustic control freak who could have gotten out early when both were merely unhappy.
Ask yourself whether any such paternalism, "libertarian" or otherwise, comports with the beautiful vision of the Golden Rule you set out the other day. (And no post hoc rationalization, please!)
On paternalism and the Golden Rule, it is of course very easy to come up with situations where doing unto others as you would have them do unto you would point to some kind of paternalism. Take trans fats as an example. I'm not very knowledgeable about nutrition, and I don't want what I eat very carefully. Yet I do want to be healthy. So if there is some ingredient that's present in a lot of food that public health officials know is definitely bad for me, I would generally like them to remove it from the food supply, so that I don't have to be bothered with that myself. It seems to follow that if I were a public health official trying to practice the Golden Rule, I might conclude that I should remove from the food supply ingredients, which, from the position of an ordinary ignorant citizen, I would want removed from my diet. I don't necessarily endorse that argument, I don't think it has enough of the presumption of liberty in it, but simply as a proof of concept that paternalism can be consistent with the Golden Rule, I think it serves well enough.
Now, on divorce, one reason that it's hardly fair to call it a heavy-handed Christian perspective is that most other faiths and cultures also restrict divorce to a greater or lesser extent. No fault divorce makes modern America an outlier not only with respect to the Christian West down the centuries, but with respect to most of human history. But never mind that, I want to focus on something else.
Start from the concept of freedom of contract. Let's say that I can borrow as much money as I want, promise as much labor as I want, commit myself for the future in any way I wish. I think it's a familiar idea. Some people would make it to kind of tenet of libertarianism. One controversial implication of it is that you could sell yourself into slavery, to pay a debt, say, or pay for a medical operation for a relative. Most libertarians, perhaps, wouldn't endorse that, and some may never have thought about it, but for some, it would be a mark of hardcore libertarianism. But even if you wouldn't go as far as that, a freedom to bind oneself pretty aggressively would be a typical libertarian principle. For example, libertarians would tend to oppose laws against usury, on the ground that if people want to borrow money at 20% interest or 50% interest, that's their affair and no one else's business. And of course, if, ex post, they want to disclaim the debt, a libertarian would typically say that they're bound by their contract. That's part of property rights. Does all this makes sense so far?
If so, apply it to marriage. Suppose that I and a woman want to get married, and that means, to us, that we want to make a binding promise for life that we cannot abrogate. Like the debtor borrowing money at 5% or 10% or whatever, we want to make a promise which we will be held to in future, and we desire that law and society should hold us accountable for our promise. The debtor also wants law and society to hold him accountable for his promise, because if they won't, then the creditor wouldn't trust him to repay, and wouldn't lend him the money, so legal accountability is necessary to the debtor's purposes. So with marriage: the woman I want to marry might not trust me enough to devote her life to me. Unless law and society stand ready to hold me accountable. I might reasonably want the ability to bind myself in marriage in a way that I can't get out of at will. Or, I might want a woman to bind herself to me in a way that she can't get out of easily, and be willing to make a like promise in return.
In most historic societies, people could do that. Now you can't.
This isn't an argument that the change is for the better or for the worse. There are arguments on both sides. But the concepts of "paternalism" and "coercion" don't really help much when it comes to how the law should enforce your own promises against yourself.
I don't know how you find the time to write these lengthy comments, but I do appreciate them. I have to be short today, to earn a crust: 1) Your libertarian-paternalism + Golden Rule seems to be arguing from a position from a guy who didn't study under (and write a book with) a master of public choice economics. So we can wish and hope all day long that a regulatory nudger will create better choices architectures, the incentives to do otherwise are far too strong, as my 1980s Food Pyramid example demonstrates. Add also high carb, low fat diets, which it took a network of insurgents against 'experts' and nudgers; to upend. (Again, I'm okay with private nudging because that can generate a discovery process. Nudging as public policy is destructive.)
In terms of the worldwide acceptance of fault-only divorce, there is worldwide acceptance of single-payer healthcare, of dictatorship, and of other faiths besides Christianity. So I don't think you really want to argue from the preponderance of any idea. This is argument ad populum.
In terms of the libertarian idea of contract, marriage in the United States is an artifact of statute law (which nudges), not contract law. Indeed, this opens the door to my point about why nudging via statute is bad. Indeed, in contract law, people can making any such agreement as they please, perhaps even the agreement to never, ever sever! But many would not. Most would likely make provisions that make it hard to separate, but allow for the subtle, sub-tort injuries of people who don't love each other anymore. Now, understand that I am a big fan of marriage, but I have learned the hard way the need for bespoke agreements. Indeed, when my fiance and I get married next May, we will have a preliminary agreement in place that protects everyone involved. In short, I just don't buy the idea that yoking people to each other as policy represents a "net good" in society. Couples may or may not be good at making such determinations for themselves. But distant bureaucrats are way too removed from the circumstances of time and place to create statutory boxes for people to tick and then inhabit in perpetuity.
"1) Your libertarian-paternalism + Golden Rule seems to be arguing from a position from a guy who didn't study under (and write a book with) a master of public choice economics."
Wow! It's pleasant to have an interlocutor who knows such things about my personal history! :) And I like being held accountable for my background like this. It has some relationship to the virtue of faith, of consistency over time.
So let me say: Public choice takes its starting point from analyzing government as if it were comprised of the same kind of selfish, rational agents who are usually assumed in economic theory to populate the private market economy. This project yields an overwhelming tide of reasons why "government failures" due to the misalignment of the individual interests of legislators, judges, bureaucrats, kings, etc. with the public interest, similar to the "market failures" in the private economy but much more severe. BUT all of this depends on government being comprised of selfish, rational agents. It isn't; and neither are private markets. Real people are less rational and more altruistic, sometimes much more altruistic, than *homo economicus.* That often makes both real democracy and real capitalism work better than theoretical government and capitalism in the world of *homo economicus* would. And that sheds some light on why I went out of my way to say I didn't really endorse the example of Golden Rule-based paternalism that I offered as a theoretical proof of concept; government tends to be pretty dysfunctional, and that's one good reason-- not the only one-- to have a pretty strong commitment to the presumption of liberty. But it's still not easy to make a convincing principled argument against something like a ban of trans fats. At the end of the day, it can happen, and often does, that legislators and bureaucrats just do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do. It's a mistake to think that public choice gives you ironclad reasons to rule out the possibility. There's also a lot of ineradicable stupidity in government, and public choice economics is helpful for popping the bubble of blind faith in democracy. Even when democracy does work well, that has as much to do with culture and the virtues of individuals than with the system. In theory, democracy should never be able to work. That it often does work decently in practice is because of virtue and Christianity and stuff like that.
"In terms of the worldwide acceptance of fault-only divorce, there is worldwide acceptance of single-payer healthcare, of dictatorship, and of other faiths besides Christianity. So I don't think you really want to argue from the preponderance of any idea. This is argument ad populum."
That's right. I was only making the semantic point that advocacy of binding marriage is not "a very heavy-handed Christian way of thinking," or specifically Christian in particular. It channels human traditions much broader than Christianity, but that doesn't make it right. Or at least, I'm not trying to appeal to the authority of broad human tradition to establish the conclusion.
I didn't get to the heart of the mater; maybe later...
Hi Max, nice article. I think the issue with the labor theory of value goes deeper.
If a person makes a T-shirt and sells it for $100, that’s $100 in sales revenue, not wages. If there are no money expenses, that is $100 in profits, not wages.
If a person uses $50 in materials and capital to produce a T-shirt, transporting costs are $10 and he sells it for $100, the person has made $40 in profit, not wages.
If the person pays someone to work for them to produce a T-shirt, the wages come out of his capital and the profits. It’s not profits that comes out of the wages, so Marx, Ricardo and even Adam Smith got it all backwards.
Yessir! Well said. We can add that even if it *were* possible to calculate the value of risk, objectively, that’s not something the laborer has to take compared to the investors and entrepreneurs.
The question of “moral truth” is inseparable from questions about the factual status of values – a value being some principle that must be chosen to sustain life. This is the starting point for Ayn Rand, who emphasizes the objective necessity of values for a creature of volitional consciousness. Whatever anyone may say about old Alice Rosenbaum, she got that much right.
Similarly, Sam Harris says that “Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.” That's pretty weak tea, since any offered example admits of obvious counter-examples.
Kant must have been dissatisfied with his own efforts to establish moral truth, since he offered several versions of his Moral Imperative, none of them compelling.
On the other hand, it seems dishonest to follow Hume, who defines “virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.” This statement weirdly admits the possibility of virtue in the absence of any objective moral truth. (Was this the seed of “existentialism”?)
Here is the problem: Those who ask for a “moral truth” typically want a truth of the same nature as a mathematical truth, that is, a truth universally true for all objective instances. But while 2+2=4 is always true for any objects offered for counting, it's impossible to give one universal prescription for every offered moral scenario. Nevertheless, I do hold that there are “moral truths,” but not of that nature.
If I had to give a formulaic answer, I'd say: A moral truth is any value recognized as promoting man's life as a rational animal.
If I were allowed a more suggestive answer – which gets at your question “‘recognized’ by whom?” – I'd say: Like a quantum particle that's objectively known by measuring one of its many aspects, we have partial knowledge of a moral truth by its being practiced by all those in a small community.
You're probably going to throw tomatoes at me when my Hume post comes out next week. I don't spill over too much into questions of metaethics, though, at least not yet. But I'm pretty Humean in this regard, too. I look forward to your insights, then.
The concept of subjective value in economics is important, and this discussion shows a strong understanding of it. To that extent, bravo!
BUT the article reminds me at times of someone driving a fire engine to an emergency site and spraying hoses, only it happens to be the site of a flood. Our society doesn't really suffer from too little deference to subjective value. We face a vast array of choices almost all the time, far more we could possibly assess. That's often innocuous, but sometimes distracting or confusing. And it tends to make community formation hard because people have so little in common. And many people ruin their lives through bad choices against which society hardly even warned them, being so relativistic and deferential to individual preferences and choices.
People are irrational in systematic ways that policy can exacerbate or exploit. I'm very reluctant to coerce from paternalistic motives, but if you can really be a "libertarian paternalist" and influence people for their good simply by structuring choices, that's worth doing. And exhortation, persuasion, advocacy, good self-help books -- that's all fine, and praiseworthy and valuable if the advice is good. Don't let subjective value theory dissuade the wise from imposing their values on the young through persuasion! We need more of that!
Oh my, "Don't let subjective value theory dissuade the wise from imposing their values on the young through persuasion! We need more of that!" I worry about the term "imposing," but I certainly agree. You're evidently a latecomer to Underthrow, and I have spilled a lot of pixels here on moral reasoning and moral practice--and wisdom.
Now, It would be one thing to persuade people of what they ought to do in the sense of instrumental rationality, something like: "if you want to live a long time, you ought not to smoke" or "If you want your children to grow up healthy and increase their likelihood of success, you ought to endeavor to work through problems with your spouse and stay in their lives." And there are, of course, purely normative claims that are sound advice, too. There are certainly wise people who make good suggestions and offer good advice. Seeking wisdom and counsel is something more people ought to do! "Imposing" regulatory nudges on 325 million people from Washington, say, is probably not a good idea, especially through the tax code. The thing is, there is a vast gulf between offering someone wise counsel and setting up a default choice architecture that raises the costs for them to make the right choice FOR THEM. The sad fact is, once you give the philosopher kings, Platonists, and paternalists set the power to set choice architectures for everyone, they will invariably apply crude Rationalism that runs counter to considerations Oakeshott and Hayek understood, for example. There is a deeply local and communitarian and context-dependent dimension to wisdom and good advice. Nudging can threaten that.
"And there are, of course, purely normative claims that are sound advice, too."
Is that claim incompatible with subjectivism about values?
On "regulatory nudges" via the tax code, I would quibble on merely semantic grounds. What's interesting about the concept of a "nudge," and the ideas of "libertarian paternalism" that it encapsulates, is that it claims to offer ways that policy can usefully influence behavior without coercion. But the tax code is coercive. So does incentivization of good behavior through the tax code qualify as a "nudge?" In general, "libertarian paternalism" seems fairly innocuous but rather vacuous, unless it's just a Trojan horse for a larger statist agenda, as might sometimes be the case.
But more generally, I think the idea of subjective value, which is valid and helpful in a limited way, is one that our society has somewhat overlearned, to its cost. Many questions related to self-binding, to the imposition of obligations on future selves by present selves, illustrate the problem. We don't allow people to sell themselves into slavery, rightly, although pure "freedom of contract" would imply that we should. We allow no-fault divorce, which is another way to say that we don't allow people to really bind themselves into a marriage, as most other societies *have* allowed them to do, and that has done great damage. And yet policy has tended to encourage indebtedness for certain purposes, for homeownership or school, and we have overridden old taboos against lending at interest, for good (entrepreneurship) and ill (payday lending to spendthrifts with poor impulse control). It's all a muddle, and the way to rationalize it isn't to go to extremes but to bring to these interconnected questions of self-binding a robust concept of human *telos* that can help us discern whether particular kinds of promises tend to contribute to genuine human flourishing, and should be condoned and given legal force, or don't, and should be left to the private sphere and not given the backing of the law. But our excessive agnosticism about what the good life for man consists in leaves us unable to do that.
Running out of time today, but...
1. It depends on whether you mean metaethics or normative ethics. I am a skeptic on the first -- there is no such thing as an objective value -- but I believe we can contrive intersubjective agreement to practice a form of normative ethics, perhaps via instrumental rationality. So, instead of YOU OUGHT DO X BECAUSE X IS OBJECTIVELY WRONG, you get IF YOU WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WITH X, you ought to do Y, as Y is more likely to bring about Z. I realize this seems a bit consequentialist, but more on duties and virtues later. I like 'em all. Still a skeptic about second-order ethics, or objective moral properties, though.
2. What I mean by nudges in the tax code is not that taxation is not coercive, but that it creates incentives through deductions and benefits. So, for example, you can choose not to avail yourself of a home mortgage deduction, but most people take 'em. There are myriad other nudges like this in the tax code, which are libertarian paternalist carrots, whereas taxation writ large is of course, one great big stick.
3. The idea that no-fault divorce or mutual dissolution of marriage "has done great damage" has also arguably done great good. Now, you might say that 'studies show children of families fare better when parents stay married,' (or I should say FORCED to stay married), or 'encourages infidelity,' or whatever... Forgive me or saying so, but it's a very heavy-handed Christian way of thinking, one that goes back to these bedeviling aggregates, and Lord help me, the very idea of a collective human telos that doesn't exist. Even if we stipulate that 56% of people who are forced to do x fare well and 44% do not, that could be millions of people who are denied flourishing, I dare say teloi, that you couldn't possible understand, much less Cass Sunstein -- you know, like the wife of a philandering wife beater or caustic control freak who could have gotten out early when both were merely unhappy.
Ask yourself whether any such paternalism, "libertarian" or otherwise, comports with the beautiful vision of the Golden Rule you set out the other day. (And no post hoc rationalization, please!)
Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Hold on!
On paternalism and the Golden Rule, it is of course very easy to come up with situations where doing unto others as you would have them do unto you would point to some kind of paternalism. Take trans fats as an example. I'm not very knowledgeable about nutrition, and I don't want what I eat very carefully. Yet I do want to be healthy. So if there is some ingredient that's present in a lot of food that public health officials know is definitely bad for me, I would generally like them to remove it from the food supply, so that I don't have to be bothered with that myself. It seems to follow that if I were a public health official trying to practice the Golden Rule, I might conclude that I should remove from the food supply ingredients, which, from the position of an ordinary ignorant citizen, I would want removed from my diet. I don't necessarily endorse that argument, I don't think it has enough of the presumption of liberty in it, but simply as a proof of concept that paternalism can be consistent with the Golden Rule, I think it serves well enough.
Now, on divorce, one reason that it's hardly fair to call it a heavy-handed Christian perspective is that most other faiths and cultures also restrict divorce to a greater or lesser extent. No fault divorce makes modern America an outlier not only with respect to the Christian West down the centuries, but with respect to most of human history. But never mind that, I want to focus on something else.
Start from the concept of freedom of contract. Let's say that I can borrow as much money as I want, promise as much labor as I want, commit myself for the future in any way I wish. I think it's a familiar idea. Some people would make it to kind of tenet of libertarianism. One controversial implication of it is that you could sell yourself into slavery, to pay a debt, say, or pay for a medical operation for a relative. Most libertarians, perhaps, wouldn't endorse that, and some may never have thought about it, but for some, it would be a mark of hardcore libertarianism. But even if you wouldn't go as far as that, a freedom to bind oneself pretty aggressively would be a typical libertarian principle. For example, libertarians would tend to oppose laws against usury, on the ground that if people want to borrow money at 20% interest or 50% interest, that's their affair and no one else's business. And of course, if, ex post, they want to disclaim the debt, a libertarian would typically say that they're bound by their contract. That's part of property rights. Does all this makes sense so far?
If so, apply it to marriage. Suppose that I and a woman want to get married, and that means, to us, that we want to make a binding promise for life that we cannot abrogate. Like the debtor borrowing money at 5% or 10% or whatever, we want to make a promise which we will be held to in future, and we desire that law and society should hold us accountable for our promise. The debtor also wants law and society to hold him accountable for his promise, because if they won't, then the creditor wouldn't trust him to repay, and wouldn't lend him the money, so legal accountability is necessary to the debtor's purposes. So with marriage: the woman I want to marry might not trust me enough to devote her life to me. Unless law and society stand ready to hold me accountable. I might reasonably want the ability to bind myself in marriage in a way that I can't get out of at will. Or, I might want a woman to bind herself to me in a way that she can't get out of easily, and be willing to make a like promise in return.
In most historic societies, people could do that. Now you can't.
This isn't an argument that the change is for the better or for the worse. There are arguments on both sides. But the concepts of "paternalism" and "coercion" don't really help much when it comes to how the law should enforce your own promises against yourself.
I don't know how you find the time to write these lengthy comments, but I do appreciate them. I have to be short today, to earn a crust: 1) Your libertarian-paternalism + Golden Rule seems to be arguing from a position from a guy who didn't study under (and write a book with) a master of public choice economics. So we can wish and hope all day long that a regulatory nudger will create better choices architectures, the incentives to do otherwise are far too strong, as my 1980s Food Pyramid example demonstrates. Add also high carb, low fat diets, which it took a network of insurgents against 'experts' and nudgers; to upend. (Again, I'm okay with private nudging because that can generate a discovery process. Nudging as public policy is destructive.)
In terms of the worldwide acceptance of fault-only divorce, there is worldwide acceptance of single-payer healthcare, of dictatorship, and of other faiths besides Christianity. So I don't think you really want to argue from the preponderance of any idea. This is argument ad populum.
In terms of the libertarian idea of contract, marriage in the United States is an artifact of statute law (which nudges), not contract law. Indeed, this opens the door to my point about why nudging via statute is bad. Indeed, in contract law, people can making any such agreement as they please, perhaps even the agreement to never, ever sever! But many would not. Most would likely make provisions that make it hard to separate, but allow for the subtle, sub-tort injuries of people who don't love each other anymore. Now, understand that I am a big fan of marriage, but I have learned the hard way the need for bespoke agreements. Indeed, when my fiance and I get married next May, we will have a preliminary agreement in place that protects everyone involved. In short, I just don't buy the idea that yoking people to each other as policy represents a "net good" in society. Couples may or may not be good at making such determinations for themselves. But distant bureaucrats are way too removed from the circumstances of time and place to create statutory boxes for people to tick and then inhabit in perpetuity.
"1) Your libertarian-paternalism + Golden Rule seems to be arguing from a position from a guy who didn't study under (and write a book with) a master of public choice economics."
Wow! It's pleasant to have an interlocutor who knows such things about my personal history! :) And I like being held accountable for my background like this. It has some relationship to the virtue of faith, of consistency over time.
So let me say: Public choice takes its starting point from analyzing government as if it were comprised of the same kind of selfish, rational agents who are usually assumed in economic theory to populate the private market economy. This project yields an overwhelming tide of reasons why "government failures" due to the misalignment of the individual interests of legislators, judges, bureaucrats, kings, etc. with the public interest, similar to the "market failures" in the private economy but much more severe. BUT all of this depends on government being comprised of selfish, rational agents. It isn't; and neither are private markets. Real people are less rational and more altruistic, sometimes much more altruistic, than *homo economicus.* That often makes both real democracy and real capitalism work better than theoretical government and capitalism in the world of *homo economicus* would. And that sheds some light on why I went out of my way to say I didn't really endorse the example of Golden Rule-based paternalism that I offered as a theoretical proof of concept; government tends to be pretty dysfunctional, and that's one good reason-- not the only one-- to have a pretty strong commitment to the presumption of liberty. But it's still not easy to make a convincing principled argument against something like a ban of trans fats. At the end of the day, it can happen, and often does, that legislators and bureaucrats just do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do. It's a mistake to think that public choice gives you ironclad reasons to rule out the possibility. There's also a lot of ineradicable stupidity in government, and public choice economics is helpful for popping the bubble of blind faith in democracy. Even when democracy does work well, that has as much to do with culture and the virtues of individuals than with the system. In theory, democracy should never be able to work. That it often does work decently in practice is because of virtue and Christianity and stuff like that.
"In terms of the worldwide acceptance of fault-only divorce, there is worldwide acceptance of single-payer healthcare, of dictatorship, and of other faiths besides Christianity. So I don't think you really want to argue from the preponderance of any idea. This is argument ad populum."
That's right. I was only making the semantic point that advocacy of binding marriage is not "a very heavy-handed Christian way of thinking," or specifically Christian in particular. It channels human traditions much broader than Christianity, but that doesn't make it right. Or at least, I'm not trying to appeal to the authority of broad human tradition to establish the conclusion.
I didn't get to the heart of the mater; maybe later...
Hi Max, nice article. I think the issue with the labor theory of value goes deeper.
If a person makes a T-shirt and sells it for $100, that’s $100 in sales revenue, not wages. If there are no money expenses, that is $100 in profits, not wages.
If a person uses $50 in materials and capital to produce a T-shirt, transporting costs are $10 and he sells it for $100, the person has made $40 in profit, not wages.
If the person pays someone to work for them to produce a T-shirt, the wages come out of his capital and the profits. It’s not profits that comes out of the wages, so Marx, Ricardo and even Adam Smith got it all backwards.
See George Resiman explain it all here, https://mises.org/library/classical-economics-vs-exploitation-theory.
Cheers
Yessir! Well said. We can add that even if it *were* possible to calculate the value of risk, objectively, that’s not something the laborer has to take compared to the investors and entrepreneurs.