Tyler Cowen is one of the smartest, most able people I’ve ever known. He’s also among the wisest. I mention his wisdom — sincerely so — because in his recent post at Marginal Revolution on The Libertarian Vice Tyler accurately describes himself as a contrarian.
Being contarian is admirable because it keeps the mind open and exploring; it’s of a piece with one of the finest of all intellectual dispositions: skepticism.
But even a disposition as admirable as contrarianism has its downside — what I might call "the contrarian vice." The contrarian vice is to weigh cleverness too heavily against wisdom.
Not all contrarians commit the contrarian vice; Tyler doesn’t. But the contrarian vice is a hazard of being an accomplished contrarian. Contrarians run great risks of rejecting some piece of wisdom simply because it is widely accepted — and of confusing the possible for the plausible.
I very much like Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s definition of widsom: "To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom." Not all facts are significant, and most facts come at us in a barrage, raw and unsifted. Knowledge and smarts are important tools to use in organizing facts and in distinguishing the more-relevant and reliable ones from the less-relevant and unreliable ones. But that elusive quality that we call wisdom is also key. Because wisdom is not (in my opinion, anyway) highly correlated with cleverness — unless, perhaps, negatively — and because being contrarian is highly correlated with cleverness, I fear that too many contarians are content to bask in the brilliance of their cleverness even if this brilliance blinds them to wisdom.
But to be contrarian for a moment, I point out that Abelard said that "The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth."
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Liberterian-type ideas are great and you guys help a lot by providing some sound economics reasoning in their defense. But when you look around and politician after politician, whether left or right, ignore this good advice, some doubts inevitably creep in: what if our great ideas are just some hopeless utopias that will never see the light of day?
What if imposing our ideas will ruin certain people lives and create unexpected consequences? After all, state intervention will always be present and thus reality will always be somewhat distorted. So maybe one should develop a theory of how to reach the best symbiosis with government distortions? No, that can't be.
CalcaMutin: Read this over at Marginal Revolution:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/libertarians_an.html
pragmatic improvement of government is one of the main things libertarians have always argued with. It is the reason that while Tyler Cowen's point may be true, as far there being a hazard in Libertarian thinking, but wrong with regard to the examples he cites.
Jacob,
thanks for the link. The problem is that I look around and I see tiny small steps forward in somewhat petty and peripheral areas (I'm talking in the world here, not just the US), in a context of huge steps backward in the important areas (trade, healthcare, soc. security, education, etc..) where libertarian principles are wiped aside for massive doses of government intervention. A friend of mine had the following analogy: "it's like arguing about which radio station to listen in a car that's careening downhill without brakes."
My heart will always be in the libertarian camp, I'm just wondering if libertarianism should abandon any pretense of practicality and become instead an "exact science", completely detached from reality.
Boudreaux: "If producers in another country are better, for whatever reason, than are domestic producers at satisfying consumer desires, no economic or moral imperative is served by government protecting these domestic firms from competition — for do so, really, is to threaten to inflict violence upon consumers who insist on taking advantage of the good deals offered by the foreign suppliers."
This is naive blindness. Have you ever talked to a producer in a foreign country? He/she is quite happy to have a minimum of protection against America's Big Aggie, for instance. Or, even against a General Electric for simple electric machinery. I could give a dozen such examples.
As I have explained before, if Boudreaux thinks that ALL domestic production should be unprotected, he should look beyond America's three-mile limit because this argument is economically myopic.
It applies to developed countries which have multiple established producers and huge, vigorous consumer markets. This is simply NOT the case in smaller countries and I mean France is a "smaller country". I have seen small electric white goods industry sunk by a tsunami of Far East producers and the phenomenon is pervasive throughout the EU.
Remember, the EU is a larger consumer market than even the US. And, yet, its domestic production of small electrical machinery has departed for points east.
So, one can imagine what it is like for an entrepreneur in, say, Egypt or even Israel who would like to employ locals to produce/commercialize even the most banal household electrical appliances. They'd be fighting against an American multinational that outsources its branded product from China.
Or, as is happening increasingly, the domestic entrepreneur is competing against Chinese branded products, or even counterfeit designer-branded products from China. Whatever, as a commercial venture, the entrepreneur's destiny is failure.
Come on, let's descend from the Ivory Tower and face reality. It is a salutary experience, especially when confronted with simplistic economic principles. Such principles are NOT universal. Each one must be tested case by case, and political arguments sometimes outweigh economic arguments.
Europe did not lower domestic tariff barriers until it really had to during the GATT accords of the mid-nineties. What began shortly afterwards was the demise of unskilled and semi-skilled small-scale manufacturing, which exacerbated European unemployment. Europe is paying the price till this day.
I don't believe that domestic markets should be protected in all instances. Europe waited too long inside its protectionist cocoon. It blithely thought that the impact on its industries would be minor. Such hubris has cost it considerable social hardship.
But, for third world countries, the context is an altogether different case study.
"The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth."
From "Confessions", responses from Karl Marx as noted by his daughter Jenny: Your motto: De omnibus dubitandum [doubt everything]
So, Marx was telling the truth … after all? Why ever did we doubt him? ;^)
"I have seen small electric white goods industry sunk by a tsunami of Far East producers and the phenomenon is pervasive throughout the EU. "
And this is a bad thing because?
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