WEBVTT NOTE Invisible Hands and Incantations: The Mystification of State Power 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.640 I've known our next speaker all my life. I first got to know him when I achieved self-consciousness. 2 00:00:09.640 --> 00:00:14.480 My paper is called Invisible Hands and Incantations, The Mystification of State Power. I'm not 3 00:00:14.480 --> 00:00:20.920 going to read it really, or at least not much of it. I don't have copies to hand out, but 4 00:00:20.920 --> 00:00:28.520 if you want a copy, just Google Molinari Society and it's on the site there. 5 00:00:28.520 --> 00:00:34.720 The topic of the paper is ways in which the state or government system is held up and 6 00:00:34.720 --> 00:00:41.720 maintained by spontaneous order. So like Charles, I'm talking about a malign spontaneous order. 7 00:00:41.720 --> 00:00:48.000 I have in mind primarily spontaneous in the sense of unplanned, not actions that maintain 8 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:54.720 a state order without intending to. Though I think to some extent the other two are relevant 9 00:00:54.720 --> 00:01:01.680 as well, the polycentric, and even to some extent, the uncoerced, in the familiar sense 10 00:01:01.680 --> 00:01:06.500 that a state can't maintain power by violence alone, so there have to be mechanisms by which 11 00:01:06.500 --> 00:01:14.920 people gain incentives to maintain the state without intending to. 12 00:01:14.920 --> 00:01:21.240 By the state system, I understand the system of something like what's known as corporatism, 13 00:01:21.240 --> 00:01:28.480 A big government, big business partnership, as I interpret, and I'm not going to argue 14 00:01:28.480 --> 00:01:35.280 for this here and now, but there's more in the paper and citations. I think that most 15 00:01:35.280 --> 00:01:42.280 public government policies that are promoted as anti-big business actually tend to support 16 00:01:42.280 --> 00:01:47.320 the big business, big government partnership. Most policies that are promoted as anti-big 17 00:01:47.320 --> 00:01:52.200 government do the same. There are some differences. You know, right-wing status 18 00:01:52.200 --> 00:01:56.200 and left-wing status have things to disagree about, but it's mostly squabbles 19 00:01:56.200 --> 00:02:08.880 over the spoils. But in order for the system to work, in order for people to, you 20 00:02:08.880 --> 00:02:13.480 know, be persuaded to support a system of big government, big business partnership 21 00:02:13.480 --> 00:02:20.920 against People, where the left-wing and right-wing factions are only doing slightly different 22 00:02:20.920 --> 00:02:27.440 variations of the same thing. You can't sell that to the people. So you have to promote 23 00:02:27.440 --> 00:02:34.560 it in a way that makes it less obvious. So left-wing status corporatist policies have 24 00:02:34.560 --> 00:02:38.980 to be marketed as protecting ordinary people against big business. The right-wing versions 25 00:02:38.980 --> 00:02:44.980 have to be marketed as protecting people against big government and I think that's what we 26 00:02:44.980 --> 00:02:50.740 see. But I don't think that it all has to be done consciously. Now I think a lot of 27 00:02:50.740 --> 00:02:54.860 it is done consciously. I think there's lots of conscious effort that goes into maintaining 28 00:02:54.860 --> 00:03:00.500 the state system. Lots of conscious collusion. In fact, stuff I wouldn't even call conspiracies 29 00:03:00.500 --> 00:03:04.660 because a lot of it is done quite openly but nevertheless conscious. However, I think there 30 00:03:04.660 --> 00:03:10.020 There are good reasons to expect invisible hand mechanisms to be at work as well. For 31 00:03:10.020 --> 00:03:15.900 one thing, a system is going to be more stable to the extent that the people who are running 32 00:03:15.900 --> 00:03:21.860 the system can somehow persuade themselves that what they are doing is virtuous. And 33 00:03:21.860 --> 00:03:28.860 therefore, it has got to be the case that in order for the system to work stably, there 34 00:03:28.980 --> 00:03:32.260 have got to be incentives to move people into thinking of themselves as doing something 35 00:03:32.260 --> 00:03:49.260 And also we have to explain not just what leads the people in the ruling classes to cooperate with each other, but also what leads the ruled to cooperate, since the system doesn't work unless they cooperate as well. 36 00:03:49.260 --> 00:04:01.260 So we have to explain how those on power on the one hand, and on the other people who support them, including journalists and educators and so forth, how they can be persuaded to support a big business, big government partnership, 37 00:04:01.260 --> 00:04:08.580 Well, not necessarily all of them realizing it. 38 00:04:08.580 --> 00:04:13.940 One way that this works is simply the ratchet effect of the need to, the perceived need 39 00:04:13.940 --> 00:04:16.660 for government to do something about a crisis. 40 00:04:16.660 --> 00:04:21.180 And think about, you know, the current airline security thing where every time there's 41 00:04:21.180 --> 00:04:25.420 a new threat, new policies are developed to deal with that threat, then when something 42 00:04:25.420 --> 00:04:29.820 else comes along, so oh, so someone tries to set their shoes on fire and so you, you 43 00:04:59.820 --> 00:05:02.340 to Legislate in the Interest of the Corporate Elite. 44 00:05:02.340 --> 00:05:08.300 I think it's only to be expected given that things that harm the corporate elite will 45 00:05:08.300 --> 00:05:15.540 get noticed, will get attention, and the rich have the ability to lobby government so forth 46 00:05:15.540 --> 00:05:19.500 and the poor are more disfused and dispersed and less able to do it. 47 00:05:19.500 --> 00:05:23.140 Also, I don't think that we have to assume that the corporations that are lobbying government 48 00:05:23.140 --> 00:05:25.260 are all in favor of statism. 49 00:05:25.260 --> 00:05:28.100 They might just be in favor of free markets for everyone but themselves, but each one 50 00:05:28.100 --> 00:05:32.900 want some special privilege for themselves, and the natural result of that will be statism 51 00:05:32.900 --> 00:05:34.900 for everybody. 52 00:05:34.900 --> 00:05:41.260 Likewise, I think you don't have to assume the conscious desire to prop up the system 53 00:05:41.260 --> 00:05:43.060 in journalists. 54 00:05:43.060 --> 00:05:48.940 All you have to assume is that journalists want to get important stories, and the way 55 00:05:48.940 --> 00:05:51.620 to get important stories is to get access to the people who produce them. 56 00:05:51.620 --> 00:05:57.340 And if you have a conception of what's important is who is in the command post of your society, 57 00:05:57.340 --> 00:06:12.340 is nothing necessarily that you decide, all right, I'm not going to rock the boat because I want access, it's just that the ones who do decide to rock the boat just don't get the access and so the ones who are willing otherwise will get the access. 58 00:06:12.340 --> 00:06:24.340 Also a certain conception of objectivity where one of my favorite examples is waterboarding was always referred to as torture in American newspapers until it became a policy of the US government, official policy, 59 00:06:24.340 --> 00:06:28.500 Policy, and then at that point they stopped referring to it as torture because at that 60 00:06:28.500 --> 00:06:31.900 point it becomes controversial whether it's torture. And if you want to be objective you 61 00:06:31.900 --> 00:06:36.340 don't take a stand on things that are controversial. But of course what's determined as controversial 62 00:06:36.340 --> 00:06:48.740 is based on these assumptions about whose opinions count. There's also kind of ideological 63 00:06:48.740 --> 00:06:57.700 and the mystification going on, where no matter how many special favors liberal politicians 64 00:06:57.700 --> 00:07:02.260 hand out to big business, they continue to be perceived as anti-big business. 65 00:07:02.260 --> 00:07:05.260 No matter how much government grows under conservative politicians, they continue to 66 00:07:05.260 --> 00:07:09.380 be perceived as anti-big government. 67 00:07:09.380 --> 00:07:14.020 What is it that maintains this strange kind of illusion in power? 68 00:07:14.020 --> 00:07:18.860 Well, in Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he describes experiments where 69 00:07:18.860 --> 00:07:22.380 people had a hard time seeing things that clashed with their existing categories. 70 00:07:22.380 --> 00:07:28.140 Here are examples of flashing very quickly playing cards of people where they'd be anomalous, 71 00:07:28.140 --> 00:07:35.980 it would be a red Ace of Spades or a black Three of Hearts or whatever. 72 00:07:35.980 --> 00:07:38.780 And if you flash them very quickly, people just automatically identify it as one of the 73 00:07:38.780 --> 00:07:39.900 familiar ones. 74 00:07:39.900 --> 00:07:44.460 We show them a black three of hearts and they'll either say it's a three of spades or it's 75 00:07:44.460 --> 00:07:47.380 a red hearts or whatever. 76 00:07:47.380 --> 00:07:51.380 And even when you do it more slowly, often they have a really hard time seeing, even 77 00:07:51.380 --> 00:07:58.300 when they go and say something's amiss, they can't tell what. 78 00:07:58.300 --> 00:08:03.340 Kuhn also gives the example of how Aristotelians and Galileans both saw pendulums but they 79 00:08:03.340 --> 00:08:05.680 disagreed about what essentially was going on. 80 00:08:05.680 --> 00:08:09.020 To the Aristotelians, it looked like what the main thing is going on is the rock is trying 81 00:08:09.020 --> 00:08:28.020 The Galileans saw it as something that's trying to go back and forth, I mean don't take the teleological language literally there, but the essential thing is the extent to which it goes back and forth and the fact that it eventually slows down is a friction phenomenon. 82 00:08:28.020 --> 00:08:34.020 So if you have a certain view that something is essential, then other things will be dismissed as not essential, not part of it. 83 00:08:34.020 --> 00:08:42.620 How does it come about, though? What makes it possible for people to think that conservatives 84 00:08:42.620 --> 00:08:52.500 are pro-free market, for example? Well, it's because I think there's a certain layer of 85 00:08:52.500 --> 00:08:57.300 primary regulations that are in place that both liberals and conservatives tend to favor. 86 00:08:57.300 --> 00:09:01.900 And then there's another layer of secondary regulations on top of those, to some extent 87 00:09:01.900 --> 00:09:31.900 are designed to go against the first ones, or at least to give the appearance of doing so and liberals tend to favor those and conservatives don't and so conservatives will be seen as anti-regulation because they favor, you know, so they favor giving a special privilege to some corporation but then not restricting how it eases the privilege and that's not really a free market thing. Whereas the basic primary regulations, those just become part of the background to become invisible. 88 00:09:31.900 --> 00:09:39.980 Also, I think there's a sense in which there's a tendency for people not to see government 89 00:09:39.980 --> 00:09:45.540 decisions as violent. They see it as somehow they often think of doing something through 90 00:09:45.540 --> 00:09:49.060 government as an alternative to doing it through violence. They'll say, well, we don't want 91 00:09:49.060 --> 00:09:53.380 to go through violence. It's through this peaceful process of legislation as though 92 00:09:53.380 --> 00:10:00.380 there's some sort of incantation to produce the result without any violence. And I think 93 00:10:00.380 --> 00:10:04.220 There are reasons for the kind of cognitive dissonance that gets into that. One reason 94 00:10:04.220 --> 00:10:12.060 is people are reluctant to recognize as, against their moral principles, something to think 95 00:10:12.060 --> 00:10:17.580 of as necessary. So if you think that government is necessary, but you also think that you 96 00:10:17.580 --> 00:10:21.460 believe in general moral principles, you shouldn't go around imposing your will on others, then 97 00:10:21.460 --> 00:10:25.060 you're going to be reluctant to see governments doing that. And so you're going to try and 98 00:10:25.060 --> 00:10:30.260 interpret the government as somehow doing something different. But that pushes it back. 99 00:10:30.260 --> 00:10:40.900 What leads to people seeing government as necessary, and I've suggested several reasons 100 00:10:40.900 --> 00:10:42.860 here toward the end. 101 00:10:42.860 --> 00:10:47.700 One is when Hayek identifies constructivist rationalism. 102 00:10:47.700 --> 00:10:51.220 One of the cues whereby we recognize the presence of intention is order. 103 00:10:51.220 --> 00:10:55.840 When we see order, we expect some order or some kind of intention there. 104 00:10:55.840 --> 00:10:59.060 And so therefore, if we want social order, it's natural for us to think in terms of 105 00:10:59.060 --> 00:11:10.060 Another reason is that smarter organisms have longer childhoods because they don't have as much pre-built into them by instinct, because they have to have room on their disk to learn stuff, as it were. 106 00:11:10.060 --> 00:11:19.060 That's great, but it means that we spend a long time being cultured to being children and having parents taking care of us, and so we develop a kind of need for that. 107 00:11:19.060 --> 00:11:23.060 Another one is Bastiat's whole idea of the distinction between the seen and the unseen. 108 00:11:23.060 --> 00:11:25.060 The Theory of Money and Credit 109 00:11:53.060 --> 00:11:55.380 The Good News is, Kuhn says, if you want to change the world, you have to change the world. 110 00:11:55.380 --> 00:12:08.540 But I also suggest, at the end, that given that spontaneous order, that is to say, unplanned 111 00:12:08.540 --> 00:12:12.900 spontaneous mechanisms play such a large role in maintaining the state and power, that means 112 00:12:12.900 --> 00:12:15.900 you don't necessarily have to seize control of the state to get rid of these problems. 113 00:12:15.900 --> 00:12:20.220 He said you have to work with these spontaneous orders, work through educating people to direct 114 00:12:20.220 --> 00:12:21.900 their attention to these things. 115 00:12:21.900 --> 00:12:27.420 The good news is, Kuhn says, if you draw the person's attention to the playing card enough, 116 00:12:27.420 --> 00:12:33.020 they'll finally recognize that it's a red three of spades or whatever, and so I think 117 00:12:33.020 --> 00:12:38.580 a lot of libertarian propaganda should be to do that. 118 00:12:38.580 --> 00:12:45.060 So that's all for me. We actually have three commentators because David Gordon, although 119 00:12:45.060 --> 00:12:51.860 he has not sent himself in the flesh, he has sent some comments and I went through my paper 120 00:12:51.860 --> 00:13:13.380 Charles Johnson has two principal goals in his excellent paper. First, I mean by first 121 00:13:13.380 --> 00:13:21.180 what is conceptually prior in the paper, rather than what is first discussed there. 122 00:13:21.180 --> 00:13:24.860 Once he endeavors to clarify the concept of spontaneous order, once he's cleared up the 123 00:13:24.860 --> 00:13:29.140 ambiguities in the concept, he applies it to Susan Brown-Miller's account of rape, which 124 00:13:29.140 --> 00:13:32.540 in her view plays a crucial role in bringing about the domination and exploitation of women 125 00:13:32.540 --> 00:13:33.540 by men. 126 00:13:33.540 --> 00:13:37.600 In the first of these goals, he seems to be entirely successful. 127 00:13:37.600 --> 00:13:41.660 His account of three meanings of spontaneous order, namely consensual, polycentric and 128 00:13:41.660 --> 00:13:47.500 emergent, greatly clarifies a confused literature, and as he shows, many famous names, the Chasse 129 00:13:47.500 --> 00:13:50.500 and Hayek among them, have tripped up here. 130 00:13:50.500 --> 00:13:54.260 I am grateful to learn that in a paper I had long forgotten I called attention to one of 131 00:13:54.260 --> 00:13:59.860 these confusions. Charles's full version of the paper is a footnote to David Gordon. 132 00:13:59.860 --> 00:14:04.820 Johnson also rightly notes that the distinctions among these kinds of orders are differences 133 00:14:04.820 --> 00:14:08.860 of degree with many intermediate shades and borderline cases rather than clean categorical 134 00:14:08.860 --> 00:14:14.460 breaks. I would add, if this is not identical to Johnson's point, that the same order may 135 00:14:14.460 --> 00:14:18.660 be spontaneous under one description and not under another. People may, for example, establish 136 00:14:18.660 --> 00:14:44.140 Johnson also seems to me to be successful in his second goal. He uses the notion of 137 00:14:44.140 --> 00:15:00.940 Johnson does not attempt a full-scale defense of Brown-Miller's theory, though it is evident 138 00:15:00.940 --> 00:15:04.840 he thinks there is a great deal to be said in its favor. I find myself unable to agree 139 00:15:04.840 --> 00:15:09.580 with him, although my reaction may well stem from insufficient acquaintance with her account 140 00:15:09.580 --> 00:15:13.500 and the literature it has generated. To me the theory has little to recommend it, at 141 00:15:13.500 --> 00:15:18.500 at least if it is intended as an account of contemporary American society. 142 00:15:18.500 --> 00:15:22.260 In setting forward the critical remarks that follow, I may be unfair to Johnson, as I am 143 00:15:22.260 --> 00:15:26.020 attacking a point he did not attempt to defend, but I have done so in large part because I 144 00:15:26.020 --> 00:15:29.620 would value highly a response to what seems to be an evident weakness in Brown-Willer's 145 00:15:29.620 --> 00:15:31.780 theory. 146 00:15:31.780 --> 00:15:35.380 Johnson devotes some time to discussing studies that show rape or physical battering is widespread, 147 00:15:35.380 --> 00:15:40.260 but he does not present any evidence for a crucial part of Brown-Willer's theory. 148 00:15:40.260 --> 00:15:44.420 In her view, women's fear of rape leads them to seek male protection, the price of which 149 00:15:44.420 --> 00:15:48.840 is to submit to male dominance. For this mechanism to operate, it must be the case that women 150 00:15:48.840 --> 00:15:53.980 fear being raped. But why should we believe this? Obviously, I do not mean to question 151 00:15:53.980 --> 00:15:58.020 that to rape someone is to inflict upon her an unterrible indignity. But it does not follow 152 00:15:58.020 --> 00:16:02.180 from this manifest fact that most women live in fear that this calamity will befall them. 153 00:16:02.180 --> 00:16:06.660 An analogy may, I hope, clarify this point. It is likely that many of us will at some 154 00:16:06.660 --> 00:16:33.660 Roderick Long is also, in his outstanding paper, argued for two main contentions. He 155 00:16:33.660 --> 00:16:36.980 He first presents a picture of the form of state system that prevails in modern industrial 156 00:16:36.980 --> 00:16:50.460 society. Having done so, he endeavors with characteristic ingenuity to show why most 157 00:16:50.460 --> 00:16:53.420 people fail to grasp the nature of the system and in fact have grossly inaccurate views 158 00:16:53.420 --> 00:16:58.580 of it. I would like to suggest an additional reason to those so ably canvassed by Long 159 00:16:58.580 --> 00:17:02.900 why people fail to adopt Long's account of the true nature of the state system. The reason 160 00:17:02.900 --> 00:17:12.000 is that his account is not fully correct. He begins from an undoubted fact which well deserves 161 00:17:12.000 --> 00:17:15.900 the emphasis he gives it. He notes that the government and modern industrialized societies 162 00:17:15.900 --> 00:17:20.200 grant special privileges to big business. Many regulations presented to the public as 163 00:17:20.200 --> 00:17:24.900 measures to protect consumers serve rather to entrench special privileges. Readers of 164 00:17:24.900 --> 00:17:28.980 Rothbard will not be surprised by any of this and Long shows a commanding knowledge of literature 165 00:17:28.980 --> 00:17:31.980 I will draw on this topic as a glance at a second footnote will show. 166 00:17:31.980 --> 00:17:35.980 Where I differ from him is on the consequence he draws from this point. 167 00:17:35.980 --> 00:17:40.980 He views businesses privileged by the state system as part of the state system. 168 00:17:40.980 --> 00:17:42.980 The issue at stake here is more than semantic. 169 00:17:42.980 --> 00:17:45.980 If all it long means here is that the government grants business privileges 170 00:17:45.980 --> 00:17:47.980 and that business interests often dominate the government, 171 00:17:47.980 --> 00:17:53.980 there would be little point to saying that I prefer to avoid his choice of words to describe the situation. 172 00:17:53.980 --> 00:17:55.980 But I take him to mean much more than this. 173 00:17:55.980 --> 00:18:00.940 Under the state system, prices are no longer established through market competition. Rather, 174 00:18:00.940 --> 00:18:06.860 we have a situation where powerful corporations control monopolistic or oligopolistic markets. 175 00:18:06.860 --> 00:18:11.100 The wages of labor depend to a large extent on bargaining power. Workers' marginal productivity 176 00:18:11.100 --> 00:18:16.260 leaves open vast zones of indeterminacy. Here long parts company with the Austrian economics 177 00:18:16.260 --> 00:18:21.700 of Mises and Rothbard. As Mises again and again insisted, there is no third system intermediate 178 00:18:21.700 --> 00:18:25.620 between capitalism and socialism. The fact that a business has gotten to its position 179 00:18:25.620 --> 00:18:28.860 and through government aid does not by itself change the way it sets prices. 180 00:18:28.860 --> 00:18:33.500 Neither is it the case that large firms operate by setting monopolistic or oligopolistic prices 181 00:18:33.500 --> 00:18:34.980 rather than competitive ones. 182 00:18:34.980 --> 00:18:38.780 Of course, if government regulations set prices or give a business the legal power to set 183 00:18:38.780 --> 00:18:41.140 prices, that is another matter altogether. 184 00:18:41.140 --> 00:18:45.340 It is also not the case that wage determination rests on bargaining power. 185 00:18:45.340 --> 00:18:49.580 As Mises and Rothbard see matters, zones of indeterminacy are mythical. 186 00:18:49.580 --> 00:18:53.600 To adduce differences between Long on the one hand and Mises and Rothbard on the other 187 00:18:53.600 --> 00:19:00.000 is not to show that Long is mistaken. Yeah, sure. I have wished here only to indicate a 188 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:04.520 sharp divergence between the left libertarianism that Long supports and the Austrian position 189 00:19:04.520 --> 00:19:05.400 in that regard is correct.