Liberals in the Weeds, Libertarians Between the Screeds

And more from this week…

It’s been a fascinating ten days of discussion and debate since American Compass’s release of Reclaiming American Citizenship last Tuesday. Oren takes a look at one interesting line of inquiry:

Reading the words, I was filled with that at once ethereal and confusing sense of déjá vu: “Who gets to decide the good life? Joe Biden? Donald Trump? How are they going to stop me?”

Jerusalem Demsas, editor of The Argument (tagline: “We’re Libbing Out”), was criticizing American Compass’s recent statement on Reclaiming American Citizenship. But we’d just published it last week. Where had I heard this argument before?

It was several years ago, debating Duke University professor Michael Munger on the issue of industrial policy. He was explaining why we should dismiss the idea of “The State” making investment decisions: “Remember to take out ‘The State’ and replace it with ‘People chosen by parties and elected by voting dominated by large corporate interests.’ In fact, you should replace ‘The State’ with ‘Donald Trump.’”

In each case, the rhetorical implication was that we should reduce the entirety of political decision-making in a democratic republic to the vesting of absolute power in an unpopular individual. The economic libertarian, with his blind faith in free markets, and the social libertarian, with her nonnegotiable commitment to radical autonomy, could allow no middle ground between unfettered license in their respective spheres of concern and a weirdly pat totalitarianism.

Oh, you think policymakers should try to identify and increase the returns in critical industries like semiconductors, where private capital, seeking to maximize profit, might underinvest? Well, that means you must want Donald Trump to make all of the country’s investment choices.

(That will seem like an absurd strawman. Here are Munger’s words: “Say it with me: ‘I think that corporate CEOs and professional investors should have all their funds taken away at gunpoint, and then all investment decisions, for the whole U.S. population, should be made by Donald Trump. He wants what is best for all of us, and he has a longer-term perspective.’”)

Oh, you think policymakers should try to reward success along well-defined paths through life? Who gets to decide the good life? Joe Biden? Donald Trump? How are they going to stop me?

This brings to mind former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s wise counsel, delivered at the 2022 American Economic Forum in Washington, that “libertarianism is a philosophy for stupid people.”

I think, probably, we can all agree that tyrannical monarchs are bad. But the history of political thought, at least back to Plato, concerns itself with the ways government can “do for a community of people,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”

The U.S. Constitution offers the best framework in human history for accomplishing this. As its preamble emphasizes, the people of the United States ordained and established it “in order to form a more perfect union,” accomplish various important ends, and “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Its elections, its separation of powers, its checks and balances, its federalism, and its Bill of Rights all work to ensure that decisions are rarely vested in one individual and almost always emerge from the intersection of, and competition among, a wide range of interests. When the people constitute a republic and specify the processes by which their government will exercise the powers they grant it, the resulting laws and regulations—that is, constraints—are not invasions of liberty, they are an exercise of liberty in pursuit of its blessings.

For all the bluster, Demsas knows this. She acknowledges, “it is the case that almost all policy decisions carry with them implicit nudges or even shoves towards some decision or away from another,” and goes on to say, “I think it should be easy to build housing, have health care, build abundant energy, and more. It should be easy to start a business and we should push back against the protectionism and occupational licensing that prevents people from living the lives they want to. That’s called liberalism.”

I think a lot of those things sound nice too, but on what basis might one advance the case for them in principle, without some conception of the good life, or advance them in practice, without some willingness to shape public policy toward chosen ends? I suspect she might have particular kinds of abundant energy in mind, and maybe even some processes and restrictions to constrain how and where it can be built. Who’s going to decide? Donald Trump? Joe Biden?

This incoherence is not unique to Demsas. To the contrary, she’s an outspoken representative of a way of thinking about politics and public policy that is widespread, perhaps even dominant, among the technocratic elite. When it comes to the values they want to advance and their vision of the good life, they have all manner of interventions and supports in mind. But they present these preferences as neutral and best for everyone, then attack any alternatives as oppressive and illiberal.

They are liberals in the weeds but libertarians between the screeds.

Unfortunately, this approach to politics is self-defeating. The ends to which today’s faux-neutral liberals are in fact committed, often rightly so, can only be achieved with the sort of substantive and constraining commitments that they want to decry. The real-world social and political equality of full participation in communal, economic, and national life depends upon that life taking particular shapes, buttressed by a particular notion of citizenship.

Demands that today’s citizens incur large costs for the benefit of children not yet born on some particular issue, say climate change, requires a public morality that imposes such intergenerational obligation broadly. Solidarity and a commitment to a strong social welfare system cannot survive an immigration policy that takes admission to the community out of the community’s control. No amount of NIMBY-shaming will persuade the majority of voters who already own homes that they should prefer “low housing prices” over “high home values” if their individual right to make their own meaning reigns supreme. The case for reform requires an appeal to the common good, and thus some definition of it.

Demsas provides a good example of this tension in a tweet that mocks an analysis focused on whether a family with a single earner can achieve middle-class security. A family with two earners could achieve it, she counters. Therefore, “he’s not asking ‘can this family cover it’ just ‘could dad cover it by himself.’” But 50 words later, in the same tweet, she says, “I also want a world where people can opt into being a single-earner household.” In that case, whether one earner could cover the costs himself is exactly the question she wants to answer, too. Why pretend otherwise?

My best guess is that all this cognitive dissonance stems from the gap between what the faux-neutral liberals perceive to be in their own best interest and what they know is best for the community. They want to have their cake and eat it too, claiming radical autonomy for themselves while achieving and living in a nation that is serving ordinary citizens well. Each goal has a moral logic in isolation, but one can only deny the tradeoffs for so long.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the saying, “Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager.” I doubt that’s true. I think most people probably do want to be villagers, embedded in communities that both provide for and demand of them. But we’re left with an adverse selection problem, like in a hypothetical health insurance market where the healthiest individuals don’t want to pay premiums to support those who are likely to need the most care, so they exit, which raises the premiums further for everyone else, so more people exit… until only the costliest patients are left with insurance they cannot possibly afford and isn’t really insurance at all.

There will always be a set of people who have sufficient economic and social resources that they don’t need—or at least believe they don’t need—the benefits of the village and thus do not want to accept its burdens and constraints. But if they opt out, the remaining community has relatively more needs and relatively fewer resources, at which point yet more people will opt out. This is what we mean in Reclaiming American Citizenship when we say, “With their undermining of tradition, respect, and solidarity, American elites released themselves from their own obligations to their fellow citizens, degrading communal life for everyone else in the process.”

I’m not sure there is a real debate over whether we need to grapple as a nation over our understanding of the good life, how to achieve it, and within what constraints. That’s what politics is for. The debate is over whether we should be honest about those realities, and whether we should shape that vision and policy toward the interests of the ordinary citizen or the interests of someone else. If those questions don’t seem like especially close ones, well then, you’ll see why the common sense and clear necessity of Reclaiming American Citizenship makes some people quite mad. — Oren

THE JOURNAL REPORTS AGAINST ITSELF

The Wall Street Journal editorial board has spent decades insisting that immigration is an unalloyed economic good, and that anyone who says otherwise is innumerate or worse. So, it was a pleasant surprise to open its news section to find a report titled “Switzerland’s Radical Proposal on Immigration: Cap the Population” that lays out the opposite case. Ahead of this Sunday’s referendum on capping the nation’s population at ten million, the newspaper’s global economics correspondent documents what a generation of high levels of migration has delivered in Switzerland and other rich, developed countries: adverse impacts on lower-skilled native workers, stagnant productivity growth, higher housing costs, new strain on social services like healthcare, and an aging-population problem no amount of new arrivals can durably solve, since, well, the new arrivals age, too.

The whole debate, the report concedes, turns on a distinction the elite consensus worked hard to blur. Immigration reliably lifts top-line GDP, reflecting the basic arithmetic that more people mean more production and more consumption. But it has done little for GDP per capita, the more relevant measure of whether a nation’s citizens are actually better off. One Swiss lawmaker calls mass migration a sugar high, a metaphor Oren has used for the Biden-era immigration surge—and for what coming down from it will look like.

You should really read the whole thing, and imagine whether a report on U.S. immigration policy from the Journal’s national economics correspondent would contain the same substance, in the same just-the-facts register. But for our money, one of the most damning lines comes from a logistics executive: “The pressure to improve productivity in industries and the service sectors has disappeared.” That is the productivist critique, stated as plainly as we’d put it: mass migration is a subsidy to employers, forestalling investment in machines, new technology, and the workers already here. As one yes-voting centrist politician puts it: “We are buying growth with immigration. Businesses say they’d rather recruit in a bigger market, but we need to train people who are here.” The Swiss are about to vote on whether top-line GDP growth should be the north star of a nation’s immigration policy.

Here in the United States, as the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda has begun to reduce the cheap-labor subsidy many employers have long enjoyed, the answer is surfacing in two places at once: on the farm and in the nursing home.

On the farm, the technology that cheap, abundant labor long kept on the shelf is suddenly worth buying, as the New York Times Magazine reports in “From Cow-Milking Robots to Weed-Zapping Lasers, Farmers Are Embracing A.I.” According to one California onion grower, one reason he’s sinking millions into new equipment is that “labor is expensive and hard to come by,” a reminder that immigration policy is, in fact, technology policy that can induce innovation and incentivize its adoption. And note who turns up to run the machines: a Georgia sod farmer says his autonomous harvesters, piloted from gaming chairs with joysticks, are drawing a younger workforce that “we didn’t even know was possible.” It turns out that “jobs Americans won’t do” can become jobs Americans will do remarkably fast, once the working conditions and wages improve.

In the nursing home, Bloomberg was out with a headline claiming “America’s Seniors to Face Healthcare ‘Calamity’ If Trump Expels Haitians.” At issue are some 350,000 Haitians, around 21,000 of them in eldercare, who are in the United States on Temporary Protected Status, which the Trump administration might strip away. Whatever one concludes about whether these Haitians should be allowed to stay, the report contains a startling admission: we have staked the care of our frailest citizens on the contingent presence of these workers holding a status with “temporary” in its name, working 16-hour shifts at wages no one has tried to make attractive to anyone else. The scandal is not that they might be forced to leave; it’s that we built a system in which their leaving would be a “calamity,” and then branded every effort to unwind that arrangement as cruelty.

An alternative, for industries facing workforce shortages, is to recruit and train domestic workers for the openings—something a growing number of companies, amid the reindustrialization push and the AI buildout, seem increasingly eager to do:

• The U.S. Needs Mechanics and Electricians. Big Business Is Spending to Create Some. (Wall Street Journal)

• Google Launches $50 Million Skilled Worker Initiative (Axios)

• Meta Launches ‘Workforce Academy’ to Train Workers to Build Data Centers (Wall Street Journal)

GOOD WEEKEND READS (AND A LISTEN)

• The American Family Is at a Breaking Point. Our Politics Have Finally Noticed. “Society has treated parenting as a private endeavor. But what if raising children is also a public good?” An important question from Jia Lynn Yang in the New York Times.

• The Left Needs to Rediscover Its Patriotism. “A left that rejects a hopeful, empathetic love of the United States can never win the country to its side” writes Michael Kazin in The Atlantic.

• The Family Formation Crisis May Have Started With A Trade Most Americans Gladly Accepted. In the Daily Wire, Patrick T. Brown offers commentary on a recent new paper that further confirms that theory that many of our social ails stem from the rise of the smartphone in your pocket.

• Daniel joined Henry Olsen’s podcast, Conservative Crossroads, to debate the Cato Institute’s David Bier on whether the United States should mandate E-Verify to confirm workers’ authorization status upon hiring. You will not be surprised to see which side of the proposition Daniel defended, nor will you be surprised to learn that Bier’s arguments did not compel us to recant our support of mandatory E-Verify.

Enjoy the weekend!