Asymmetrical Information

Thacker > Tabarrok > Henry. Tabarrok is right about the problems with government but is not making a proper opportunity cost analysis. As both John Thacker and Tyler Cowen point out in the discussion, the choice is between two different kinds of fiasco and it's not clear which is preferable from a utilitarian standpoint.

As a good student of Hayek, I find the faux-Hayekian arguments against invasion to be specious. Certainly knowledge problems make certain kinds of top-down "nation building" impossible, but there is no necessary reason why things must be done in a "central planning" fashion. It's unclear to me why someone who believes (as Alex seemingly does) that the state should confine itself to keeping the peace would reject the idea that it should (under certain conditions) do this in places outside its borders. Unless of course one is a "citizenist" a la Steve Sailer -- but Alex claims not to be, so colour me perplexed.

Another liberaterian in his fantasy world that has no relationship to reality. War is a constant in human experience and it is always wasteful and destructive. So what else is new.

Does he really believe that if we implemented his fantasties it would eliminate war.

the difference between this war and other US war is that in previous wars the administration looked at it realistically and took corrective actions after problems arose. But in this war the administration retreated into its fantasty world -- much like that of the liberaterians -- and refused to acknowledge there were a problems.

When I was in PLC class a Quantico they taught us that your decisions will often be wrong. That is life. But the key to leadership is how you deal with mistakes and the actions you take to assure you do not repeat them.

The bottom line is that Bush has tried to fight the War of terror on the cheap because if he were honest about what it would cost to win the war he would have had to give up his tax cuts. We are losing the war on terror because Bush believes his tax cuts are more important then winning the war.

I challenge any reporter to ask bush if he would rather have 500,o00 troops in a peaceful and secure Iraq or the 135,000 troops in the current fiasco and his tax cuts.

It is a shame that a person as smart as Alex never spent any time in the real world so his
obvious intelligence would not be wasted.

“I challenge any reporter to ask bush if he would rather have 500,o00 troops in a peaceful and secure Iraq or the 135,000 troops in the current fiasco and his tax cuts.”

First, it is not at all clear that 500,000 troops would have resulted in a peaceful Iraq given the problem of sorting out the bad guys from the good guys without excessively angering the general population.

If spending more money would fix Iraq, I am sure Bush would put it on the credit card. That could be justified since a peaceful, Iraq in the center of the middle east would benefit future generations and it could be reasonably be argued that the one time cost of liberating the country should be spread across future taxpayers.

spencer,

"Does he really believe that if we implemented his fantasties it would eliminate war."

He didn't say so, so I'd guess not. And why refer to libertarian ideas as "fantasies?" If you had the better argument, such pejoratives would be entirely superfluous.

"I challenge any reporter to ask bush if he would rather have 500,o00 troops in a peaceful and secure Iraq or the 135,000 troops in the current fiasco and his tax cuts."

Are you meaning to imply that without the tax cuts, the government would have so much additional revenue as to be able to pay for some 360,000 troops? At about $50k per troop per year, that would run about 18 billion. How much do you believe the tax cuts cost?

Getting the tax is not a matter of the actual cost. Rather, if the original spending estimates had been realistic the political calculus of getting the tax cuts would have been very different. Remember, we had a surplus when the legislation was proposed and the budget projections were for a very small and temporary deficit.

Remember, the first casulty of the war was Larry Lindsey for making a high estimate of the cost.

The more idealistic libertarians forget that our games of freedom must be played within the context of national sovereignty, as man is presently (and perhaps forever) incapable of establishing a single world government that would not be a tyranny.

That many libertarians believe open borders is a desirable immigration policy is one reflection of this misunderstanding. The hallucination that all war is optional is another.

Less dreamy libertarians accept the limits of sovereignty, accept that citizens enjoy rights and priviliges non-citizens do not, and that national defense is job number one of any national government.

Brett,

There may be some libertarians who oppose the Iraq war because they are idealistic, dreamy or hallucinating, but I don't know who they are. Overwhelmingly, the libertarian opposition to the war in Iraq is based on the concern that war will lead to increased state power, huge burdens to taxpayers, the deaths of innocents and unintended negative consequences which, when taken into account, offset any benefit to be had from this war.

All that may be true, James, but I wasn't commenting on the Iraq war; I was commenting on the routine pacifism of the left wing of the libertarians.

The debate in the comments was very good, and Alex's original post had some great observations (like the Pentagon being the USPS with nuclear weapons). But Alex drew conclusions that just don't follow from his observations, true as they may be.

No doubt, the military is horribly inefficient in large part because its agents are not subject to market incentives. But military success, like good police work, results in large, uncapturable, positive externalities, so is not clear that the market can supply it at all. Given this market failure, it can be worthwhile to accept military inefficiences, because military action is the only way to get to the prefered outcome.

Basically there are two ways you can come to libertarianism. One is as a moral framework: coercion is never justified. The other is as a practical framework: usually, the uncoerced outcome is optimal. If Alex is arguing from the first, then it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient the military is; it's coercive, so it's wrong. If Alex is arguing from the second, then it's good to know that the military is so inefficient, but knowing that isn't enough to prove that it shouldn't be used; you have to compare the alternative.

David Wright,

Ok, so suppose that I'm one of the optimal consequence seeking libertarians. In that case, there are matters where coercion is certainly or almost certainly going to ahve bad consequences, so I'll oppose coercion in those instances. There are also cases where coercion will very likely have good consequences, so I'll favor it in those instances, right? So what about the very uncertain cases, where it's impossible to say whether or not coercion, on balance, has good consequences? In those cases, my consequentialist alter-ego would err on the side of no coercion. Do you think this is the right way to err in the very uncertain cases? Do you think the Iraq war is one of those very uncertain cases?

Regarding externalities, recall back to when you first heard that term. Someone probably mentioned to you that positive externalities will be underproduced in a totally free market. This argument was based on certain assumptions regarding how humans will act, recall? Well, if those assumptions do pertain to the rest of us, I'd find it vanishingly unlikely that they don't pertain to the people in the government. So I'm curious, why do you believe that the people in the government will use the military to provide positive externalities, rather than to protect their sources of income and advance their sundry other agendas?

James: Many thanks for your considered reply. This is a great discussion.

Regarding the role of uncertainty: Your model of uncertainty is too simplistic. You can't just divide all decisions into "certainly good", "certainly bad", and "uncertain", and then a rule applied for each bucket. Instead, there is always some level of uncertainty in any decision, and the degree of uncertainty that we are willing to accept and nevertheless press ahead with a course of action depends on just how much we stand to gain if it all works out. (I'm envisioning isopreference lines in uncertainty-payoff space.)

I debated the ethics of the Iraq war with a lot of friends at its outset. One, who had spent a lot of time in the region, said: Eliminating Sadam would be a great good, but I think Bush will botch it, so I am opposed. I said: I agree Bush will botch it, but he can't botch it so badly that it comes out worse than Sadam, so I'm in favor. I must admit that my friend is looking smarter than I am right now. Does that increase my discount to uncertainty in future decisions? Absolutely. Does it mean I will in future always choose inaction over coercion without 100% certainty? No.

Regarding the corruptibility of government: It is certainly valuable to consider how a coercive regulatory framework can and will be abused. (Public choice theory is beautiful!) But it doesn't automatically follow that all coervive regulatory frameworks are equally bad and we should all just become anarcho-capitalists.

David Wright,

I don't think my model of uncertainty is too simplistic. I tried to make clear that I wasn't treating everything less than perfectly certain in the same way. That's why I used words like "almost certainly" and "very uncertain." My general argument is not that any amount of uncertainty is a case for inaction; rather, *in some range* the amount of uncertainty is a sufficient case for inaction. Do you agree with this? If so, what would it take to convince you that the uncertainty about the consequences of the Iraq war is in that particular range?

And yes, I realize that public choice theory is not a proof for anarcho-capitalism. I suspect that PC is adequate to refute any argument that assumes governments to be uniquely likely to provide bundle of public goods at which the marginal benefit of more public goods is equal to the marginal cost of coercive behavior.

James: Yes, there is some level of uncertainty at which inaction becomes the default, although just what that level is depends not only on the degree of uncertainty, but also on the potential payoffs. What I was trying to say in my previous response is that I did consider this when evaluating the Iraq war, and the degree of uncertainty there did not trip my threshold.

I may have been wrong about Iraq. Ask me in 2013. If, at that time, a civil war has turned Iraq into another Afghanistan, then I was wrong. If, at that time, Iraq is more prosperous and governed by the rule of law, I will consider myself vindicated. (A pro-American government that respects church-state seperation and women's and gay rights is entirely off the table. That wouldn't represent the will of the majority of Iraqis, anyway.)

James said:
There may be some libertarians who oppose the Iraq war because they are idealistic, dreamy or hallucinating, but I don't know who they are.

Well, you know Prof. Tabarrok. He opposed and opposes Panama and Grenada, along with every other intervention or war that the US has had since WWII and maybe including and before that. His own paper which he linked to confirms that. (Also, are you familiar with that strain of libertarians that bitterly criticizes Lincoln for the Civil War?) Panama and Grenada, on the measure of civil, political, and economic liberties, both improved hugely *and* remained democratic-- it takes only a slight familiarity with Amnesty, HRW, or Freedom House reports to know this.

David Wright said:
I must admit that my friend is looking smarter than I am right now.

You and your friend are both very reasonable people, and each opinion is plausible. That the majority of Iraqis still stay that removing Saddam was the correct thing means that I do not necessarily consider your friend to look smarter. It's odd when being "anti-imperialism" means to some people discounting the opinions of the residents of the country because us educated folks know better. But of course, as you say, the situation could change in many ways.

Of course fiascos will occur. And of course there's a reason that the market doesn't have the ability to provide stability-- the state takes a monopoly on violence, and we discourage private adventurers from going in and knocking off dictators these days. Anti-foreign bias occurs in both directions, though, so I think that Alex's speculations on motives were quite out of line, and deserved an equivalent response.

if you watch these
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/archives/cat_911.html
you will understand that is another reasons for unhuman wars and you can imagine how much these wars take costs and injure USA commercial and the only beneficiary their oil and weapons companies which stood by decision makers

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