I’m pleased to announce that the Auburn Philosophy Department has created (or discovered, one of my colleagues argues) an Institute for Value and the Arts.
We’ll be kicking off the Institute’s sure-to-be-illustrious career with a two-day conference on philosophy of law at the end of next week.
More libertarians have been weighing in on the firehouse issue; see Gary Chartier, Art Carden, Tom Knapp, Bob Murphy, and Kevin Carson.
(I’ll reply to Tom’s, and others’, criticisms after I get back from Libertopia, where I’m headed tomorrow.)
In other news, Libérale et Libertaire explains what libertarians should say when asked about the Civil Rights Act.
A recent spectacular example of government failure – namely, a government fire company’s refusing to put out a nonpayer’s fire– has been transformed, through the magic of non sequitur, into a criticism of libertarianism. That last charge is too silly to comment on, but the case does raise some interesting libertarian issues. I venture some tentative answers:
1. Should a fire company be legally required to put out the fires of nonpayers?
In a free market, the answer is obviously no. In an oligopolistic market where the company is the beneficiary of artificial restrictions on competition – or, as in the recent case, is an actual government monopoly – the case for yes grows a lot stronger.
2. Would a fire company have an (unenforceable) moral obligation to put out a nonpayer’s fire in a case like this recent one?
I lean toward saying yes – especially once they’d arrived, and especially given that there were pets in the house. Obviously still more so if there’d been children in the house. We have positive obligations to our neighbours as well as negative ones, even if the positive ones aren’t legitimately enforceable (other than through shaming).
3. Wouldn’t it be economically unfeasible to fight fires of nonpayers, inasmuch as letting the house burn down would serve as a warning to other nonpayers?
Seeing a nonpayer forced to pay full price for having their house saved seems like sufficient incentive.
4. Would this recent event be likely to happen in a competitive market?
I think not. Company A says “sorry, we won’t put out your fire, even though you’re now offering to pay the full amount.” What’s your natural response if you’re Company B? (Note that the existence of private fire companies does not by itself guarantee a competitive market; I suspect most private fire companies historically operated in an oligopolistic context.)
5. What if a nonpayer can’t afford to pay full price? Is there any economic incentive to save her house then?
Sure. Letting nonpayers’ houses burn is the kind of bad publicity a rival would benefit from exploiting.
6. What if a nonpayer can afford to pay full price but is out of town and can’t consent to it, so the fire company saves her house anyway. Can they force her to pay?
I’d say no. But reputation effects apply to customers too.
I notice, belatedly, that the Libertarian Alliance is offering a £1000 prize for the winning essay on the topic “Would a libertarian society deprive individuals of cultural roots and collective identity?” The deadline is October 25th, so hurry scurry. Details here.
Okay, Machete isn’t Hitchcock or anything; but it’s a fun movie. It also has some interesting libertarian aspects:
Now we just need to convert Robert Rodriguez to agorism and we’ll be all set.
My friend Bryan Caplan has a response to my recent post about inequality. I’m preparing to leave town for the Alabama Philosophical Society and so probably won’t have a chance to reply in detail until I get back. (This also applies to the comments section of my previous post, which I haven’t had a chance to look at.) But three short points just for now:
a) Bryan’s response focuses on the ways in which free markets would solve the problems I point to if they were really problems. But the whole point of my position is that we don’t have a free market! Left-libertarians have pointed out in detail the ways in which the housing and labour markets, for example, are skewed in ologopolistic and oligopsonistic directions respectively. By ignoring these analyses rather than refuting them, Bryan in effect assumes the problems out of existence; he might just as well say “taxes can’t really be too high, because if they were, consumers would just switch to a rival protection agency with lower fees.”
b) The fact that workers can shirk, that tenants can be delinquent, etc., is beside the point. We already know upfront that each party to a contract can potentially screw over the other. The point is that, given that context, the contracts are then skewed to favour one side. That skewing isn’t counterbalanced by the other side’s capacity for delinquency, because each side has that capacity, and one side has the favourable contract in addition.
c) Yes, there are various regulations that purport to help the weaker party to the contract; but left-libertarians have argued in detail that those regulations in practice actually tend to help the stronger party instead. Maybe we’re right about that and maybe we’re wrong, but as far as I know, Bryan hasn’t addressed those arguments, and we can hardly be expected to pretend we haven’t made them.