August 14, 2007
For a new philosophical infrastructure
When the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis I felt it. I used to live a couple of blocks away from that bridge, and I drove over it regularly. I had friends who lived in the area and was worried for their safety. I've even been having nightmares lately about similar disasters. So don't blame me for not taking this seriously.
But as soon as the bridge collapsed, I predicted two inevitable kinds of commentary. First the left would trot out their usual charge that the government is ignoring America's "crumbling infrastructure." Second, Objectivists would blame the problem on government ownership of infrastructure. Both charges were made.
Both of these charges are true, in a way. If the government is going to control infrastructure like roads, bridges, and airports, then it's clearly doing an awful job. And is it any wonder? At the state level, in particular, most of the money is going to sexy education and welfare programs. If you had to rank these two functions, wouldn't maintaining the infrastructure of the economy that pays for education and welfare come out on top? Yet for some reason our politicians don't set priorities that way.
Likewise, it is undeniable that the those areas of the economy controlled by the government are incomparably less efficient than those controlled by private industry. You don't see a decay of our telecommunications infrastructure, for example. On the contrary, it's growing in leaps and bounds. So yes, I think our transportation infrastructure would be better off in private hands—if we can figure out a way to do it.
But even if we figure out an efficient way to privatize something as complex as the city streets, there is a much bigger challenge facing the case for private ownership of infrastructure. I was reminded of this challenge after reading an item that popped up today on the Randex. In this article in Fortune, Adam Lashinsky takes a look at the charge that our decaying infrastructure indicates that Atlas is Shrugging.
Lashinsky points to some interesting examples of how government infrastructure fails where private infrastructure succeeds, e.g.:
But the levees? After much consideration the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has now fessed up to its responsibility for poor construction and maintenance over decades. When I was in New Orleans in July I heard a story about a levee that didn't fail. It is operated by Lockheed-Martin (Charts, Fortune 500) at a plant that makes fuel tanks for the Space Shuttle. Workers braved Hurricane Katrina and operated pumps during the storm. The privately operated - but government financed - levees held.
But Lashinsky is generally not sympathetic to the Atlas is Shrugging idea, and makes the following observation in his defense:
Today's Randians, of course, have an answer to our woes: Privatize everything. No way a bridge falls if a profit-seeking company, properly incentivized, had been charged with maintaining it, goes the argument. That, however, is dangerous thinking. There are certain things the market just can't be trusted to handle. Imagine that bridge-maintenance company having to cut expenses this quarter by delaying work for just a few days. Imagine how the CEO might feel if the stock would drop if he couldn't make the quarter.The markets don't always work for the public good. Just ask CEOs of mortgage lenders that pushed no-documentation loans, which anyone with common sense knew was just asking for trouble. The solution isn't to abolish government. It's to make government work better.
There's something to this, at least as applied to our current business culture. The same pragmatism that causes today's politicians to prioritize welfare spending over infrastructure also causes today's businessmen to prioritize short-term financial gains over long-term ones. Both act on the range of the moment, seeking to satisfy whichever constituency (voters or stockholders) is making the loudest demands. I think if we privatized infrastructure today, some of it would be run quite well. But some of it would also be run like Enron, which, if you'll recall, actually owned energy-distribution infrastructure.
Of course it is important to point out that businessmen today are forced into pragmatism in a way that their politician counterparts are not. The current regulatory burden doubtless makes long-term planning impossible. Why take out a 99-year lease on, say, your privately owned bridge if the government will impose OSHA, EPA, SarbOx regulations that make it impossible to turn a profit. Never mind eminent domain, which could rob the bridge owner of the bridge itself.
But not all of the pragmatism of the business world is government-imposed. A lot of it is simply cultural. Not only do businessmen voluntarily sacrifice long-term profit to short-term profit, but they sacrifice profit itself to social causes. Don't forget that the biggest disasters in Atlas Shrugged happen to Jim Taggart's socially-conscious Taggart Transcontinental, a nominally private company.
So yes, I think infrastructure should be privatized. But it's not a panacea. Before making the political changes necessary for real laissez-faire, we need cultural change. We'll need people to understand the importance of the long-range, and the role of principles in acting in the long-range. We'll need the same cultural change before we can even convince politicians to make the political changes, anyway. So before we build a new physical infrastructure, we'll need a new philosophical infrastructure.
Posted by admin at 11:15 AM | Comments (3)
August 09, 2007
Yglesias vs. Mossoff on intellectual property
Considering recent proposals to apply intellectual property law to fashion designers, prominent liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias recently posted the following:
The idea of copyright is not that creators deserve your money, but that you, the citizen, deserve a world in which creators have incentives to create. The fashion industry is perfectly vibrant as is.
I responded with the following in the comments section:
Matt, I disagree, and I wonder what your reason for thinking this is. Saying that copyright is not a matter of the creator's desert is like taking the "P" out of "IP." Surely creators of an item of intellectual property deserve the right to set the conditions for the disposal of their property, insofar as there is a right to property.I for one would argue that IP and property in general are a matter of moral right. Now it is true that there is a historical tradition justifying copyright (and property rights in general) on utilitarian grounds. But a second historical tradition appeals to natural rights doctrine. Adam Mossoff, a law professor at Michigan State, has a piece outlining the second tradition, and its influence on the U.S. constitution here:
http://www.ipcentral.info/review/v1n1mossoff.pdf
For example:
State laws protecting intellectual property rights prior to the 1787 federal convention also reflected a Lockean influence; the New Hampshire legislature, to take but one example, enacted legislation to protect copyrights and other forms of intellectual property because “there being no property more peculiarly a man’s own than that which is produced by the labour of his mind.”22 Moreover, the evolution and creation of new types of intellectual property rights in the nineteenth century, such as trademarks and trade secrets, followed the contours of a labor theory of property.23 The initial definition and protection of trade secrets as property entitlements, for instance, derived its justification from the courts’ belief that such rights were similar to other property rights born of valuable labor and already protected by the law.The rest of the piece deals with digital copyright, but in relation to the general question of whether copyright is property. Take a look.
IANAL, and I don't know what to think about the application of copyright law to the fashion industry. I think it's probably misguided and Walker may be right that patent law is better applied. But this is not because copyright isn't a right.
NS
UPDATE: Professor Mossoff himself has now added a comment to the thread.
Posted by admin at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2007
Ezra Klein comments on Ayn Rand
Ezra Klein, a prominent liberal blogger, recently posted the following:
Reading this perfectly serious attempt to lay out Ayn Rand's objections to utilitarianism, I'm reminded of how utterly astonishing I find it that anyone takes her seriously. Listen to this stuff: "The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good."Do people really find that compelling?
Ezra is one of the most intelligent and fair-minded liberal bloggers out there, so I thought I'd take his question at face value and respond, with the following in his comments section:
Hi Ezra,As a regular reader of your blog, I thought I'd chime in to say that I do find Rand compelling.
Yes, I first discovered Rand when I was fairly young, when I was about 17. Interestingly, I had already read a lot of philosophy by that time. I had just finished reading A Theory of Justice and considered myself to be a pretty serious advocate of Rawlsian liberalism. So I wasn't exactly approaching Rand as a complete know-nothing.
I only picked up The Fountainhead in the first place because I thought writing an essay for the Ayn Rand Institute's contest would be an easy way to help pay for college. I didn't expect to agree with Rand's philosophy. But I actually ended up liking the book, and didn't even bother entering the essay contest. I later started to read her nonfiction, including books by her students, and found their arguments compelling. That is the main reason I continue to like her.
There's been a lot of Rand-bashing in the blogosphere as of late, regarding the motivations of the people who read her and what they're trying to rationalize. I think it's unfounded:
http://www.noumenalself.com/archives/2007/07/im_kind_of_a_ph_1.html
Sanpete mentions an Objectivist philosophy grad student who doesn't fit the stereotype of obnoxious "selfishness." I've met many of these non-stereotypical Rand admirers in my travels through the Objectivist movement. But WB Reeves is correct that Objectivists "range from princes of character...to venal buffoons of the lowest rank." The same is true, I imagine, for individuals who adhere to many ideologies.
There is some confusion in this comment section about how Rand's advocacy of selfishness could be consistent with an Aristotelian approach to virtue. I could say a number of things here, but instead I'll just point Ezra's readers to *Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist*, a recent book from Cambridge by Professor Tara Smith:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521705460
Not exactly 17-year-old fare. But to give a short answer myself: I think you'll find that Aristotelian ethics in particular would find the concept of an ethics of self-sacrifice to be incredibly alien. Aristotle thinks that the virtuous man is a lover of self. And this is compatible with love for others: we have friends, Aristotle says, because they are like "another self." Aristotle's ideas are not entirely consistent with Rand, but there is a significant amount of overlap.
Likewise, Ayn Rand though that self-interest was a far richer concept that is conventional to believe. Self-interest is not reducible merely to economic calculus, but is constituted instead by values like reason, productive work, and self-esteem. This includes the values of love and friendship. The boundaries of the self are wider than many would admit, but they are not infinitely elastic. There is still such a thing as self-sacrifice, and it is morally corrupt. It is a virtue to give up money to help your sick wife. It is a vice to sacrifice that money to help a stranger's sick wife and let your own die.
As for those who are contending that Rand's philosophy was just some kind of response to her life under communism: She denied this, and her biography suggests that she held many of her central ideas before the 1917 revolution. Surely her experience in Russia informed her worldview, but it certainly didn't stop her from critiquing the ills of American society that she encountered when she got here, even though it was the anathema of Soviet Russia. Careful readers of The Fountainhead will notice a Sinclair Lewis-style satire of American commercial culture.
NS
I encourage other Objectivists to add their own polite and evenhanded comments.
Posted by admin at 02:19 PM | Comments (2)