Feasible Freedom and Gausian Justificatory Liberalism

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Feasible Freedom

In my studies of freedom, I have so far come to the conclusion that freedom is a dynamic equilibrium such that a (historically unprecedented) maximum of dissent coexists with incentives to keep explosive tensions built up through free dissenting from destroying social cohesion.

True enough, it is not correct to think of dissension as necessarily productive of problematic (potentially destructive) tension; allowing dissension to take place can itself be a major form of placation and mutual social reassurance. It may be tolerated, on balance, as a productive feature, even though unpalatable under other aspects. Or it may be countenanced as a nuisance that other people are entitled to.

Still, under many other circumstances, dissension is a source of significant tension. It is interesting to note that most people are in favour of freedom of speech and expression, but are scandalised when this freedom is being pursued in concrete instances of political commitment. In such situations, dissension seems pushed to the limits of toleration. One may think of a bar at the edge of the plane of toleration against which tension - to be pictured as some kind of viscous mass - keeps piling up, hopefully without dropping off into the abyss of violent disagreement.

Ultimately, what keeps "the mass of tension" from dropping off into the abyss is a whole system of institutions that tend to ensure 

(a) sufficient de-escalation, or
(b) productive consequences of dissension. 

To neutralise, adequately reduce, or even transform it in productive fashion, dissension in modern society is not countered or absorbed by a single procedure but by a complicated host of such procedures, a veritable labyrinth of circuit breakers, reverse thrust aggregates and other means of containment and transformation.

The Umpire Solution to Public Justification

One of  the methods by which we cushion and peacefully channel the discord encouraged by freedom is based on a general presumption embedded in the legal and political institutions of a free society, whereby interference in the private domain of any citizen must be justified in terms that are intelligible and appear reasonable to the affected party. Very roughly speaking, this is what Gerald Gaus refers to as Justificatory Liberalism. The latter seems to require the use of search procedures (epistemological, cultural, political etc.) by which we can identify a minimal common ground consisting of convictions sufficiently similar to enable us to agree on the rules that bind us and the legitimacy of enforcing these rules.

Writes Gaus:

To escape the state of nature, in which each relies on her own moral judgements, we require rule by an "Umpire, by settled Standing Rules, indifferent, and the same to all Parties" -- that is umpiring through law. For all three philosophers [Hobbes, Locke, Kant - I.G.T.U.] law as articulated by the umpire is the definitive voice of public reason.   (p. 195)

Gaus, G. (1996), Justificatory Liberalism. An Essay in Epistemology and Political Theory, Oxford University Press

Gaus then states his main contention, using a phrase that I have not been able to understand as yet: "victorious justification," which seems to mean something like: we are all prepared to accept the grounds underlying that kind of, i.e. victorious, justification.

Thus, Gaus states that his

aim is to show that such an umpire can be victoriously justified ... Unless that that can be done, disputes about the publicly justified umpiring procedure will simply replace disputes about justice. As Nozick observes: "When sincere and good persons differ, we are prone to think they must accept some procedure  to decide their differences, some procedures they might they agree to be reliable and fair. [But] ... this disagreement may extend all the way up the ladder of procedures." Showing that the disagreement does not extend all the way up the ladder of political procedures is the main concern of social contract theory ... [I]t needs to be shown why umpiring through law is required to solve the problems raised by a clash of private judgements. That is, ... why does the analysis of conflicting private judgements indicate that the set of justifiable umpiring procedures must be restricted to those that rule through law?  (Ibid.)

Gausian Justificatory Liberalism

I believe that the Gausian project of justificatory liberalism describes an important section of the landscape of freedom. 

However, to the extent that I have comprehended Gaus, one reservation that I have about his presentation of justificatory liberalism is that he seems to fail to emphasise - if that is what he believes, in common with me - that public justification (see below) is only part of the institutional infrastructure of feasible freedom, complemented by other institutions, and mostly a means of approximation with fuzzy ends, inconvenient bumps, inappropriate turnings and dead-ends. It has a significant signalling and symbolic function, but ought not to be thought of as a routinely frequented road to final resolution.

Gaus seems to imply that public justification can be achieved, in principle, even though most people do not attempt or accomplish it most of the time. I am not sure that Gaus is right as to "achievability." I think that we simply cannot achieve Gausian public justification in numerous situations where such achievement would be tantamount to solving the issue at hand. We have to get on with one another in the absence of consummate public justification.

However, the moral and eventually habitual pressure to attain public justification, incessant efforts at coming as close to it as we possibly can, does contribute momentously to a climate of tolerance robust enough to achieve feasible freedom, i.e. the dynamic equilibrium between dissension and placation in modern civil society.

Let us see, where this is taking Gaus.

To be continued.

Obedient Freedom - Rules and Justification

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Obedient Freedom

I will argue tentatively: 

a free society is characterised by 

• a typifying dilemma, and 

• the need to provide a solution to it.

A free society is challenged by Rousseau's problem: 

under what circumstances would it be possible for individuals 

• to be obedient to the rules of society, and 

• yet remain free? 

Freedom and Equality

The dilemma arises under the presupposition that people are supposed to be free and equal.

Freedom meaning: 

• individuals are not to be interfered with in their autonomous actions unless grounds (supporting corresponding rules) can be advanced that represent reasons intelligible and acceptable to those to be interfered with.

Equality meaning: 

• an individual's eligibility to be treated according to the proviso established above under "Freedom."

Obedient Freedom - Vetting the Rules

The dilemma that contributes to the definition of freedom consists in the possibility that a free and equal person might not understand and endorse rules that she is asked to heed.

Rules may be efficacious; that is one is required to honour them. But such efficacious rules need not be justified, that is accepted by those heeding them. 

A free society needs rules, and it needs to enforce these rules. However unlike an unfree society, in a free society every citizen has a right to demand that the rules she follows are justified in a way that she can ratify (accept, agree to).

If the rules of a free society are not required to be put to the test of such justification, they can be made in arbitrary fashion, in which case the non-consenting citizenry is no more free and equal. 

Instead we have 

• wilful law-makers, and 

• hapless, non-consenting rule-takers, which means that there is a class of people, who are subject to

1. arbitrariness, and thus not free, while being at the same time 
2. unequal to other citizens by virtue of their preclusion from vetting society's valid rules.

Rules

What an unfree society and a free society have in common is that their members will find that restraints of morality are worthy of their respect and that, therefore, they should submit to the authority of morality. In other words, it is reasonable and ultimately self-serving to subject oneself to rules.

Why?

Because individual behaviour entirely unrestrained by such norms yields a lower level of personal benefits, i.e. if each person seeks to best promote her own goals, all will be worse off. Thus, the absence of rules or rules insufficient to achieve social cooperation of a vital kind, such as required for effective defence operations, may make the difference between perdition and survival:

If a plurality of members of a community were each to claim supreme leadership, say in a hunting or warring enterprise, soon the need would arise for rules to protect the inevitable requirement that only one person can effectively exercise this function. Alternatively, imagine groups, perhaps tribes, that had never before been in lethal conflict with other groups. One type of group is relying on a sole religious leader, whereas the other type of group is practising a division of labour among several functional specialised leaders, none of which being solely responsible for warfare. Say, these groups come to clash. The multi-leader groups operate based on the decisions of a committee compromising all specialised leaders, rather than one commander-in-chief. Let us also assume that the single-leader war parties turn out to be more effective in waging war and therefore end up victorious in each of the many battles. This may effectively bring about unreasoned selection of a single-leader model of hierarchy. It was natural to have the religious leader command war activities - in truth an accident. Yet the choice proved effective, established in superiority of the single-leader type of group, whose concept of military hierarchy other groups assimilate to.   

Thus, from a mixture of experience and reasoning, but also by virtue of unreasoned selection, human communities accumulate a canon of rules that everybody is expected to abide by.

Note, this is true both for an unfree community and a free one.

Successful social cooperation depends upon the curtailment of certain narrowly conceived forms of personal autonomy and advantage.

Rule following is necessary for bringing about a social order that benefits all. 

Writes Gerald Gaus:

... social cooperation requires us to be confident that rational others will refrain from opportunistic cheating on cooperative arrangement.

Christiane Bicchieri has recently stressed the way that acceptance of social rules transforms mixed motive interactions such as the Prisoners' Dilemma into types of coordination games.

Gaus G., (2012), The Order of Public Reason. A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World, Cambridge University Press, p. 103

Gaus emphasises:

... communities of humans who follow cooperative norms better promote their individual goals than do communities who do not (and so are stuck playing Prisoners' Dilemmas).

Surely it is not just an accident that all human communities are devoted to rule following ... [T]he quintessential functions of social rules is to allow individuals to better advance their ends. [...]

[R]ule-based, cooperative, reasoning is best for us, and it tells us not always to decide on the grounds what is best for us.

Ibid.,  p.104

And Gaus immediately adds the very important proposition:

As Brian Skyrms has  demonstrated so well, although rationality cannot explain this uniquely human characteristic [of being obedient to rules and authorities in order to become personally the better-off and even freer, I.G.T.U.], an evolutionary account can do so." 

Ibid.,   p.104

Human beings, as Hayek suggested, are just as much goal-seekers, as they are rule-followers. Put differently, they are susceptible to private urges, aims and ambitions ("anthropocentric freedom,") but also absorb and embrace rules that restrict personal volition and prefigure the admissible paths along which to pursue autonomous intentions.

Punishment (coercion) becomes a vital ingredient in a rule-honouring society, i.e. a social equilibrium based on the observation of moral restraints.

Moral Calculus in a Free Society

With that, back to the beginning of this post:

Freedom is a condition in which coercion is applied to enforce rules that invite broad public approval, where the latter is based on accepting grounds that are intelligible and reasonable to each free individual, i.e. these grounds broadly conform to his moral standards - that is, while they may not be perfectly congruent with his moral assumptions and conclusions ( = his moral calculus), they are acceptable to his moral calculus.

Justified rules may be dispersed over an ambit of accommodation, leaving space for grounds and permutations of grounds that need not be fully concurrent, as the following analogy may help to explain.

Perhaps justified grounds may resemble those motivating a group of three friends agreeing to take a trip to Paris, with two agreeing on route A, and the third desiring a different route B, the former finally agreeing to route B, considering that the deviant choice nonetheless still basically conforms to the idea of the trip, its destination and time constraints, and the desire to see along the way certain new parts of the country and some of their exciting sights, while pleasing the proponent of route B, who is deemed by all to have merits (driving and providing the car) that call for accommodation concerning the issue at hand.

If this analogy is valid, the challenge of freedom is to improve the conditions that foster accommodation of this type and still insure peaceful solutions and continuity of freedom even in situations where a common ambit of moral understanding is absent.

Freedom - A Place-Holder Concept Extending into Popper's World Three

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Freedom, or its synonym liberty, is a place-holder concept. It refers to far more than what we can have in mind or even be aware of at any particular mentioning of the term. 

Even if it is well-defined with respect to one characteristic or a number of its aspects, at some point the term becomes a noise accompanying an increasingly diluted intuition. 

Take this meaning of the term: 

freedom is the absence of arbitrariness 

In the manner of concentric circles, this definition enters our mind as if taking the form of (1) reasonably audible sounds, followed by (2) less distinct echoes, and finally petering out in (3) a large aura of noise.

In the first stage, imagining an act of arbitrariness, like a king taking illegitimate revenge on a defenceless subject, we may be able to convince us - with good reason - of a clear meaning of the definition. 

In the second stage, realising that it is not always self-evident what might or might not count as an arbitrary act, the range of meaning gets more diffuse. 

In the third stage, we enter still more deeply into Popper's World Three, which presents us with the unforeseen implications of the initial shape of a theory: implications spread widely, revealing a vast hinterland of uncertain, indeterminate, or even contradictory conjectures and conclusions.

Freedom seeks to widen the range of an individual's options for autonomous acts. This necessarily unleashes diversity and the attendant potential for disagreement.

Freedom is an invitation to the widest possible dissension in a population. For this reason, she can only be viable in the long term if she also provides the cohering forces that prevent such systemic discord from breaking up an order tending toward a durable balance between freedom's strife and freedom's peace.

Peace among equals can only be maintained if strife is allowed, while strife must be curtailed so that it never suspends peace.

Freedom stands for a set of characteristics that will tend to contain different elements depending on who is asked to specify the members of the set.

Freedom resits ideological capture. There cannot be partisan ownership of her. Any one group may contribute their own concept of liberty, but none can claim to represent freedom in the only admissible and authentic way.

Real freedom, or feasible freedom, as I like to call it, is a living organism that is undergoing constant change in its inner and on its frontiers. The elements she consists of change, wax and wane in their import and alter their relationships and relative weight vis-à-vis one another.

When economic competition is a more specifically tasked discovery process, then freedom is a discovery process at large. The intricate intertwining of the political, legal, and economic spheres set aside, economic competition seeks new desires and ways to satisfy these, while equally searching for efficient assignment of means and resources to human needs. It is set to gather information from which it is possible to approximate how to rank and accordingly best distribute our economic capabilities to the most worthy tasks. In this it will be congruent with patches of the space spanned by liberty, but the latter extends far beyond this plane of congruence. Thus, among other things, liberty incorporates discovery processes that delimit our "ranking and distribution of economic capabilities" and the social permissibility of objectives aspiring to the status of "the most worthy tasks."

Notwithstanding attempts at ideological capture of liberty, it is not possible to derive one single variant of overall economic policy as the sole legitimate instantiation of liberty in the economic sphere.

Freedom is an evolutionary accident, propelled to take on her modern shape by congenial constellations of power politics. Freedom is  a gradual discovery, whose stages of growth are being experimented upon. Upon her unfolding, we witness a constant interlocking between spontaneous processes - not under direct or any human control - and conscious human design. Freedom is not self-evident, but socially self-defining. In her capacity as a discovery process, functional reconstruction reveals, freedom seeks to maximise her ability to gather useful information; to that purpose, she admits the entire gown-up population to the game of information gathering. She involves all full-aged individuals in the discovery process that she is.

So how can the term freedom be given (1) a sufficiently clear and (2) a sufficiently useful meaning, and, taking both aspects - (1) and (2) - into a account, a sufficiently flexible meaning?

To be continued.

A Quiz on Sectoral Balances - Refreshing My National Accounting

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 Bill Mitchell offers this quiz:

Question 1:

Assume that the current account deficit of a nation is on average over the business cycle equal to 2 per cent of GDP and that the government manages to run a balanced fiscal position when averaged over the same cycle. We can conclude that on average the private domestic sector overall is spending more than it is earning.

True or false?

The source.

I am at the very beginning of it, having just browsed L.R. Wray's Modern Money Theory, where he stresses that when one of the three sectors of the economy runs a deficit, there must be at least one other sector in surplus, as the balances of the three needs to sum to zero.

Government balance:                          G(overnment spending) + T(axes)

Private sector balance:                       S(avings) + I(investments)

External balance:                                X(exports) - M(imports)

More on sectoral balances.

In trying to answer the question I got confused owing to an incorrect assumption implied in my phrasing above: "the three sectors of the economy."

Actually, there are only two sectors that represent "the domestic economy," and one sector representing "the rest of the world."

If the external sector is erroneously considered part of the domestic economy, we have the contradictory situation that two sectors are in deficit, with no other sector providing an offsetting surplus.

But a current account deficit of the domestic sector means more imports than exports, i.e. more spending than income, hence a deficit.

And it implies a surplus for the external sector, "the rest of the world," which is importing less than it is exporting to the domestic economy, thus generating net income, a surplus.

So with the domestic government sector even, the external sector must fully offset the deficit of the domestic private sector.

Therefore, the answer to the question must be: yes.

The Anthropology of Freedom - A Note

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Freedom as Uniquely Human Enterprise

While working on my theory of freedom, this is just a brief note to remind me of a number of points that I am going to flesh out at a later occasion.

From a certain stage on, the propensity to seek freedom becomes a uniquely human enterprise. Animals seek freedom, in much the same way that humans exercise anthropocentric freedom, i.e. engaging in acts of personal autonomy - following one's own choices. 

However, at some point in time, the human species takes a decisive turn toward being able to imagine and realise a far wider range of choices than any other animal.

Uniquely Human Higher Levels of Language

With the development of higher levels of language that allows humans, unlike other animals, to describe their situations elaborately and to argue over these descriptions, human intelligence takes off in a big way. We are able to learn from one another, partake in and improve the experience even of fellows that we have never met. We turn our subjective inner experience out, allowing us to compare, test, and judge our ontological (what is real) and aetiological (what causes what) theories.

Far beyond the dictates of instinctive disposition and intuition, we are able to control our own reasoning and the reasoning of others for indications of falsehood and error. Eventually, the documentation of thought in written form universalises what advanced human oral communication had already started: mankind becomes so interconnected as to constitute a living socially organised hyper-intelligence, where pertinent and valuable information and insight has a high likelihood of being processed by those equipped to advance the mutually useful application of such knowledge, even without any such intent by those whose information and insights are being taken advantage of, as when the most recent engineering feats are undertaken without the inventors of algebra and other mathematical tools having intended any such use of their contribution to human knowledge.

(Animals are also capable of learning, but not in a way that uncouples learning to such a large extent as the faculty of human criticism is capable of. Animals are closely tied to their instincts in learning new things. They lack the ability to systematically criticise the messages of their instincts. Relativity theory is about as far away from the messages of our instincts as it gets.)

Adaptation by Creation and Pursuit of New Needs

The unique versatility and "trans-instinctual" capabilities of specifically human intelligence are of great import for the evolution of liberty. Human beings are the only species whose distinct strategy for environmental adaptation consists in

(a) developing, inventing or discovering  new desires, and

(b) pursuing (at a high rate of success) the satisfaction of such self-generated, novel needs.

As a consequence, human beings have a very high and zoologically unique disposition toward autonomous acts. 

Suppression and Furtherance of Anthropocentric Freedom

Anthropocentric freedom is always an outstanding factor to be dealt with in ordering human relationships, as this urge to act according to one's own propensities is strongly present in every human being.

Perhaps one ought to divide human history in two parts; the epochs that feared, despised, and sought to suppress anthropocentric freedom, and those that organised that fundamental human resource so as to utilise it as a systematic contributor of personal and public benefits under a regime of sociogenic freedom.

Even under conditions of sociogenic freedom, the restriction of individual autonomy remains necessary, a difficult and contentious issue.

This entails an important implication: under sociogenic freedom, freedom in its diverse aspects, especially as represented by personal freedom, is always intertwined with unfreedom. This is because anthropocentric freedom must be restrained by unfreedoms to be able to coordinate a community of people in such a manner as to be endowed with maximal (and therefore not total) personal autonomy. 

Freedom should not be conceived of as  

• an accumulating stock to be maximised until full capacity is achieved, but as an 

• equilibrating process producing constant change among the customary, legal and other relationships that conditions human interaction.

The Place of Liberty among Other Values (3) - Seminal Values of Freedom

Image credit. Continued from The Place of Liberty among Other Values (2) - Between Total Unfreedom and Total Freedom

Freedom - A Composite of Values

In my first post in this series on The Place of Liberty among Other Values, I have presented the conjecture that:

Even if it were possible to define a timelessly unique and incontestable notion of freedom, which I doubt is feasible, it would always depend for its structural reliability on the inclusion of values other than that of freedom. In other words, freedom is not self-defining, no less than markets are self-creating. 

In other words, freedom encourages people to contribute to the community their personal interpretations of the values they consider momentous. More specifically, the values that affect the meaning of freedom are arrived at by an open-ended process of political competition involving the entire population. We will see (in later posts) that freedom cannot assume any arbitrary meaning, but she is amenable to different interpretations which constitute a range of Wittgensteinian family resemblance.

I have also suggested, in my second post in this series,  that:

... freedom is likely to have to fit into some sort of order with attributes that exist prior or next to the attributes of sociogenic freedom ...

In other words, freedom is not only liable to being defined by the values and their interpretations that her constituents bring to the table, but she may also have to be thought of in terms of absorbing and adapting to values that precede or exist next to her. Freedom is a composite of values.

Order, Values, and Freedom

Any social order is characterised by certain regularities, some of which may be expressed as "values."

Josepf Spengler has tried to reconstruct the history of economic thought looking for the ways in which various economic schools have tried to account for the "problem of order." That is: how did the respective scholars think we could ensure an economic order? And how do we arrive at the best economic order?

I am quoting Spengler from Warren Samuel's "The Legal-Economic Nexus," p. 93.

Three somewhat incompatible conditions have combined, at all times and in all economies, to create the problem of economic order: the autonomy of many consuming and factor-organizing and supplying agents; the necessity that these autonomous agents behave in an appropriately cooperative and coordinate fashion; and the generally felt need that economic activity be continuous and uninterrupted. The problem has been aggravated, moreover,  by the force of secular and random change. ... In general, it may be said that the problem of economic order is solved in proportion as the three objectives, autonomy, cooperation, and continuity, are achieved and reconciled both with one another and with the force of secular and random change.

Spengler's is a dynamic conception of order. He depicts order as the result of balancing a number of factors that are variable in their turn. There are tensions between the factors: autonomy (freedom) may conflict with coordination (control), continuity may block the balancing process, and change might disrupt the dynamic equilibrium attained from balancing the factors. In a later article, Spengler adds another pair of factors - hierarchy and equality.

While anthropocentric freedom (A-Freedom) fits into any kind of social order, sociogenic freedom (S-Freedom) makes stringent demands on the kind of social order that is supposed to sustain her. Freedom is not unconditional. She requires that certain conditions prevail; conditions that may be interpreted in terms of values.

Values That Freedom Depends Upon - Peace, Equality, Democracy

Let us see if we are credible in construing freedom to be a composite of at least the three following values: peace, equality, and democracy.

Peace

Freedom seeks to maintain order not by violence and oppression but by peaceful means. Freedom's objective is a social order in which peace reigns. In order to attain that goal freedom proceeds peacefully.

Equality

The peace sought by freedom is meant to encompass the entire population. Every citizen is equally entitled to the presence and benefits of peace sought by a regime of freedom. The peace requirement of freedom makes people equal in a specific sense.

I cannot go into the issue of different meanings of equality in any detail here, but let me mention that equality should always be specified, to make evident what the term is supposed to mean. After all, countless specifications of equality are possible, each single one of which not necessarily implying other specifications of equality.

Democracy

To pre-empt violence and oppression from being employed as part of the means by which admissible human relationships are determined, I feel, I need to allow participation of all members of society in the processes that establish justice in their community. Concerning justice, remember, I had conjectured here:

Justice may indeed be regarded as the most fundamental issue in political philosophy because - or: if it is felt that - politics is about ordering the relationships among human beings.

If by justice we understand the admissible ordering of relationships among human beings. then the concept does serve a fundamental purpose in thinking about politics.

Note, I have not specified any concrete forms of democracy. Rather, I define democracy tentatively as the publicly accountable restraints that ensure peace to all constituents of freedom.

My terms - peace, equality, and democracy - correspond to the Spenglerian pillars of order: continuity, equality, and coordination. They form a composite that is held to be capable of bringing about personal freedom (Spenglerian autonomy).

If one thinks of freedom, as many who consider themselves partisans of liberty do, as personal liberty, then it would appear that liberty cannot stand alone as the supreme value, as her possibility critically depends on the presence of conditions related to at least three more values: peace, equality, and democracy.

The finding seems to lend support to my initial conjecture, expressed here:

... some of the building blocks of freedom, like a certain set of different applications of the term equality (e.g. characteristics of equality in the political or the legal processes of debate and negotiation), are just as fundamental as the demand for liberty relative to a certain desired ordering of human relationships. If, in your mind, you conjure away or, in practice, remove these building blocks of equality, the tower of freedom collapses.

Anticipating later posts, let me extract from the idea of order the thesis that freedom - an order in its own right - is a process of balancing a range of variable components so as to form a dynamic equilibrium.

Liberty is not a self-evident category. It is not possible to characterise her sufficiently without specifying the processes by which her constituents develop her meanings and her admissible practices.

The Place of Liberty among Other Values (2) - Between Total Unfreedom and Total Freedom

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Continued from The Place of Liberty among Other Values (1) - Politics Is Ordering Human Relationships

The Span of Freedom I

In order to define the range spanned by freedom, i.e. the continuum between the least degree of freedom and her largest extension in human society, it is useful to discern between anthropocentric and sociogenic freedom. 

Anthropocentric Freedom

Every human being has at least a limited ability to act in ways that are willed by him or her. The result are acts manifesting personal autonomy. Even a baby can do things its mother disapproves of, say, groping for a hot plate. A child is able to act out her intentions in defiance of her parents commands and prohibitions, jumping into a puddle, as I once did, protesting against not being bought the first TV set I had ever seen. Even a prisoner, handcuffed and on his way to the gallows, may decide to spit his jailor in the face.

Anthropocentric freedom designates the need and ability of every human being to take autonomous decisions and translate them into action, intended and endorsed by himself. Anthropocentric freedom may be very limited, as in a human baby or a prisoner or a highly disabled person, but it is present in the comportment of every human being. Also, anthropocentric freedom may give rise to detrimental and anti-social effects, as in the behaviour of a powerful bully.

Since anthropocentric freedom is always present in a human community, the span of freedom never reaches the point of a total absence of freedom.

At any rate, man is capable of autonomous action in considerably larger measure than any other animal. This makes him an agent seeking to expand liberty. In this propensity, man may subdue, oppress, and enslave other human beings - and actually has done so for the longest period in human history.

Sociogenic Freedom

Then there is a quantum leap. The age of sociogenic liberty sees an entirely new form of human culture. Liberty is no longer chiefly a matter of personal inclination, skill and luck; it is now the result of the manner in which we all generally relate to one another by heeding certain rules and refraining from certain forms of conduct. Liberty becomes a social convention or set of practices, a network of rules that are being generally observed. Liberty advances from being a highly restricted personal option to being a social tool liberating (vast numbers of) an entire population.

The Span of Freedom II

The scope for anthropocentric freedom widens with the spread of sociogenic freedom, or in other words: personal freedom increases in a social framework designed to promote and  defend unprecedented leeway for acts of personal autonomy. While greatly augmenting personal freedom, sociogenic freedom necessarily caps the extension of freedom. 

In fact, due to sociogenic liberty there can never be total freedom. Put differently, total freedom is conceptually impossible - in a free society people are free to disagree, and disagree they will. Not only will people have different ideas of freedom, there will be people who challenge and violate what others may unanimously regard as representing freedom.

Freedom is an ongoing process of finding out and enforcing and challenging and re-establishing what freedom means.

So, in an order of sociogenic freedom people will enforce checks on the widening of their personal freedom beyond certain tolerance levels and occasions for socially "unpoliced" individual discretion.

On the continuum of freedom there is a middle stretch, far away from "no freedom" and far away from "total freedom." It is the range, within which robust (not all conceivable nor all desirable) criteria of liberty are being fulfilled, so that we have an open access society (civil society), which in turn is characterised by considerable independence of individuals and their (private) organisations from arbitrary transgression by other citizens and especially by specialists in violence and governance.

Understanding the span of freedom is necessary in order to appreciate that freedom is best thought of as being nested within other values and conditions. In the face of this insight, it is compelling to ask what exactly is the place of freedom among other values. Is she the highest value? If so, in what sense? Or is she subordinate or on a par with other values? And so on.

Order with and without Freedom

We can now argue that there is (social) order without sociogenic freedom, which is the type of freedom we have in mind in investigating freedom as a characteristic of modern society.

This will help us iidentify values and conditions that accompany freedom as she emerges in sociogenic form. In other words, our presumption is that freedom is likely to have to fit into some sort of order with attributes that exist prior or next to the attributes of sociogenic freedom. If so, this requires us to determine the relationship of the attributes of freedom to other, distinct attributes of the overall social order, part of which freedom becomes. 

Joseph Spengler gives the outline of an order that allows us to rank freedom among other pillars of society. The Spenglerian pillars are autonomy ( = freedom), coordination ( = control), continuity, change, hierarchy and equality.

How freedom may be relating to these pillars, we shall look into in the next post: The Place of Liberty among Other Values (3) - Freedom and Order

See also King George I - From Anthropocentric to Sociogenic Liberty.

The Place of Liberty among Other Values (1) - Politics Is Ordering Human Relationships

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I have just come across a text in which it is proposed that in The Republic 

Socrates poses what may be the most fundamental of all questions in political philosophy: 'What is justice?'   (p. 3 in G. Gaus, Political Concepts and Political Theories)

It has been a long time since I have read The Republic, leaving me with very little memory of what is argued in it, and I have not yet continued to read the piece by Gerald Gaus from which I take the above quote.

So, I am simply asking myself, as a matter of probing my own "attempts at liberty," my own theory of liberty, what reasons might I be able to advance in defence of the contention that the search for justice is the most basic urge in political reasoning.

Posing this question strikes me as a useful way to get ahead with an issue I have meant to tackle a long time ago: determining the place of liberty among other values.

Apart from being an entertaining pastime, the question who might be the best soccer player ever is hardly a valid research programme. There are, to begin with,  too many incommensurabilities involved in comparing all players in their diverse positions as goalkeeper, defender, midfield player or forward.

Surely, there is no absolute hierarchy of questions in a subject as complex as political philosophy; the pertinence of questions and their ranking are likely to change depending on which issue one is focussing on, which aspects one is interested in learning more about. 

However, for my purpose, it is heuristically efficient to examine what is gained by according justice the place of pre-eminence among other fundamental issues.

My initial answer, then, is: 

Justice may indeed be regarded as the most fundamental issue in political philosophy because - or: if it is felt that - politics is about ordering the relationships among human beings.

If by justice we understand the admissible ordering of relationships among human beings. then the concept does serve a fundamental purpose in thinking about politics.

Thus, we can think of different variants of ordering admissible relationships among human beings, such as embodied in paternal models, where admissibility is determined by paternal decree ("Führer befiehl, wir folgen dir," meaning "Führer command us, we shall follow you."), or egalitarian models, where decrees must be striven for in processes of debate and negotiation that involve numerous equals.

A phrase like 

there is no higher value than freedom

may contain important information, if it is intended to point to the fact that a certain desired order of admissible human relationships cannot persist in the absence of what we call (the conditions of) freedom. 

However, ultimately the statement is a rhetorical exaggeration because an order characterised by the hallmarks of freedom depends on other values than that of freedom alone. 

Even if it were possible to define a timelessly unique and incontestable notion of freedom, which I doubt is feasible, it would always depend for its structural reliability on the inclusion of values other than that of freedom. In other words, freedom is not self-defining, no less than markets are self-creating. 

Counting among the egalitarian models of admissible human relationships, freedom is of necessity negotiable among the constituency that vouchsafes her present condition. Thus, values associated with freedom are not subject to a uniform and unchangeable definition, which is also true for their relative status vis-à-vis one another, i.e. the trade-offs deemed admissible among the values constituting or complementing any set of narrower definientia of freedom.

So: yes, freedom is one of many possible regimes of justice. And as we shall argue in later posts, the basic contours of freedom are capable of enclosing many different regimes of justice.

Also, some of the building blocks of freedom, like a certain set of different applications of the term equality (e.g. characteristics of equality in the political or the legal processes of debate and negotiation), are just as fundamental as the demand for liberty relative to a certain desired ordering of human relationships. If, in your mind, you conjure away or, in practice, remove these building blocks of equality, the tower of freedom collapses.

Continued in The Place of Liberty among Other Values (2) - Between Total Unfreedom and Total Freedom.

Government Spending and Taxation - On MMT (4)

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                                                                   Continued from Government Spending an Taxation - On MMT (3)

Taxing To Avoid Excessive Inflation, Booms and Busts

According to Warren Mosler, taxing is instrumental in regulating "aggregate demand," that is: the spending power exercised by society's economic subjects. If the economy threatens to overheat owing to too much spending, higher taxes will have a dampening effect. If the economy is sluggish, lower taxes leave the people with more means of spending.

Taxing is not being resorted to for the purpose of raising funds with which government is able to finance its expenditures. No such funding is required, as government can originated any amount of funds it deems requisite for its various tasks and projects.

An increased tax burden means people have a lesser ability to cause inflation by exercising their spending power. Lower taxes free resources to be spent so as to avoid unemployment and recessions.

The government taxes us and takes away our money for one reason - so we have that much less to spend which makes the currency that much more scarce and valuable. Taking away our money can also be thought of as leaving room for the government to spend without causing inflation.

Think of the economy as one big department store full of all the goods and services we all produce and offer for sale every year. We all get paid enough in wages and profits to buy everything in that store, assuming we would spend all the money we earn and all the profits we make. (And if we borrow to spend, we can buy even more than there is in that store.) But when some of our money goes to pay taxes, we are left short of the spending power we need to buy all of what’s for sale in the store. This gives government the “room” to buy what it wants so that when it spends what it wants, the combined spending of government and the rest of us isn’t too much for what’s for sale in the store.

However, when the government taxes too much - relative to its spending - total spending isn’t enough to make sure everything in the store gets sold. When businesses can’t sell all that they produce, people lose their jobs and have even less money to spend, so even less gets sold. Then more people lose their jobs, and the economy goes into a downward spiral we call a recession.

The source.

As we have already seen here, this regulating effect of taxation can also be interpreted as a way of balancing the competing appetites of the government sector (GS) and the non-government sector (NGS) for society's economic resources.

However, he advances another reason why taxes perform a seminal function in society.

Taxing to Motivate Resource Creation

Putting it less charitably, according to Mosler, government taxes people in order to make them work for it. 

Taxes create an ongoing need in the economy to get dollars, and therefore an ongoing need for people to sell their goods and services and labor to get dollars. 

With tax liabilities in place, the government can buy things with its otherwise-worthless dollars, because someone needs the dollars to pay taxes. [...]

Think of a property tax. [...] You have to pay the property tax in dollars or lose your house. [...]  So now you are motivated to sell things - goods, services, your own labor - to get the dollars you need.  (p. 25.)

The source.

In other words, modern taxation is the continuation of the age-old practice of forcing people to pay tribute to government.

Frankly, I feel somewhat reluctant to accept the idea that people only deign to work productively because government forces them to pay taxes. But that may not be what Mosler is trying to say. 

Logically, it is perfectly possible that people are motivated to be productive for other reasons, and practically the fact that people earn differential surpluses over and above their tax liabilities is indicative of complementary motifs for diligence. 

Historically, modern taxation may be a development toward greater efficiency in a tax-based society, at least to the extent that government policy is endeavouring to find the equilibrium point where the GS and the NGS jointly achieve optimal resource use. 

At any rate, Mosler makes his point by referring to 

what happened in Africa in the 1800’s, when the British established colonies there to grow crops. The British offered jobs to the local population, but none of them were interested in earning British coins. So the British placed a “hut tax” on all of their dwellings, payable only in British coins. Suddenly, the area was “monetized,” as everyone now needed British coins, and the local population started offering things for sale, as well as their labor, to get the needed coins. The British could then hire them and pay them in British coins to work the fields and grow their crop.  (p. 26)

Government Spending and Taxation - On MMT (3)

 
Image credit. Continued from Government Spending Not Limited by Ability to Tax or Borrow - MMT (2)

According to MMT (Modern Money Theory), taxation is not needed to fund government spending. The "funding" is accomplished by the origination ex nihilo of new money at the behest of government.

Writes Warren Mosler:

Let’s start by looking at what happens if you pay your taxes by writing a check. When the U.S. government gets your check, and it’s deposited and “clears,” all the government does is change the number in your checking account “downward” as they subtract the amount of your check from your bank balance. Does the government actually get anything real to give to someone else? No, it’s not like there’s a gold coin to spend.

[...]

Can you now see why it makes no sense at all to think that the government has to get money by taxing in order to spend? In no case does it actually “get” anything that it subsequently “uses.  (pp. 14)

The source. 

Government Spending Creates the Ability to Tax

Rather than the government requiring money from taxpayers in order to be able to spend, it first has to spend, before anyone is able to pay taxes.  Put differently: government being the monopolistic originator of money, it clearly is required to first issue currency as legal tender before it can be paid by anyone in terms of that only admissible type of money. 

It would appear that government is in a position to spend simply by creating new fiat money, precisely and only because no one else is allowed to originate money. It would be interesting to think through the implications of currency competition in the absence of a monopolistic originator of money; however, this a matter for later examination.

In the meantime, we must ask ourselves, why is there a need for taxation at all? 

Why does the government tax the citizenry, if it does not require taxpayers' money to be able to act as government, that is demand certain activities from non-government parties involving monetary remuneration and thus incur costs in terms of its own currency?

Understanding the answer takes some effort of accustoming, and leaves a feeling with me as if my brain is getting twisted or hazed.

Taxation - Regulating Rivalry for Economic Resources between Government and Non-Government

If I understand Mosler correctly, what makes taxes necessary is the need to manage rivalry for the economic resources of society between non-government parties and the government.

Taxes are a tool that enables us to achieve or come close to a sensible balance between the competing demands that the private sector and the government make on the economic resources produced and offered in society.

Assuming a need for government at all, there are at least two types of parties that wish to draw on the resources of an economy: those situated in the government sector and those making up the non-government sector.

Which of the two sectors is going to get which portion of the resources?

By levying taxes, we force the non-government sector to give up some of the purchasing power it would otherwise use to command more of the available economic resources.

Ideally, if there were a right amount of consumption (of society's economic resources) by government sustaining an ideal contribution to the common weal, taxes should be so set that the rest of society is inhibited from pre-empting the resources needed by government to accomplish its desirable functions.

If taxes are set at the correct rate, society's economic resources will be advantageously divided between the government sector (GS) and the non-government sector (NGS).

Hence, Mosler seems to imply the possibility of a perfect division of labour between GS and NGS, some sort of equilibrium setting. Say, the proper claim of the GS is 30% of the economic resources of society, and 70% by the NGS. If taxes are "too low," the GS will be starved of resources and fail to provide the services it ideally ought to offer. If taxes are "too high," the GS is wastefully expropriating resources better left to the NGS.

To be continued at Government Spending and Taxation - MMT (4)

Government Spending Not Limited by Ability to Tax or Borrow - MMT (2)

 

Image credit. Continued from  Government Spending Not Limited by Ability to Tax and Borrow - MMT (1)

How does government effect its spending? More specifically, how does government carry out spending, if it does not draw on 

• (a) some endowment of assets of its own, or 

• (b) third parties, as by borrowing or requisitioning through taxation?

 

Explains Warren Mosler:

Imagine you are expecting your $2,000 Social Security payment to hit your bank account, which already has $3,000 in it. If you are watching your account on the computer screen, you can see how government spends without having anything to spend.

Presto!

Suddenly your account statement that read $3,000 now reads $5,000.

What did the government do to give you that money? It simply changed the number in your bank account from 3,000 to 5,000. 

It didn’t take a gold coin and hammer it into a computer.

All it did was change a number in your bank account by making data entries on its own spreadsheet, which is linked to other spreadsheets in the banking system.

Government spending is all done by data entry on its own spreadsheet called “The U.S. dollar monetary system.  (p.15)

Source: Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy

If I see it right, government has a bank account which it can credit out of nothing with a number that represents money recognised as such in the territory under its jurisdiction.

In an act of origination, the stage of creation ex nihilo, an "empty" government account (with a balance of $ 0) is credited by fiat with, say, $ 1,000 or any other sum of money.

This act of origination is re-enacted any time the government decides to create money.

The next stage, the act of spending, involves a transfer of (some or all of the balance of the government's account) to one or more accounts held by anyone the government chooses as the recipient of its newly created money.

So, the government might debit its own account to the tune of $ 1,000, while crediting the account of, say, a private contractor employed to repair a government building by the same amount.

The government has engaged in a valid and effective economic transaction without the use of any productive resource or service, and without employing taxed, saved or borrowed money.

At the same time, it has enhanced the ability of another non-government participant in the economy to engage in similar valid and effective economic transactions with anyone interested in deals denominated in the government's currency.

To illustrate, in Australia, the central bank maintains a special facility to manage a number of bank accounts on behalf of the government, and when the latter spends, it debits these accounts and credits various recipient bank accounts within the commercial banking system. As a result, deposits show up in a number of commercial banks as a reflection of the spending.

Federal government spending ... is largely facilitated by the government issuing cheques drawn on the central bank. [...] When the recipients of the cheques (sellers of goods and services to the government) deposit the cheques in their bank, the cheques clear through the central banks clearing balances (reserves), and credit entries appear in accounts throughout the commercial banking system. In other words, government spends simply by crediting a private sector bank account at the central bank. 

 The source: Deficit Spending 101 - Part 2

All in all, government spends by creating deposits in the private banking system.

Summarises Bill Mitchell:

While the exact institutional detail can vary from nation to nation, governments typically spend by drawing on a bank account they have with the central bank.

An instruction is sent to the central bank from the treasury to transfer some funds out of this account into an account in the private sector, which is held by the recipient of the spending.

A similar operation might occur when a government cheque is posted to a private citizen who then deposits the cheque with their bank. That bank seeks the funds from the central bank, which writes down the government’s account, and the private bank writes up the private citizen’s account.

All these transactions are done electronically through computer systems. So government spending can really be simplified down to typing in numbers to various accounts in the banking system.

Source: Overt Monetary Financing - again.

Unlike asset-backed money, where a unit of money represents (some fraction of) a physical unit of some asset such as gold or silver, and is limited by this correspondence, fiat money can be created ad libitum. 

Under a regime of fiat money, government does not get the money it wishes to spend from anyone or anywhere, other than from its own decree that there be more money.

Hence, fiat money is not an economic good. It is not subject to scarcity. 

A matter of uninhibited volition, its provision itself is unlimited. That is to say, in as much as government is the creator of its own currency, it is able to honour any claims against it denominated in that money. 

In that sense, government cannot go bankrupt, i.e. it is not facing the risk of insolvency. 

Therefore, it can and, indeed, it ought to go on issuing new money, i.e. engage in spending, as long as such spending provides a net economic benefit.

Continued at Government Spending and Taxation - On MMT (3)

Government Spending Not Limited by Ability to Tax or Borrow - On MMT (1)

I am trying to acquaint myself with a number of propositions advanced by MMT that are new and, at least, initially hard for me to comprehend. MMT stands for Modern Money Theory, also known as Modern Monetary Theory, a heterodox economic doctrine associated notably with Warren Mosler, Bill Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, Stephanie Kelton and others.

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The first of these propositions is stated by Warren Mosler as a presumptively erroneous tenet:

The federal government must raise funds through taxation and borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax and borrow.  (p.13)

All quotes are taken from "Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy."

On the contrary, the correct statement, according to Mosler, is:

Federal government spending is in no case operationally constrained by revenues, meaning that there is no "solvency risk." In other words, the federal government can always make any and all payments in its own currency, no matter how large the deficit is, or how few taxes it collects.  (p.13)

What made me hesitant to accept, or even understand, the proposition at first, were assumptions added on my part to the Mosler contention. Thus, I insinuated that Mosler is suggesting that there are no limits of any kind and no detrimental consequences at all to uninhibited government spending. But this is not what Mosler is saying. 

He does not deny that spending may be funding inimical purposes, nor does he rule out that a certain level or intensity of spending might have a direct negative impact, such as giving rise to inflationary effects.

I believe, Mosler is right in contending that government's ability to spend is not constrained by the need to tax or borrow. However, what spread a premature layer of haze over the proposition, to me at least, is the whole apparatus of arguments and counterarguments relating to the effects of government intervention.

But what Mosler is really saying is that (1) the ability of government to spend, which is unlimited as far as the provision of funds is concerned, is one thing, while (2) society's ability to politically deal with and economically digest any such spending is another matter. 

What he is driving at ultimately is that if government spending is capable of helping the economy at a certain juncture and under certain circumstances, in order to provide such support the state is never constrained by its capacity to tax or borrow.

Why? 

Because the government, unlike all other participants in the economy, originates the money in question. It is not revenue-constrained. It does not have to work and offer a desired product or service to obtain additional money. Nor does it have to get some good or service from someone backing its ability to spend.

All government has to do is to make some accounting changes. What sort of accounting changes? Well, that is another source of inhibited insight, with me. I do not know much about the way in which taxing, borrowing, spending and lending are documented in terms of accountancy.

More on that in the sequel: Government Spending Not Limited by Ability to Tax or Borrow - On MMT (2)