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When Academia Turns into Fight Club – Article by Steven Horwitz

When Academia Turns into Fight Club – Article by Steven Horwitz

The New Renaissance Hat
Steven Horwitz
July 14, 2017
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What do academics do for excitement over the summer, you ask? This summer many of us have been engaged in a furious debate over the new book Democracy in Chains by Duke historian Nancy MacLean.

Libertarian and conservative scholars from a variety of disciplines have raised a number of criticisms about MacLean’s sources and her accuracy about historical facts that call into question the “evidence” she has to show that economist James Buchanan and public choice theory, if not libertarianism more generally, are all tools of racist oligarchs like the Koch Brothers.

Rather than rehash all of the particular criticisms, I want to focus on the controversy that has developed over the criticisms themselves. It’s important to understand that the libertarian critics of MacLean have carefully compared passages in her book with her cited sources and showed how she has misread and quoted selectively from them, often leading her to attribute to people the exact opposite of the argument they actually held. These criticisms have been posted publicly on blogs and websites. These are not just vague accusations. They are detailed examples of poor scholarship.

But the fascinating part has been her response. And her lack thereof.

Everyone Is under Attack

MacLean has offered no substantive response to the detailed criticisms. She had one exchange with Russ Roberts over her treatment of Tyler Cowen, but even there she did not respond to the substance of Russ’s concerns. Other than that, nothing.

What she did do, however, was put up a long Facebook post that reads like a combination conspiracy theory tract and call to action for progressive activists. The short version is that she claimed she was under “attack” from a conspiracy of “Koch operatives” who were paid hacks out to destroy her book and her reputation and silence her. She claimed, then retracted when she found out it couldn’t be done, that the Kochs had bought Google results to put the critics at the top of searches. She encouraged her supporters to game the Amazon reviews by posting positive reviews and down-voting the “fake” Koch reviews.

She has continued this narrative of being “under attack” in various interviews, and most recently in a story in Inside Higher Ed, where fellow progressives echo this language.

This notion of being “attacked” is particularly fascinating to me. Let’s be clear what she means: people who know a lot about Buchanan, public choice theory, and libertarianism have taken issue with her scholarship and have patiently and carefully documented the places where she has made errors of fact or interpretation, or mangled and misused source materials and quotes. That is all that they have done.

None of this was coordinated nor was it part of a conspiracy from the Koch brothers. It was scholars doing what scholars do when they are confronted with bad scholarly work, especially when it touches on issues we know well.

None of these critics, and I am among them, have called for physical violence against her. None have contacted her employer. None have called her publisher or Amazon to have the book taken down. Contrary to her claim, the only silence in this whole episode is her own refusal to respond to legitimate scholarly criticism. We don’t want to silence her – we eagerly await her response.

So where is this language of “attack” coming from? Here is where I think the political right bears some responsibility for the current situation. And to the degree libertarians have cast their lot with “the right,” we are seen as guilty by association. Call it blowback if you will.

In the last year or two, progressive intellectuals and academics have been threatened with violence and had their employers contacted, not to mention threats made from politicians, on the basis of public statements they’ve made. Yes, some of those statements were deplorable, but that is no excuse for threatening people’s physical safety or their jobs. These are real attacks, not intellectual criticisms.

We should also not forget the anti-intellectual “Professor Watch List” put up by TurningPoint USA, which gave left-leaning faculty more reason to imagine coordinated and conspiratorial attacks.

And yes, all of this was not done by conservative or libertarian intellectuals, but they were done by activists associated with “the right,” and that is all that progressives need to find the intellectuals guilty by association.

It probably also matters, though less so, that many conservative and libertarian students have referred to themselves as “under attack” in college classrooms. In my 30 years of teaching experience, what they call “under attack” is far more often than not simply having their views strongly challenged and being expected to defend them. In other words, exactly what MacLean is experiencing.

This is not being “attacked.” It is what college classrooms and scholarly conversation are all about.

Unfortunately, the real attacks on left-wing faculty (and yes, there have been ones on right-wing ones too) have provided MacLean’s defenders with a convenient word to use to blur the difference between legitimate, but forceful, scholarly criticism, and threats of violence or silencing.

Always Take the High Road

Conservative critics of higher education should take this to heart. When you whip people into a frenzy over the crazy things that a small number of faculty say on Twitter, or because of legitimate concerns about the treatment of a small number of conservative speakers, the whipped up folks are going to do things you wish they wouldn’t. And that’s going to lead to blowback.

As a libertarian academic who frequently speaks at public events on other campuses, I do have low-level concerns about my safety. And if I were a progressive academic, I’d have similar fears given the way some of them have been treated, especially by politicians. Calling the intellectual criticisms of her book a coordinated conspiracy heads MacLean into Alex Jones territory, but given the current climate, it shouldn’t surprise us that she and her supporters feel “under attack.”

But notice the result: a book that smears libertarian and conservative ideas on the basis of shoddy scholarship gets attention because the author claims she’s under attack when she is called out in careful detail by other scholars. The real attacks on left-leaning faculty enable her to claim victimhood by association while using guilt by association to blame the conservative and libertarian intellectuals who are criticizing her work.

Once we head down the road, whether caused by the left, right, or libertarians, of turning intellectual disagreements into threats of violence, or threats to employment, or anything of that sort, the social losses are huge. Indeed, once both threats to people’s safety and employment and sharp intellectual disagreement become “attacks,” we will lose our ability to recognize the moral and intellectual difference between the two, and our disgust at the threats will weaken. And to the degree that the left largely dominates the intellectual world, conservatives and libertarians will be the biggest losers when academia turns into Fight Club.

So what to do? First, call off the dogs. Conservatives and libertarians need to consistently take the high road, as many of the intellectuals have tried to do in response to MacLean’s book. The hard part is getting right-wing media, both traditional and social media, to do the same. Those of us who care about intellectual standards have to publicly call out our own when they whip up anti-intellectual and anti-higher education frenzies.

Second, implore our left-wing friends of integrity to do the same. The most important thing that can happen to end this arms race is for scholars of integrity on the left to call out people like MacLean, both for their shoddy scholarship and their hyperbolic use of the language of conspiracy and attack. A strongly critical review of her book by a historian or economist of the center or left would go a long way to addressing the specific concerns it raises and could set a necessary example for others.

In the meantime, those of us critical of MacLean will continue to document her errors and press publicly for a response. And we’ll do so with the most proper of scholarly etiquette. I implore those sympathetic to our cause to be on their best behavior on social media as well. She and her supporters need no more ammunition.

Steven Horwitz is the Schnatter Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball State University, where he also is a Fellow at the John H. Schnatter Institute for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise. He is the author of Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author. Read the original article.

Protectionism is All Around Us – Article by Daniel Gold

Protectionism is All Around Us – Article by Daniel Gold

The New Renaissance HatDaniel Gold
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In political speak, a protectionist is someone who is against free trade. They want to protect American businesses, and indirectly American workers, from cheap labor offered abroad.

The underlying argument is that American workers require protection from competition.The underlying argument is that American workers require, or benefit from, protection from competition.

This same argument is used to restrict many other liberties.

Crusaders against immigration lament that low wage earning immigrants steal jobs from, and drive down the wages of American born workers.

Opponents of Uber and AirBnB claim that hotel owners, and taxi drivers, need to be protected from cheap competition offered in the sharing economy.

Even advocates of the minimum wage are protectionists. They feel that workers need to be protected from other workers who would offer to sell their labor at a lower price. This was evident in the first debate over the minimum wage, when white workers felt they needed protection against cheaper, African-American labor.

The minimum wage was first implemented in the United States nationally in 1931 by the Davis-Bacon act. During the debate in the House of representatives, Rep. William Upshaw (D-Ga.) complained of the “superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor.” Rep. Miles Allgood (D-Ala.) said, “That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.”

Opposition to immigration, trade, the sharing economy, and a wage set by the market is all the same tired argument, rebranded to hide its proven failure.

It’s Always Anti-Competitive

Protectionism fails because the harms of protectionist policies are guaranteed to exceed the benefits. Any benefits transferred to the producers are passed onto the consumer in the form of higher prices. However, because less exchange takes place at a higher price, there is a deadweight loss to the economy as a whole.

Protectionism is propped up by a political system of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs that make it difficult to defeat. Imagine you own a hotel, and a bill is sitting on your legislator’s desk to ban AirBnB.

You will make it known to your legislator, that your support for him, and the support of 100 other hotel owners like you, depends on him signing the bill. Meanwhile the hundreds of thousands of consumers who are hurt by this bill, care more about other things.

The Damage Adds Up

The individual consumer may not care much about the hurt she suffers from a more expensive hotel, but it adds up. Hundreds of thousands of goods are more expensive because of tariffs or quotas. Hundreds of services become more expensive for everyone because of occupational licensing laws.

Because of the incentives within the system, this will be one of the most difficult economic problems to fix. It requires vigilance, it requires us to call our representatives while they consider protectionist laws, it requires us to vote for non-protectionist candidates. If we do all this, we can rid ourselves of the largest drag on our economy.

danielgold
Daniel Gold

Daniel Gold is a student at Carleton College.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Free Study Guide on Public-Choice Economics – Third Edition – by G. Stolyarov II

Free Study Guide on Public-Choice Economics – Third Edition – by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 3, 2014
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The Third Edition of the popular Free Study Guide on Public-Choice Economics, prior editions of which have received over 31,000 views, is now available for download. Click here to download a free PDF copy of the Third Edition of this study guide.

This study guide covers 20 areas of public-choice theory and related topics in a question-and-answer format, with questions developed by Mr. Stolyarov on the basis on his notes taken in Stolyarovian Shorthand during the 2008 session of the Public Choice Economics course at Hillsdale College, taught by the renowned economist and professor, Dr. Gary Wolfram.

See more educational offerings in The Rational Argumentator’s section of Free Tools for Rational Education.

Ceremonial plastic sword, awarded to Mr. Stolyarov in 2008 for receiving the highest grade in Professor Gary Wolfram’s Public Choice Economics course at Hillsdale College.

Ceremonial plastic sword, awarded to Mr. Stolyarov in 2008 for receiving the highest grade in Professor Gary Wolfram’s Public Choice Economics course at Hillsdale College.

Libertarians and Voting – Article by Alex Salter

Libertarians and Voting – Article by Alex Salter

The New Renaissance Hat
Alex Salter
November 5, 2013
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While it’s often dangerous to make blanket statements about sociopolitical movements, it’s not a stretch to say libertarians have a contentious relationship with voting.

Many libertarians don’t vote at all, and cite positive (as opposed to normative) reasons for doing so. The standard argument goes something like this: Voting in an election is costly, in the sense that it takes time that could have been used doing something else. However, in the vast majority of elections—and probably all elections that matter for who gets to determine significant aspects of policy—each individual vote, taken by itself, is worthless. The voting populace is so large that the probability that the marginal vote affects the outcome of the election is virtually zero. To the extent that one votes solely for the sake of impacting the outcome of elections, the costs of voting outweigh the expected benefits, defined as the probability one’s vote is decisive multiplied by the payoff from having one’s preferred candidate win. A really big payoff, multiplied by zero, is zero.

This argument is a staple of the academic literature in political economy and public choice. It’s used to explain many phenomena, the most prominent of which is rational ignorance. Since each individual’s vote doesn’t matter, no individual has any incentive to become informed on the issues. As such, voters acting rationally remain largely uninformed. As an explanation for an observed phenomenon in political life, it is impeccably reasoned and extremely useful for academic research. However, as an explanation for why individual libertarians refrain from voting, it is potentially quite dangerous.

Voting is a quintessential collective-action problem. Policy would be more libertarian at the margin if libertarians showed up en masse to vote on election day. But for each individual libertarian voter, voting is costly. Furthermore, the benefits of a more libertarian polity are available to each libertarian whether he votes or not. Each libertarian potential voter thus acts according to his own self-interest and stays home, even though if some mechanism were used to get all libertarians to vote, each of them would be better off.

Why is using this argument for abstaining from voting dangerous?  The answer lies in a significant reason why libertarians are libertarians. Many who are not libertarians advocate government provision of goods and services such as roads or education on the grounds that collective-action problems would result in these goods and services being undersupplied. Libertarians rightly respond that this is nonsense. History is full of examples of privately supplied roads and education, not to mention more difficult cases. The existence of a collective-action problem is not a sufficient argument for government intervention. To believe otherwise is to ignore the creative and imaginative capacities of individuals engaging in private collective action to overcome collective-action problems.

Every time a libertarian points to the collective-action problem as a reason for abstaining from voting, he weakens, at least partially, the argument that individuals in their private capacity can overcome these kinds of problems. By suggesting we cannot overcome a relatively simple collective-action problem like voting, our illustrations of ways other collective-action problems have been solved privately, and arguments for how such problems might be solved privately going forward, may appear disingenuous.

Looking at the problem more closely, there are all sorts of ways libertarians can solve the collective-action problem associated with voting. Libertarians could meet throughout the year in social groups dedicated to furthering their education by, say, reading Human Action together, and follow up such meetings with dinner parties or social receptions. The price tag for admission to such groups could be meeting at a predetermined time and place on Election Day and voting. This coupling of mild political activism with other desirable activities is an example of bundling, a very common mechanism by which collective goods and services have been privately supplied throughout history.

At this point, a few caveats are in order.

First, this potential solution is irrelevant for those who refuse to engage in the political process for ethical reasons. A libertarian could find the current popular interpretation of the “social contract” so unacceptable that any engagement in the political process cannot be justified. Second, even after deriving mechanisms for overcoming the voting collective-action problem, individuals’ opportunity cost of participating exceeds the expected benefit. Academics who are libertarians — who must spend significant time engaging highly technical scholarly literature to further their careers — would be most likely to cite this argument, and they may very well be right to do so. Third, organizing “voting clubs” large enough to have a chance of mattering for election outcomes may itself be prohibitively costly. Such is most likely to be true in national elections.

But if these reasons or others are why libertarians abstain from voting, they should say so. Citing the collective-action problem by itself is not enough, and it undermines the argument that purposeful human actors can overcome collective-action problems through voluntary association.

Alex Salter is a Ph.D. student in economics at George Mason University.

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
Restoration of Free Study Guide on Public-Choice Economics

Restoration of Free Study Guide on Public-Choice Economics

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
March 17, 2012
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I am pleased to announce that The Rational Argumentator’s Free Study Guide on Public-Choice Economics has been restored. It is available from the index page of TRA’s Free Tools for Rational Education. After languishing for years on the unreliable and now non-existent site of BlogDog.com, this study guide shall now be permanently hosted on TRA’s own domain. There are 20 individual sections, each of which is still hosted on my Yahoo! Contributor Network (former Associated Content) pages. I cannot readily edit these pages, so they still link back to the old (now defunct) study-guide index. However, the current index at least offers a way to navigate to each section.