Pamela J. Stubbart very nicely responds to her critics. I want to add something to a point she makes along the way. She writes: If you have fewer laws, you need well-functioning informal norms to keep society running smoothly. The norms are not decreed by anyone top-down; they are emergent from the many voluntary, peaceful, unilateral actions of individuals – like my writing a blog post, and us discussing it on Facebook. A “totally free society” with no norms and no laws would be non-conducive to human happiness, because people would face huge coördination problems, constantly fail to learn from each other’s mistakes, etc. Social norms in any particular domain are ceteris paribus morally less problematic than laws in that domain would be, because “enforcement” is undertaken through the voluntary and peaceful actions of decentralized individuals and not via the barrel of a gun wielded by a distinct political class (i.e. the state) which holds a monopoly on force. You seriously want to live in a world where people e.g. do not expect each other to wait in line for things as appropriate, and where people do not “punish” defectors by giving line-cutters a sideways glance? EXACTLY. And I find it sadly amusing that the same young libertarians who go on and on about the knowledge problem are often the same ones who now seem to REJECT one of the key ways we overcome dispersed and contextual knowledge outside the market: evolved social norms. They, like other social institutions, are surrogates for detailed knowledge and help us engage in effective social coordination, as Pamela says. If you are going to use the knowledge problem as a key argument for your libertarianism, it would behoove you to read some Hayek and others (like Lachmanns book on Max Weber, or Seabrights *The Company of Strangers*) to gain some appreciation for the role of bottom-up, informal social norms and the damage you can do by trying to wholesale replace them.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 01:53:27 +0000
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