The October, 2011 issue of Cato Unbound tackles some of the foundational questions of political theory: how do we recognize justice? If it’s not utopia, is it still good enough to command our respect? Or allegiance? How do we know? Who are the members of the political community? How are they chosen? What counts as a “reason” for political action?

If all of this sounds abstract, rest assured that lead essayist Gerald Gaus is both lucid and engaging. He writes:

Liberalism’s founding insight was the recognition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that controversial religious truths could not be the basis of coercive laws and public policies. The task is now to apply this insight to philosophizing about justice itself. This is an extraordinarily difficult lesson for many. Can it really be that I should not endeavor to ensure that my society conforms to my “knowledge” of justice? (Compare: can it really be that my “knowledge” of God’s will should not structure the social order?)

Gaus argues for a “range of justice”—a range of theories that, while perhaps not perfect by anyone’s standards, are still close enough to demand our respect, especially given the large benefits that come from freely engaged social cooperation.

Discussing with him this month are a panel of three other prominent social theorists. Richard Arneson argues that we tolerate one another not because we’re all pretty close to rational (clearly a lot of us aren’t!)—but because intolerance breeds atrocity. Eric Mack argues that classical liberalism is no mere contending sect; it is the right approach to politics, because it offers the greatest leeway for individuals to choose their own ends in life. And Peter J. Boettke argues that any social system that neglects private property will fail to produce a cooperative society in any sense; without market exchange, individuals will fall into strife over scarce resources.

Obviously I won’t be able to do justice to their arguments here, so please do check out Cato Unbound, where discussion will continue through the end of the month.

This Month at Cato Unbound: A Little Foundational Theory is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This month’s Cato Unbound looks at the intersection of education, work, and gender, and asks: Are men in decline? As women have advanced in education, the workplace, and even politics, some fear that the emerging new economy—or perhaps some other factors—are dragging men down. We’ve all heard talk of the Mancession, and it’s well known that men are in the minority now on many college campuses. How long will the trend continue?

Lead essayist Kay Hymowitz makes the case for male decline; Jessica Bennett, Amanda Hess, and Myriam Miedzian give reasons to be skeptical. Hymowitz replies to her critics. (Men, alas, were so far in decline that I couldn’t find a single one to write for this issue.)

The conversation is just getting started, so be sure to drop by again or subscribe to Cato Unbound so you’ll never miss a post.

Cato Unbound: Are Men in Decline? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This month’s Cato Unbound looks at the failure of expert forecasting.

When I was very young my father received a book of expert predictions edited by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace, and Irving Wallace, titled simply The Book of Predictions. How’d they do? Awfully.

Virtually no one predicted the peaceful end of the Soviet empire. The next big technology was still outer space, not information. Nuclear war and overpopulation vied with exotic environmental disasters to do us in. Want to print a document? Your computer can do that! Just walk to the end of your street, where you’ll find a device called a “printer.” I’ve kept the book, and I’ve been interested in the failure of expert prediction ever since.

This month at Cato Unbound, experts—sorry, we had to—Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock lay out the evidence against forecasting, along with suggestions for how to improve it. But they conclude that many forms of forecasting, even those that once seemed just on the horizon, will perhaps always remain a dream:

Natural science has discovered in the past half-century that the dream of ever-growing predictive mastery of a deterministic universe may well be just that, a dream. There increasingly appear to be fundamental limits to what we can ever hope to predict. Take the earthquake in Japan. Once upon a time, scientists were confident that as their understanding of geology advanced, so would their ability to predict such disasters. No longer. As with so many natural phenomena, earthquakes are the product of what scientists call “complex systems,” or systems which are more than the sum of their parts. Complex systems are often stable not because there is nothing going on within them but because they contain many dynamic forces pushing against each other in just the right combination to keep everything in place. The stability produced by these interlocking forces can often withstand shocks but even a tiny change in some internal conditional at just the right spot and just the right moment can throw off the internal forces just enough to destabilize the system—and the ground beneath our feet that has been so stable for so long suddenly buckles and heaves in the violent spasm we call an earthquake. Barring new insights that shatter existing paradigms, it will forever be impossible to make time-and-place predictions in such complex systems. The best we can hope to do is get a sense of the probabilities involved. And even that is a tall order.

Human systems like economies are complex systems, with all that entails. And bear in mind that human systems are not made of sand, rock, snowflakes, and the other stuff that behaves so unpredictably in natural systems. They’re made of people: self-aware beings who see, think, talk, and attempt to predict each other’s behavior—and who are continually adapting to each other’s efforts to predict each other’s behavior, adding layer after layer of new calculations and new complexity. All this adds new barriers to accurate prediction.

This Month at Cato Unbound—What’s Wrong with Expert Predictions is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

When can the executive lawfully kill?

The rule of law itself depends on getting the answer right. Clearly that answer can’t be “never,” because then even defensive wars would be impossible. And it can’t be “whenever,” because that would be the very antithesis of lawful government. As F. A. Hayek wrote, “if a law gave the government unlimited power to act as it pleased, all its actions would be legal, but it would certainly not be under the rule of law” (p. 205).

The answer must be “sometimes”—but which times are those? In wartime? In peacetime? Against aliens? What about citizens? What role do the courts play? And what about the legislature?

In answer to these questions, Cato Unbound lead essayist Ryan Alford draws on the Anglo-American constitutional tradition, arguing that the killing of a citizen or subject without judicial authorization was so far opposed to our traditional legal safeguards that the American Founders didn’t even bother to prohibit it in the Constitution. And yet, he argues, the case of Anwar al-Awlaqi shows that our government now claims this power anyway. The themes of his essay are explored in much more detail in his forthcoming article in the Utah Law Review.

To discuss with him this month, we’ve lined up a panel of legal and historical experts: John C. Dehn of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Gregory McNeal of Pepperdine University, and Carlton Larson of the University of California at Davis. Each will offer a commentary on Alford’s essay, followed by a discussion among the four on this timely and important subject. Be sure to stop by often, or just subscribe to Cato Unbound‘s RSS feed.

As always, Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes, and enter into the conversation on their own websites and blogs, or at other venues. Trackbacks are enabled. We also welcome your letters and may publish them at our option. Send them to jkuznicki at cato.org

June 2011 Cato Unbound: Targeted Killing and the Rule of Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you follow the news, you might never guess that we’re living in a remarkably peaceful era. But we are. The long-term trends say that war is on the decline—combat fatalities, too. If we value world peace, we shouldn’t be complaining. We should be figuring out why these things are happening—and asking how we can keep them going.

Peace, of course, doesn’t often make the news. There’s nothing dramatic to report. Peace doesn’t explode. It doesn’t kill people. It makes for lousy TV.

I’m hoping, however, that peace makes a good topic at Cato Unbound. This month’s lead essay is by Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University. If we live in a more secure world, he asks, why is it?

Please join us throughout the month for an empirical discussion of peace and war, the demographics of each, and what it is that makes our era an unusually peaceful one.

Peace by the Numbers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Talk between libertarians and the left usually follows one of two scripts, each of which frustrates me.

In the first script, both sides find things that they can safely dislike together — war, eminent domain, small business licensing — while carefully avoiding all the contentious areas. They’re a lot like that recently divorced couple at the Christmas party you’ve just attended, chattering as much as they dare… but mostly about the weather.

In the second script, someone yells “Taxation is theft!” or “You hate the poor!” and it’s not long before someone gets a drink thrown in their face. Perhaps also like that Christmas party you’ve just attended.

If I may say so myself, this month’s Cato Unbound has been quite different. The disagreements have been sharp, but well-informed and polite. (Even the libertarians are disagreeing among themselves; it’s a good sign that our movement isn’t just a set of dogmatic propositions, as some have claimed.)

As readers may already know, the December issue is about the role of property rights in social democracy. Discussants Daniel Klein, David D. Friedman, Ilya Somin, and Matthias Matthijs are arguing about whether social democracy entails the concept of overlordship — that is, the idea that the state must be the final, true owner of all property in a social democracy. If it’s not explicitly and by declaration, then at least it’s implicitly and by inference from its actions.

Klein shows that social democrats were once quite explicit on the point, and did indeed portray themselves as would-be overlords. Today they have to be cagier, but the claim remains logically implicit, he says.

Friedman argues that property has existed without the state, and perhaps even before the dawn of the human race. The state might claim any number of things, but we should judge it by what it actually accomplishes.

Somin suggests that today’s social democrats aren’t really overlords; they’re pragmatists without much in the way of theoretical principles at all.

And Matthijs actually is a social democrat. A proud one, by the look of it. He’s even European! Rights aren’t meaningful unless something enforces them, he argues, and the state does the work we all depend on. In this sense, all rights are artificial; all rights are created by the state. And he’s gamely defending his claims against a barrage of libertarian criticism.

Is your blood boiling? Or are you giggling behind your hand? Either way, grab yourself another egg nog, promise not to throw it at anyone, and go read the discussion for yourself.

Cato Unbound: Property, the State, Libertarians, and the Left is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This month’s Cato Unbound features a lead essay by economist and polymath Deirdre McCloskey. Though she’s been professionally associated with the Chicago School, her ideas are anything but predictable, and she’s been one of the strongest critics of the mainstream of her discipline.

Economic activity, she argues, is driven primarily by forces outside of conventional economic theory. Sure, there’s supply and demand, and we all know the story, and there’s nothing terribly wrong with it, at least as far as it goes. Elaborations on the model aren’t wrong either — externalities, transaction costs, asymmetrical information, problems of coordination and public goods — these too are fine, as far as they go.

Where she disagrees is in her claim that a whole lot of things have to happen inside people’s minds before these things become terribly interesting to talk about. The decision to enter a marketplace, or to behave in ways that we might call “a market,” or even just the decision to look for economic incentives, all depend on some fairly deep value judgments. The creation of a highly market-driven society implies a commitment to a set of values.

What values are we talking about? Here’s a sample:

The Big Economic Story of our times has not been the Great Recession of 2007–2009, unpleasant though it was. And the important moral is not the one that was drawn in the journals of opinion during 2009 — about how very rotten the Great Recession shows economics to be, and especially an economics of free markets. Failure to predict recessions is not what is wrong with economics, whether free-market economics or not. Such prediction is anyway impossible: if economists were so smart as to be able to predict recessions they would be rich. They’re not. No science can predict its own future, which is what predicting business cycles entails. Economists are among the molecules their theory of cycles is supposed to predict. No can do — not in a society in which the molecules are watching and arbitraging.

The important flaw in economics, I argue here, is not its mathematical and necessarily mistaken theory of future business cycles, but its materialist and unnecessarily mistaken theory of past growth. The Big Economic Story of our own times is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted liberal ideas in the economy, and came to attribute a dignity and a liberty to the bourgeoisie formerly denied. And then China and India exploded in economic growth. The important moral, therefore, is that in achieving a pretty good life for the mass of humankind, and a chance at a fully human existence, ideas have mattered more than the usual material causes.

A society that denigrates small businesses, small landowners, entrepreneurship, thrift, and innovation will see less of each. It will have different laws, customs, and institutions. Its resources will be used differently. Even its class structure will be different.

Societies that make a place for the artisan, the entrepreneur, the innovator — societies that see these people as valuable — will prosper. That’s the essence of the argument, anyway, and I’m only disappointed that we can’t present it in more detail (McCloskey is in the middle of a four-book series on this one very big idea).

Through the rest of the week, we have a lineup of notable response essayists, including U.C. Davis’s Gregory Clark, science journalist Matt Ridley, and Yale University’s Jonathan Feinstein. Be sure to stop by often, or just subscribe to our RSS feed.

Deirdre McCloskey at Cato Unbound is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

At Cato Unbound this month, economist and Cato adjunct scholar Glen Whitman discusses “soft” paternalism — the attempt to manage consumers’ choices in such a way that their “real” preferences come forward.

One often-cited example takes place in the cafeteria: Put fruit and healthy snacks up front, and people will be more likely to choose them. Put the chocolate cake first, and that’s what they pick instead. Paternalism, the argument runs, lies on a continuum, and some forms of it are really quite harmless. It’s not (or not only) a boot stamping on a human face forever. It’s also the nice lady at the cafeteria, who helps you pick out healthy food. Healthy food is what you really wanted anyway. So what could be wrong with that?

Whitman, however, turns the argument around a bit: Legislators, too, suffer from bias. What if paternalistic legislation proves sort of like that chocolate cake? By placing it up front, and by making it look appealing, legislators may choose it too often, and they may neglect the healthier — but to them less appealing — choice of freedom. What if a little paternalism now turns into a lot of paternalism later? And where are our “real” preferences, anyway? Whitman offers arguments for why a slippery slope may very well exist here, and examples of how the theory of soft paternalism has developed teeth in practice.

Joining him later this week will be noted economists Richard Thaler, Jonathan Klick, and Shane Frederick, for a discussion that should last through the next couple of weeks. Be sure to stop by often and see it develop.

Slippery Slopes and the New Paternalism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato@Liberty is the #1 U.S. political blog available on Kindle. Or at least it’s the #1 U.S. blog in the “News, Politics, and Opinion” category, and the #3 Politics blog in the same category. What’s the difference? Beats me. So as far as I’m concerned, we’re #1.

Note that you can also get Cato Unbound on Kindle. And both the blog and Cato Unbound are available for the low low price of just 99 cents a month!

Of course, they’re free 24 hours a day right here at the Cato websites.

And don’t forget that all recent Cato books are available in Kindle and also as e-books from the Cato store.

We’re #1 ! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Health care insurance mandates: Why it is unconstitutional for the government to force you to purchase a product you don’t want to buy.

• Should malpractice reform be included in the pending health care bill?

• The end of globalization? Cato’s trade policy expert Daniel Griswold debates.

• Doug Bandow on the minaret ban in Switzerland: “Swiss voters underestimated the impact on religious liberty when they voted to ban minaret construction. But Muslims whose nations persecute Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities have no standing to complain. The Islamic world needs to respect religious liberty at home before lecturing the West about intolerance, racism, hatred and Islamophobia.”

• More debate over Hayek and spontaneous order at Cato Unbound.

• Podcast: “Obama’s nation-building in Afghanistan“

Weekend Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Well, so much for the peace presidency…

• Patrick Michaels on Copenhagen: “Expect a lot of heat, not much light, and a punt right into our next election.”

• Why the Supreme Court should strike down the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board: “Imagine a government agency with the authority to create and enforce laws, prosecute and adjudicate violations, and impose criminal penalties. Then throw in the power to levy taxes to pay for all the above. And for good measure, make the agency independent of political oversight.”

• Discussing Hayek over at Cato Unbound: Four problems with spontaneous order.

• Podcast: “Obama’s Patriot Act Duplicity.”

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• How the European Union can bring peace to the Middle East.
• Nat Hentoff on the health care debate: “We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.”
• Video: What can autism teach us about economics?
• Cato’s Malou Innocent debates the troop build up in Afghanistan.
• Over at Cato Unbound, experts discuss the positive and negative outcomes of modernity.
• Podcast: Driverless cars? They aren’t as far away as you think.

Monday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The recession has given the government an excuse for major interventions into markets, and the word “bailout” is found in business section almost daily. While there are justified concerns over government bailouts of large corporations, big businesses cashing in on the economic stimulus plan have flown below the radar.

In an essay for Cato Unbound on the issue of corporations and markets, libertarian theorist Roderick Long states: “Corporate power depends crucially on government intervention in the marketplace.” This dependency is on full display in an insightful Wall Street Journal story on General Electric’s overt efforts to hitch its future to billions of stimulus dollars.

The article is worth reading from start to finish, but here are some snippets:

The government has taken on a giant role in the U.S. economy over the past year, penetrating further into the private sector than anytime since the 1930s. Some companies are treating the government’s growing reach — and ample purse — as a giant opportunity, and are tailoring their strategies accordingly. For GE, once a symbol of boom-time capitalism, the changed landscape has left it trawling for government dollars on four continents.

‘The government has moved in next door, and it ain’t leaving,’ Mr. [GE CEO Jeffrey] Immelt said at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Montreal in June. “You could fight it if you want, but society wants change. And government is not going away.’

A close look at GE’s campaign to harvest stimulus money shows Mr. Immelt to be its driving force… Inside GE, he pushed his managers hard to devise plans for capturing government money.

By January, Mr. Immelt had become a leading corporate voice in favor of the $787 billion stimulus bill, supporting it in op-ed pieces and speeches. Reporters who called the Obama administration for information on renewable-energy provisions in the legislation were directed to GE.

When the stimulus package was rolled out, Mr. Immelt instructed executives leading the company’s major business units “to put together swat teams to get stimulus money, and [identify] who to fire if they don’t get the money,” says a person who heard him issue the instructions.

In February, a few days after President Obama signed the stimulus plan, GE lawyers, lobbyists and executives crowded into a conference room at GE’s Washington office to figure out how to parlay billions of dollars in spending provisions into GE contracts. Staffers from coal, renewable-energy, health-care and other business units broke into small groups to figure out “how to help companies” — its customers, in particular — “get those funds,” according to one person who attended.

It speaks poorly for American capitalism when one of the nation’s biggest economic engines is assembling “swat teams” to go after taxpayer money. Instead of corporate America trying to figure out what products and services to bring to the marketplace, big business is taking its cue from politicians and bureaucrats in Washington. This isn’t socialism; it’s state corporatism and it bodes ill for long-term economic growth.

See this essay for more on the problems with special-interest spending. Also see this essay on why the excuses for government interventions in energy markets fall short.

Government Electric is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This month’s Cato Unbound features Robert Wright, who offers us an excerpt from his new book, The Evolution of God. He looks at the possibility of religious tolerance from a game theoretic and evolutionary psychology perspective: Is there a fundamental “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West? Or just a communication failure? Wright argues that we can work toward understanding by realizing the limits and biases of human moral reasoning:

You might not guess it to read the headlines, but by and large the relationship between “the West” and “the Muslim World” is non-zero-sum. To be sure, the relationship between some Muslims and the West is zero-sum. Terrorist leaders have aims that are at odds with the welfare of Westerners. The West’s goal is to hurt their cause, to deprive them of new recruits and of political support. But if we take a broader view—look not at terrorists and their supporters but at Muslims in general, look not at radical Islam but at Islam—the “Muslim world” and the “West” are playing a non-zero-sum game; their fortunes are positively correlated. And the reason is that what’s good for Muslims broadly is bad for radical Muslims. If Muslims get less happy with their place in the world, more resentful of their treatment by the West, support for radical Islam will grow, so things will get worse for the West. If, on the other hand, more and more Muslims feel respected by the West and feel they benefit from involvement with it, that will cut support for radical Islam, and Westerners will be more secure from terrorism.

This isn’t an especially arcane piece of logic. The basic idea is that terrorist leaders are the enemy and they thrive on the discontent of Muslims—and if what makes your enemy happy is the discontent of Muslims broadly, then you should favor their contentment. Obviously. Indeed this view has become conventional wisdom: if the West can win the “hearts and minds” of Muslims, it will have “drained the swamp” in which terrorists thrive. In that sense, there is widespread recognition in the West of the non-zero-sum dynamic.

But this recognition hasn’t always led to sympathetic overtures from Westerners toward Muslims. The influential evangelist Franklin Graham declared that Muslims don’t worship the same god as Christians and Jews and that Islam is a “very evil and wicked religion.” That’s no way to treat people you’re in a non-zero-sum relationship with! And Graham is not alone. Lots of evangelical Christians and other Westerners view Muslims with suspicion, and view relations between the West and the Muslim world as a “clash of civilizations.” And many Muslims view the West in similarly win-lose terms.

So what’s going on here? Where’s the part of human nature that was on display in ancient times—the part that senses whether you’re in the same boat as another group of people and, if you are, fosters sympathy for or at least tolerance of them?

It’s in there somewhere, but it’s misfiring. And one big reason is that our mental equipment for dealing with game-theoretical dynamics was designed for a hunter-gatherer environment, not for the modern world. That’s why dealing with current events wisely requires strenuous mental effort—effort that ultimately, as it happens, could bring moral progress.

Robert Wright at Cato Unbound is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig’s seminal work on Internet law, turns ten this year. To mark the occasion, Cato Unbound has invited a distinguished panel of Internet law experts to discuss the book’s enduring significance: What did it get right? What did it get wrong? And where do we go from here?

Joining us will be Adam Thierer, Jonathan Zittrain, and Lawrence Lessig himself. The lead essay, up this morning, is by Declan McCullagh. Readers of Code will recall that McCullagh was called out by name in the book’s final chapter, and his “do-nothing” cyberlibertarian views were criticized at length. Ten years later, is it time to reconsider? Join us and find out.

New at Cato Unbound: Ten Years of Code is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This month’s issue of Cato Unbound has drawn an extraordinarily hostile response from a couple of mainstream online publications. Writing at Salon, Michael Lind inferred, mistakenly, that our interest in Seasteading and other radical libertarian projects was due to our disappointment that Republicans lost in the 2008 election. Because this issue was my idea, I feel I can speak effectively to the charge.

As I see things, it was basically impossible to cast either John McCain or Barack Obama as a libertarian. Neither of them shared the policy goals of the Cato Institute to any appreciable degree. Speaking as a private individual, I didn’t vote for either of them, and I don’t regret my choice. I found both Democrats and Republicans profoundly unappealing this election cycle.

This issue of Cato Unbound was motivated solely by my desire to see one particularly radical branch of libertarianism publicly confront its critics. I wanted to see how well it could hold up. Whether it stood or fell, the issue would have served its purpose. Electoral politics had nothing to do with it.

As our disclaimer makes clear, Cato Unbound doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of the Cato Institute. No endorsement is implied. Instead, we strive to present ideas and arguments that will be interesting to libertarians and also, if possible, to the general public.

Sometimes this means soliciting opinions that are very, very far from the American mainstream, and also far from our own views. It was a proud day for me when a prominent climate change blog suggested that Hell had frozen over — because the Cato Institute had published a piece by Joseph Romm. But that’s just the kind of place that Cato Unbound has always tried to be. We court controversy.

Some of Lind’s harshest barbs were reserved for contributor Peter Thiel, and for his suggestion that, demographically speaking, women have tended to oppose libertarian policies:

According to Thiel, one problem with democracy is that women have the right to vote:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.

What could more beautifully illustrate the pubescent male nerd mentality of the libertarian than Thiel’s combination of misogyny with the denial of aging and death? We had a nice John Galt libertarian paradise in this country, until girls came along and messed it up!

Thiel continues:

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’

After considering the possible mass migration (if that is not a contradiction in terms) of libertarians to cyberspace and outer space, he opts for Fantasy Island:

The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. For this reason, all of us must wish Patri Friedman the very best in his extraordinary experiment.

Here’s an idea. Thiel could use his leverage as a donor to combine the Seasteading Institute with the Methuselah Foundation and create a make-believe island where girls aren’t allowed to vote and where nobody ever has to grow up. Call it Neverland. It would be easy for libertarian refugees from the United States and the occasional neo-Confederate to find it. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.

Emphasis added. Owen Thomas at Gawker jumped to about the same conclusion, but with even more ad hominem.

Yet Thiel’s claim is not that women should be denied the vote. He writes only that women have tended to favor policies and candidates he opposes, and which he thinks are bad for the country. This seems — to my mind at least — regrettable, but also generally true. Thiel might have chosen his words more carefully, but it’s still quite a logical leap from what he actually wrote to demanding the end of women’s suffrage. Of course women should be able to vote. It’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise. We libertarians just need to do a better job of convincing them that voting in favor of individual liberty and free markets are the best choices they can make.

Consider that a Democrat might complain that white evangelical Christians don’t support enough Democrats, and that this works out badly for the country. No one would ever conclude that Democrats want to take away the votes of white evangelical Christians. We would all figure that they are just confronting a failure of practical politics, and perhaps trying to do better at realizing their particular vision of the world. That’s what Thiel was doing too, albeit not via electoral politics. Something about libertarians, however, seems to demand that some people read us as uncharitably as possible.

Seasteading proposes to create a demonstration of how a libertarian society might work. Its proponents believe that if it works, everyone will be drawn to it, including women. Will they succeed? I have some serious doubts, to be honest.

That’s why I set up this issue of Cato Unbound, and why I think the discussion has been valuable.

Cato Unbound Update is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog