 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of Libertarianism.org. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Libertarians are generally skeptical about state-based attempts to alleviate poverty. Because of this, we're often branded anti-poor and told we represent an ideology that benefits only the rich. I know I speak for a great many libertarians when I express dismay about this characterization. I'm a libertarian in large part because I believe liberty brings enormous benefits to all. To the wealthy, yes, but even more so to the poor and disadvantaged. I care about helping people and I think libertarianism represents the best path forward. But it's a hard sell, and in part because some libertarians are sometimes rather bad at talking about poverty or give the appearance of not taking it seriously. So that's our topic for today's podcast. We'll explore the plight of the poor and how it relates to libertarian thinking. Joining us is Matt Zalinski, associate professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego and co-director of USD's Institute for Law and Philosophy. Matt's the editor of arguing about political philosophy and is currently writing two books, Exploitation, Capitalism in the State, and with John Tomasi, Libertarianism of Bleeding Heart History. He is also the founder of the blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians and perhaps most importantly, a columnist at Libertarianism.org. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Matt. Thank you, Aaron. It's a pleasure to be here. So a lot of political philosophies seem to be framed almost entirely around helping the worst off, but libertarianism usually isn't. Instead, we begin with liberty. So does this mean that we don't or even that we shouldn't care about the poor as much as, say, those other guys? No, I don't think that it does. There is, I think, a tendency, not just among people doing political philosophy, but among the population more generally, to read off moral views as kind of flowing directly from people's political positions so that if, for instance, you care about children who might be the victim of gun violence, then a lot of people seem to think that an opposition to gun control ought to flow directly from that moral concern for the children. Or, for instance, if you care about working individuals not making enough money to support themselves or feed the families, then a support for minimum wage laws might be a direct way of expressing that moral concern. And I think that what is distinctive about libertarianism is its tendency to block that inference. We don't think that just because you value something, that just because something is truly objectively valuable or morally important, it follows from that that a law ought to be enacted to directly pursue that goal or that value. So we don't think that everything that's worth striving for in life ought to be pursued by the particular mechanism of government. But that would be one way of libertarianism saying we should look at it as if it's effective at certain ways. So we could say we need to judge the minimum wage by effectiveness. But there are some libertarians who say that's the wrong way of looking at libertarianism at all. Right. So libertarians come in different stripes and different libertarians have different moral foundations for their political views. And different libertarians draw somewhat different political conclusions from those moral foundations. They all sort of fit together in what I like to think of as a kind of broad family of political ideologies. Libertarianism is one thing. It's more of a cluster of closely related things. Libertarians tend to favor small government. Libertarians tend to favor a fairly hands-off approach to government when it comes to economic matters and civil liberties. But within that broad framework there are a variety of individual differences. And some libertarians take a fairly hard line on issues of redistribution and claim that, for instance, even if redistribution could be effective, for instance, as a method of pursuing a moral goal like the relief of poverty, it would nevertheless be immoral because it involves the use of coercion. Any kind of state-based redistribution is going to involve coercively taking money from some individuals and giving it to other individuals. And one of libertarianism's fundamental moral commitments is an opposition to the aggressive use of force. And so some libertarians deduce from that straightforwardly that all redistribution via the state is necessarily immoral, regardless of its effectiveness or lack thereof. Could we, though, kind of not concede this ground about not wanting to use whatever tools we have to alleviate poverty by saying that, look, these guys may say, you know, if poverty is a problem then we should use the law to solve it. But it seems to be like a lot of libertarians could agree with that in a sense by simply saying yes, but if law is, say, the method by which we create a society worth living in or maintain a society and we have protections of rights and whatnot and things that help us live our lives well, then the way you go about using the law to, say, alleviate poverty or whatever else is by respecting rights, is by creating a framework for economic freedom. But that still is using the law to help poverty. It's just using the law in a slightly different way. Right. So I think I agree with you that we ought not to concede this point. I mean, I think the fundamental lesson here is that libertarians don't necessarily have to choose one of these ways of critiquing government transfer programs to the exclusion of all others. I think there's a lot of things to be said against such programs. There's also some things to be said in favor of some of them and we can talk about that a bit later in the interview. I think, for instance, libertarians have a point when they identify the coercive nature of redistributive programs. I mean, in general, we think that coercion is bad. That's a kind of common sense, moral view, one that's held not just by libertarians but by ordinary people as well. For instance, if I were to engage in redistribution in a way that the state does and take money from somebody else and then give it to another person who I thought was more needy or more deserving in some way, almost everybody would think that that's wrong. I don't have the right to use coercion in that way even to achieve, let's say, really valuable and desirable social ends. It's a bit of a puzzle why the state should be any different and why we should apply a whole different set of moral norms to the state than we do to individual moral agents. I think there's a point there. That's a non-negligible moral claim that libertarians are making. Where it runs into problems, I think, and where it begins to be at odds with common sense is when libertarians take the prohibition on coercion to be a kind of absolute constraint so that no matter what, no matter how minor the coercion involved may be and no matter how significant the social gains might be that that coercion could produce, it is nevertheless deemed impermissible because it runs afoul of this ironclad prohibition. So I think libertarians are right to appeal to the wrongness of coercion. They're wrong if they take that to perhaps what you might call an extreme, but there are other arguments you can make too. And libertarians shouldn't feel like they have to choose between the kind of moral arguments and the more pragmatic arguments that talk about the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of anti-poverty programs in achieving their stated goal. So that probably is a good way to get into the website you run called Bleeding Heart Libertarians and the sort of mission of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians, which has shaken up and angered some people and made some people incredibly happy. So I guess the question is, what is a bleeding heart libertarian and how is that related to the question of libertarianism and the poor? Right. So yeah, we've annoyed a lot of people. We've annoyed other libertarians by not being libertarian enough and we've annoyed liberals by not being bleeding heart enough so it feels sometimes as though we're fighting a war on two fronts and a bit doomed. But the idea at least is to rethink the fundamental moral commitments of libertarianism and to rethink the idea specifically that an appreciation and support of libertarian institutions of free markets and private property is somehow incompatible with, well, concern for the poor or perhaps even something like a commitment to social justice. Those things are usually thought to be diametrically opposed. You can't be a libertarian and be committed to social justice by I think both the sort of popular culture and by a lot of libertarians themselves. People like Robert Nozick and Friedrich Hayek have made kind of extended arguments against the concept of social justice. And so we're trying to challenge that idea and in some ways it's a public image game. I mean we're trying to rehabilitate the image of libertarians as these cold hearted creatures who because we don't want the state working actively to relieve poverty must therefore not think that poverty is a real serious problem at best or at worse we might be actively sort of rooting for the destruction of the poor as some kind of closeted social Darwinists. So you talk about social justice but I want to, can we just take a step back and kind of explore that a bit because that's a social justice is kind of a poisonous term for a lot of libertarians. It's not something that they tend to embrace or in fact they see it as a term that's employed by people who are very in favor of using the state to do all sorts of illegitimate things. So what do you mean when you say social justice and are you using it in a different way than most of us tend to think? Right. So when I talk about social justice I think I probably am using it in a way that's somewhat different from what most people think. It's almost certainly in a way that's different from the way in which it's used by many of my colleagues here at the University of San Diego which is a, which is a Catholic institution. Which prides itself on being committed to social justice and what they seem to be, to mean by that term is, it's almost the kind of thing I spoke about at the beginning of the interview which is that to be committed to social justice is ipso facto to be committed to a certain specific set of policy goals. And so if you oppose those policy goals you thereby demonstrate yourself to be opposed to social justice. And I think that's not a very useful way of thinking about the term. I think what's really going on there on the most charitable interpretation is they have certain beliefs about the way certain policies work and the way that the economy works in the absence of certain kinds of government intervention or regulation. And because they have those background beliefs they believe that these policy goals that they favor which tend to be broadly interventionist except on the issue of immigration in which they tend to be pretty good. Because they have those background beliefs they think that the policy goals that they favor flow directly from their moral commitment which is a concern to protect the poor and the vulnerable from exploitation, from oppression and from severe harms that they think would befall them in a kind of unregulated market economy. So would that make it mostly a factual dispute do you think? See here's where there's some disagreement among some of the bleeding heart libertarians. So bleeding heart libertarians tend to believe that libertarianism is compatible with certain moral goals that are held by those on the left. And a lot of us think that the only real disagreements between those of us on the libertarian side and those on the more standard liberal social justice side are factual disagreements, disagreements about the way that policies or economic systems work. I think there's a lot to that. I think that there is a great deal of factual disagreement about these matters partly because they're very complex and partly because most people are rationally ignorant about the ways in which these things work out. But I think that's not the whole of the story. I think there are significant moral disagreements too. For instance on the issue of coercion. I think that libertarians see coercion in places where non-libertarians don't. And I think that that's not an illusion from which libertarians suffer. That is an insight that they have into the way the political system really works. So there are many philosophical differences in addition to the coercion issue which you brought up which other than just effectiveness and whether or not empirically free markets help the poor. And there's of course the biggest defender of I would say mainstream social democrat policies, a little bit of entitlement state and a little bit of freedom would be John Rawls which comes up a lot on bleeding heart libertarians and has a lot to say about the poor. So could you tell us a little bit about what John Rawls says and some of the things that libertarians have said about John Rawls? Yeah, so Rawls you're correct. I mean I think he's generally regarded by philosophers as one of if not the most influential political philosophers of the entire 20th century. And his influence certainly continues to this day in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. Rawls set forth a theory which purported to give both a way of thinking about justice or a sort of procedure to follow in thinking about justice and a set of principles of justice that he thought would emerge from that procedure and that would be appropriate to use in governing what he called the basic structure of society which is just his terminology for sort of basic institutions of society such as the government in its relation to the economy and maybe some other major social features of society as well. So Rawls's procedure was known as the original position which involves sort of thinking about yourself as though you didn't know your place in society and as though you were operating behind this kind of veil of ignorance he called it and asking yourself what kind of principles you would want to govern that society given that you don't know where you're going to end up in it. I like to think of it as you're sort of a soul up in heaven and you're going to be popped into a body somewhere down on earth and you don't know whose body you're going to be popped into. So you're trying to pick principles that guarantee Rawls thought that no matter where you end up in society you're going to do okay and so he thought that individuals in this original position would choose two principles of justice one guaranteeing to each individual a certain extensive or maximally extensive set of basic liberties so liberties of the person liberties of to own certain amount of personal property and so forth political liberties. And a second principle which dealt with inequalities in which placed severe limits on the kinds of economic inequalities that could legitimately emerge in society specifically holding that inequalities would only be permitted if they could be shown to be to the advantage of the least well off members of society and it's that second principle which is known as the difference principle that has attracted the most attention I think in the literature on Rawls both from libertarians and from non libertarians but also that's the aspect of Rawls theory that I think has drawn the most scorn from libertarians since it seems to reflect a commitment to a very thorough going kind of egalitarianism material egalitarianism that libertarians generally oppose so that's that's the short version of Rawls and so this is applied this is a sort of justice as fairness argument which I've always thought was kind of a question of what traits are irrelevant to justice and trying to make sure that people are ignorant of those so they can make a society and go into that society and not have to create it to favor red heads or women or any trade that would not necessarily be relevant to their position in society which is has some intuitive appeal to it yeah right and Rawls in setting out the argument here draws parallels between the way we think about material inequality based on say inheritance and particular kind of family you happen to have been born into and the way we think about inequalities that might arise as the result of say racial discrimination so Rawls says look we would find it objectionable and unjust if some people's lives went much much worse for them merely because they happen to be born a member of the wrong race and that that race was discriminated against in various ways by society so denied opportunities for education denied opportunities for career advancement and so forth we would think that to be objectionable Rawls says because we think that one's race is a feature of a person that is morally arbitrary that it ought not be a factor that determines one's life prospects but then Rawls builds from that and he says well look if we think that race is a morally arbitrary feature of a person why isn't it just as morally arbitrary what kind of family you happen to be born into whether it's a rich family or a poor family why in fact isn't it arbitrary whether you happen to be born with certain kinds of natural talents or not and so if most of if not all of the existing inequalities that we observe in society are a product of those kinds of arbitrary starting points right one's social class or one's natural genetic endowment then aren't those inequalities too morally arbitrary and shouldn't we therefore be at liberty to use the powers of the state to correct them so as to give everyone a sort of fair shot at success in a game of life so the question is why shouldn't we it's an interesting argument and I've always found it to be worthy of refutation which is a compliment in the philosophical world why shouldn't we have libertarians or what do you say or what's wrong with that idea well I think it's not as easy to refute as one might think I mean it's a shockingly radical conclusion and so it would be nice if there was a pat easy way of dismissing it but but Rawls is very very smart and and he builds a lot into his theory that anticipates many of the objections that people like libertarians might be inclined to bring against his theory so for instance right one standard libertarian argument against redistribution is that it destroys incentives so if I'm taking money from you in the form of taxes that produces bad incentives on your end because if I'm taxing you based on your income let's say then you've got less of an incentive to earn income given that some of it's going to be taxed away so you're going to be working less you're going to be less productive and if this is magnified over the entire economy the economy is going to be less productive and on the other end if we're using the money that we take from you to give to someone who doesn't have a lot of money then that person too is going to have less of an incentive to work so there's kind of a double hit you take from these redistributive policies in terms of incentives to productivity and that has been thought by a number of libertarians and conservative critics to be a major problem with redistributive policies but Rawls anticipates this right Rawls says that in his difference principle not that inequalities are to be eliminated but that they are to be tolerated only in so far as to their to the advantage of the least well off and by phrasing it in that way he takes account of the incentive problem so that if taxing the very rich at a rate of say 80% would so destroy their incentive to work that it lowered economic productivity to the point that we weren't getting as much revenue as we would if we say tax them only at a rate of say 50% then Rawls would favor taxing them at the rate of 50% and not 80% precisely so that we would have more funds available to help the least well off so all that is just to say that Rawls is sharp. Rawls knows the standard arguments that libertarians make in favor of markets and against government redistribution and he anticipates a great number of those in his book so the problem or problems in Rawls's theory are going to be somewhat more subtle and difficult to detect and I can say something about that but I feel like I've been talking a lot in answering your question here so let me try to approach this I mean we can have these arguments about Rawls versus libertarianism and what not but a lot of people I think have this objection that's not so much a hard philosophical one or even an empirical one but an objection to libertarianism and the way it deals with the poor that's kind of more rhetorical perhaps in the sense that the libertarian solution to the poor as you've talked about like the problems with Rawls with aiming at redistribution and what not is that it de-incentivizes people to behave in these ways that would otherwise be beneficial to both themselves and to the poor and so there's but there's this sense of which the libertarian solution ends up looking like a let's just not do anything and it will work itself out that in contrast with the we see a problem and we're going to set out to solve it and it's also a view that says the poor aren't really again going back to the libertarian puts kind of puts freedom first it's it's that we're not we're not focused on helping the poor and so this does this mean that the libertarians I mean is there is there something to this argument in the sense that we're we're not really caring about the poor as much as we should because we're letting these emergent processes and markets and other kind of just abstract ideas solve these problems as opposed to setting out with the tools that society offers us to address them head on or are we giving the right message to people who lost their job whether as I will give you a job versus free up some markets and hopefully but I can't guarantee it someone will probably give you a job right and in that instance the guy without the job you know if the politicians saying I'm going to help you or the libertarian is saying if we free up markets then there'll be more employment and that will help you at some point it's not unreasonable to you know it's not reasonable for him to go with the politician who's saying I'm going to help you right now right it's a weird argument on the one hand I see the concern that people have and I can even in the right mood sort of talk myself into sharing this concern right I mean when libertarians talk about letting the market take care of things that sounds very passive and it sounds like we haven't really got any solution to the problem and that isn't very satisfying to most people most people when they see a social problem they want somebody who proposes concrete solutions to that problem and libertarians talking about impersonal market forces don't seem to be offering any such solution but of course when you think about what impersonal market forces actually are it's much less clear that that's actually a problem right when we talk about market forces we're just talking about people right making decisions freely about what to do with their businesses with their free time with their disposable income that's what market forces are. It's also what government forces are too right. In a way yes but in other words it's not it's not that we are proposing not to do anything about the problem of poverty it's just that we don't want to use the particular institutions of government to do anything about the problem necessarily although again there are some libertarians who take a different view on this and hopefully we'll talk about that in a bit but to say that you don't want government to solve the problem doesn't mean that you don't think people should do something to solve the problem I think that there are all kinds of things that are very important making sure that enough food is produced to feed people in the country or making sure that enough shoes are produced that nobody has to walk around barefoot and yet I don't for a moment think that we ought to have government programs devoted to ensuring that enough food or shoes get produced and I don't think that makes me sort of any less caring about those problems I just am fairly confident that in the market system people will have the right incentives to produce those things on their own without any central direction from the state and of course oh sorry just one more point because it is important I've been talking about the market and some of you have talked about the market but of course libertarians aren't just viewing society as a market our choices aren't between government and the market in a mutually exclusive sense and exhaustive sense there are ways in which free human beings interact with each other that have nothing to do with the market as for instance when I go down to a local soup kitchen and volunteer my time that's not a market interaction that's what I think we would describe as part of civil society it's part of the kind of free associations that individuals form amongst themselves and that's an important part of society just as much as our economic interactions and so when libertarians advocate for rolling back the state it's not that they're assuming that the market is going to take care of everything the libertarians are quite and appropriately so fond of and appreciative of market mechanisms it's that they think free human beings can solve these problems in voluntary ways some of which will be market based ways but other ways will involve the institutions of civil society I've had I agree with everything you say of course but I've had a significant number of conversations with non libertarians particularly on the left but even some conservatives who say that even despite all of these mechanisms civil society in the market people will fall through the cracks and because you know if we say that there shouldn't be a safety net and even in the term safety net it is implying that people won't fall through the cracks and so that libertarians are somehow committed to the idea that somebody will fall through the cracks they won't get a job they won't be helped by an institution of civil society and they'll end up very down and out and that the person who is against libertarianism is simply saying that he's not willing to admit that possibility and that we should try to make sure that that doesn't happen which is why we need a safety net and exactly that metaphor of falling through the cracks right so there's two things to say about that one short point and then one somewhat longer point the short point is that passing a law that says that nobody's allowed to fall through the cracks isn't the same thing as guaranteeing that nobody's going to fall through the cracks so the problem arises just as much with government programs as it does with voluntary non-government aid it's neither of those things is a foolproof method of eliminating poverty or ensuring that nobody gets left behind so if foolproofness is the standard then nobody passes which I think means that we need a different standard the second and somewhat longer point is this so the extreme libertarian view and when I say extreme I don't mean to denigrate it it is the extreme view is that no government redistribution at all is justifiable under any circumstances because it's coercion and coercion is always wrong that said there is a long tradition in libertarian thinking that does in fact make room for some kind of safety net for the poor so if you go and you read the major figures in the libertarian and classical liberal tradition if you read people like John Locke or Adam Smith or to take some more modern examples people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek all of them advocate in some form for a kind of safety net provided by the state with tax revenues it's a safety net of probably a very different kind than anything we have in the United States or elsewhere well in most developed countries but I think it's different in a good way in that it's designed to actually fulfill the function of a safety net and stop people from being in a situation where they simply don't have enough money to take care of themselves and meet the basic needs of themselves and their family so this spectrum of libertarian views that you brought up and it gives us a good opportunity to get to your particular flavor which is bleeding heart libertarianism so I was wondering could you give us the kind of thumbnail sketch of what BHL is how it differs from other sorts of libertarianism and then what you think it has uniquely offered to this question of poverty and disadvantage or maybe just what your version of BHL because there's a lot of bleeding heart libertarians sure and if there's disagreements you go into those too there are some pretty wide disagreements our blog role is growing and we don't have any kind of philosophical purity test that we applied to people before they're taken on board so we've got people like me and I think of myself as a kind of broadly Hayekian kind of moral pluralist I suppose and then you've got somebody like Roderick Long who is a roughly speaking a Rothbardian natural rights theorist who kind of aligns himself with Rothbard and is more leftist period but so there are disagreements among bleeding heart libertarians but what we all have in common I think is that we take seriously the kinds of concerns about poverty and exploitation and oppression that are characteristic of those on the political left and we think that those are real concerns but for various reasons some of which are moral and some of which are empirical we think that broadly libertarian political institutions of free markets and private property are the best response to those concerns so for instance some BHLs advocate like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek for a kind of universal basic income so that there will be literally a floor beyond which no one is to fall in terms of minimum income and Milton Friedman spelled this out in his idea of the negative income tax and Friedrich Hayek discusses the idea at some length in Volume 3 of his Law of Legislation and Liberty so that would be one mechanism that some BHLs advocate for dealing with the problem of poverty which involves state action and state redistribution but it's a kind of state redistribution that avoids a lot of the problems that libertarians see in most forms of state redistribution so for instance one of the advantages of a universal basic income especially in its negative income tax form is that it minimizes the role of discretion among political agents so a big problem with redistribution is if redistribution is done according to the whims of legislators then there are grave reasons to worry that redistribution will increase and keep increasing over time to serve the interest of those political agents and that it will be dispensed in ways that again serve the interest of the agents who administer them rather than the interest of the people who are supposed to benefit them, namely the poor so here's where all kinds of familiar public choice concerns come about about the way in which income redistribution in the country like the United States for instance is used to benefit not the poor for the most part but the middle class who are in a position to offer various kinds of political support and political threats to the agents who are in charge of passing and enacting these forms of redistribution sorry you want to say something? so if we remove the political noise though that's a question I always have so we imagine a better functioning government which is what we're usually going for and trying to figure that out in some way and remove the noise in the system to create a very direct and straight redistribution system that accounts for variations that people would generally endorse for example people who never work on welfare or adverse as people who are generally hard up would that be something that more libertarians or more bleeding heart libertarians could get on board with? well it's controversial among libertarians and even among bleeding heart libertarians whether that is something that would be desirable as a kind of first best ideal theory function of government I think almost all bleeding heart libertarians agree that something like a Hayekian or Friedmanite basic income would be much much better than what we have now the collection of motley programs that we have ostensibly designed to serve the interests of the poor now this would be a great improvement in that both in terms of the incentive effects in terms of the amount of discretion allowed to political agents and in terms of overhead costs for instance in administering the programs so for all those reasons if we could sort of snap our fingers and move from what we have now to something like the basic income I think the BHLs agree that that would be a good idea some go further and argue that it would be a requirement of even an ideally just system so not just better than what we have now but part of the best imaginable form of system and you get different arguments advanced for that view but part of the argument is that society and the social institutions that compose the basic structure of society impose costs upon people they impose costs and they distribute benefits and those burdens and benefits fall on different people in different ways and so one idea is that we have an obligation given that we're imposing costs on people by imposing this political system upon them we have an obligation to make sure that nobody suffers too much to make sure that nobody is too disadvantaged by that system and a basic income is one kind of rough and ready way to do that to make sure that everybody is deriving some minimal level of benefit from this society that we have formed together as a kind of cooperative system of mutual advantage to use a phrase from Rawls does this guaranteed basic income potentially run into the same sorts of incentive problems that you accuse Rawls of earlier so Rothbard I believe in a speech that he gave critiquing Milton Friedman's basic income proposal argued that the problem with it is you're going to get a ratchet effect that say the basic income is $20,000 a year and I make $22,000 a year then what that means is that I'm working 40 hours a week for effectively $2,000 a year which doesn't sound like a great deal so I'll drop out and when I drop out to get just the $20,000 for not working we have to by some amount increase the amount of taxes in order to fund my now $20,000 which is going to cut into the income of the people who are working which is going to reduce their earnings their after tax earnings closer to that level where they'll become one of those people too right and so eventually you get where no one is really incentivized to work because the taxes make it not worth your time So any program of redistribution is going to have some disincentive effect both on the tax end and on the beneficiary end I think the negative income tax and universal basic income schemes more generally are designed in a way to be more sensitive to those effects and to mitigate them and it can be further tweaked in ways that mitigate the incentive effects further So Charles Murray for instance has a fairly well worked out basic income plan he's another self-identified libertarian in his book In Our Hands A Plan to Replace the Welfare State he comes up with a fairly detailed proposal but he comes up with a variety of tweaks that reduce the disincentive effects on both ends but even still there's still going to be some disincentive effects and that's a problem I think not merely because it requires higher taxes to compensate for that effect but because it indicates a deeper issue with basic income schemes and with welfare state policies more generally actually there's two problems so the first one is that to the extent that these policies slow economic growth they might wind up helping to relieve the poverty the problem of poverty among currently existing citizens at the expense of future citizens so I think people tend to underestimate the compound effect of economic growth over time it's easy not to appreciate just how big of a difference that can make in average quality of life so for instance there's one figure that says if the annual rate of growth in the American GDP had been just one percentage point lower between 1870 and 1990 Americans in 1990 would have been no richer than Mexicans in 1990 so a tremendous difference in quality of life results from a fairly small difference in GDP growth over time or similarly if you have a country that's growing at a rate of 5% per annum it would take it about 80 years just over 80 years to go from a per capita income of $500 to a per capita income of $25,000 whereas at a rate of growth of 1% that same improvement would take 393 years so economic growth over time makes a huge difference in the amount of wealth in a society and the average quality of living of members of that society and so if it turns out to be the case that welfare state programs, even welfare state programs like the basic income have a significant negative effect on economic growth I think that's a good reason to oppose them not just on grounds of economic efficiency but because when we're concerned about poverty we're not just concerned about the poverty of the people right in front of us we ought or shouldn't be anyways we should be concerned about poor people who exist in the future and if we want to ensure that poor people who exist in the future aren't going to be badly off in fact if we're concerned to make them not poor then one of the most effective long-term strategies that we can pursue to achieve that goal is a strategy that promotes economic growth so let me loop us all the way back around to this question that we opened with which is the relationship between libertarianism and the poor and ask you specifically about the Bleeding Heart Libertarian Position or maybe the Matt Zolinski version of the Bleeding Heart Libertarian Position which is so are you advocating libertarianism because the empirical evidence indicates that it's the best way to help the poor so you're starting with we should help the disadvantaged that's the goal and libertarianism the best way to do that or are there other reasons to support libertarianism that either exist outside of that or potentially trumpet so if the empirics changed and it turned out that a non-libertarian solution was the best way to help the poor would that be reason to give up or for you to give up libertarianism in favor of an alternative or would you have reasons for sticking with the libertarian position that's a good question and it's a difficult question to answer because I don't have a fully developed and articulated set of moral principles from which I deduce all my more particular political and economic views and I realize that people sometimes expect such a thing from a philosopher but I think in some ways that's expecting too much I have some fairly strong opinions about a variety of different moral matters and I try the best I can to whip those beliefs up into something like a coherent system or to resolve any contradictions at least when they make themselves manifest to me but I'm suspicious of system building in moral philosophy almost as much as I'm suspicious of central planning in the economic realm I think there's a certain amount of hubris that underlies both of those projects so I'm not totally sure what the answer to that question is for me I think the question of poverty is more like a constraint than an overarching goal so the way I think about it is if it turned out to be the case that these libertarian institutions of free market and private property which I support on generally speaking other grounds than their effect on the poor but if it turned out to be the case that those institutions had some disastrously bad implications for the poor I mean if it turned out to be the case that free markets really worked the way that Marxists say they do or the way that people on the progressive left say that they do that for me would be a good reason to rethink my commitment to those institutions Interesting so the question here it seems to bring up a point which I think is a good one to bring all these ideas back around because it's been implicit in a lot of the discussions but if you have a situation that runs on libertarian a political system that runs on libertarian principles wherein 2% of the people control an amazing amount of wealth and the 98% of the people are completely destitute and everyone followed libertarian principles to get there the question that is always I think morally intuitive and attractive to most people is the diminishing marginal utility of wealth that the incredible wealth enjoyed by some of these people even justly earned does not compare to how much it would be worth it to take $1000 from Warren Buffett and give it to someone who is starving to death so I think this is a big animating principle of the welfare state but also they could admit someone who supports this could admit various things that we hold to be true like yes it's presumptively wrong to take from someone but here the benefits outweigh the costs and so without diminishing marginal utility of wealth it would seem like you wouldn't really have a welfare state you need rich people it seems like the money is less valuable to them than it would be to give to someone else so do we just have to accept that truth and make more systematic claims or is there something wrong with that claim I'm tempted I'm sorry I wouldn't hang too much myself on claims about diminishing marginal utility of wealth per se at least in so far as that kind of consideration is tied directly to a broader utilitarian moral framework for evaluating public policy so for instance I don't think the problem with some people being very rich and some people being very poor is that we would have more of this stuff we call aggregate utility if we took from the rich guy and gave to the poor guy instead I'm not concerned with maximizing aggregate utility I'm concerned with individuals and so if some individuals don't have enough to get by in a market society that's a problem independent of the way in which their destitution contributes to aggregate utility or disutility overall so it's a and maybe this is part of my libertarianism right because I think one of the kind of foundational moral commitments of libertarianism is a commitment to individualism and moral evaluation what we think matters morally speaking as libertarians is how individuals are doing not how groups or classes or nations are doing so if we're skeptical about redistribution maybe not all of us against it but skeptical about its morality and its effects but we care about poor people which I absolutely do what else can libertarians say about poverty and what a libertarian solution or a way to address at least some of the worst causes of poverty that exist out there what can we do about it well I actually think if you understand libertarianism as being defined by its opposition to coercion then that actually places libertarians in a particularly good place to advocate on behalf of the poor because I think that when you look at the actual causes of poverty in the real world a great many of them are can be traced back to the to unjust uses of coercion that libertarians themselves given their own basic moral premises would condemn so for instance one of the most egregious forms of coercions that states exercise today that perpetuates poverty are the immigration restrictions that develop countries place that prevent poor people from the developing world from traveling to the United States setting up shop there setting up their families there and partaking of the tremendous economic growth that our system makes available to people I think there's a tendency for those on the left who are concerned to relieve poverty to think about poverty in a kind of nationalistic way right so we're thinking about the poor people who are immediately around us who are in our cities or our states or our countries but I think that's absolutely the wrong way to think about poverty if you think about the severity of poverty and who suffers the most from it it's mostly people living outside of the developed world and so if you're concerned to relieve poverty where it's at its worst those are precisely the people that you ought to be focused on and the kinds of programs that those on the left advocate to relieve poverty within their societies often kind of paradoxically exacerbated for those outside of their societies because every time you build up the welfare state for those within your society you make it harder and harder for people outside of that society to have access to the basic economic framework of free trade and private property that really have this tremendous wealth generating potential people don't want to let in a bunch of immigrants if they're worried that those immigrants are going to be a drain on their welfare services so I think one of the most effective things that libertarians who are concerned with poverty could do is to advocate for open borders for the dismantling that is of the coercive boundaries between states that are established by states and unjust on basic libertarian principle yeah and I think that there's a saying too I mean that's a great point about broadening your moral sphere and it has been said in a couple papers that the biggest single policy change you could do to alleviate poverty would be to have open borders or incredibly relaxed borders throughout the world could nearly double the GDP of the world in a pretty short scale yeah I think that's by and away the biggest example of state action that exacerbates poverty that libertarians can and should be saying more about but there are lots of other examples too right there are lots of things that the state does that make it harder to be poor or that make it more likely that people are going to be poor or stay poor so minimum wage laws for example that produce unemployment rent control laws that make it harder for people to get a home milk price supports or other agricultural price supports that increase the price of basic food stuffs that are that consume a disproportionate share of the income of the poor restrictions on entrepreneurship right so occupational licensing requirements that mean that you have to get a license from the state to braid someone's hair or to drive them to the airport all of these are regulations that are unjust on libertarian grounds and that hurt people and that disproportionately hurt the poor and so I think there's a there's a wide field of issues on which libertarians are in a really good position to advocate for policies that fit squarely within their ideological wheelhouse but that also demonstrate a profound concern for the poor and that would make a real difference in the quality of lives of the poor if they were active Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find me on Twitter at A. Ross P. that's A. R. O. S. S. P. and you can find me on Twitter at T. C. Burris T. C. B. U. R. R. U. S. and I'm on Twitter at Matt Zulinski that's M. A. T. T. Z. W. O. L. I. N. S. K. I. To learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org