 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast 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. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our topic for today's episode is egalitarianism, and joining us to discuss it is Elizabeth Anderson. Professor Anderson is the Arthur F. Thirnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Professor Anderson. Thank you. I want to start with what I think a lot of libertarians, when they hear the term egalitarianism, they have this picture of wanting to make everyone equal in the sense of how much stuff they have. So, radical wealth redistribution. Hating merit. That's another good one. That everyone should just kind of be the same in everything that they have. Is that an accurate picture now? If it isn't, has that ever been an accurate picture of egalitarianism? Right. So, I agree with you that that's the popular conception, but I've been doing work now on the history of egalitarianism basically from the mid-17th century forward. And I'm arguing that the core ideal of egalitarianism isn't essentially connected with issues of distributive equality of income and wealth, but it's much more fundamentally connected to a critique of social hierarchy. Deep down what egalitarians oppose is hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, gender, caste, religion, and social hierarchies are fundamentally defined in terms of specific relationships between people, the most important one being relations of domination and subjection. So the most important kind of hierarchy that egalitarians oppose is one in which some people get to order other people around and tell them what to do. And usually those hierarchies are based on some background identity difference between the rulers and the rules. The rulers might be a different caste or a different race, but sometimes it's based on wealth too. But if you look at the origins of egalitarianism, they didn't oppose any qualities of wealth in and of themselves. What they opposed was a ruling class based on wealth, the idea that you're entitled to rule somebody else just because you own a lot of property. That was the core idea behind the levelers, and that's an idea that's really carried out through the egalitarian tradition, and we can even see some of those concerns in the present day. And of course the Enlightenment tradition and the founding principles of America and even part of the French Revolution had equality as one of its core aims, not just liberty as maybe libertarians would like to say, especially coming out of a monarchy and different types of class system that had been the norm in the world throughout history. That's quite right. So a lot of Enlightenment thinkers were really they opposed aristocracy, and what is aristocracy? It's not just that you have a bunch of wealthy landowners, but the landowners are the ruling class in virtue of the fact that they own a lot of property. And that's a very problematic idea, but the Enlightenment in general was not opposed to some people having more money or wealth than others. The question is whether having more wealth entitled those people to rule over other people who had less. You mentioned the levelers. Are they the source of egalitarianism? Are they the first egalitarians, or does this idea go back even further? That's a wonderful question. You can find egalitarian ideas going back even to biblical times. I think a core idea of almost all monotheistic religions that there is an equality of souls that one soul doesn't differ from another. They're all equally eligible for salvation, at least in principle. The difficulty was with these older biblical forms of egalitarianism was there was always a million reasons why the equality of souls never translated into equality of social relations on earth. You only get into an egalitarian position in heaven. What's interesting about the 17th century is here you have a movement in the English Civil War, the levelers who really want to bring egalitarian social relations down to earth. Now you can see some precedents even before the 17th century that start to arise really with the Protestant Reformation. Luther declared the priesthood of all believers. That is, you didn't need some priests to mediate an individual's relationship to God. At the same time, common people were learning how to read and they read the Bible for themselves and they decided, hey, we can interpret the Bible on our own. You don't need the priests to tell us how to understand what the Bible demands. And so if anything, you can see the origins of more egalitarian thinking arising earlier in the Protestant Reformation with the rise of a variety of egalitarian religious sects, including most notably the Quakers and also some Dactus sects, which wanted to reject the hierarchy of priesthood and achieve a much more egalitarian style of worship within the churches. So if you want to go further back, I suppose you could trace egalitarianism to the Reformation. But as far as state relations go and limitations on state power, that's largely arising in the mid-17th century around the time of the English Civil War. And in many ways, the concept of republicanism as was used by founding father figures like Alexander Hamilton really just expressed a lack of social hierarchy to a degree and you read a lot of early founder writings and you see them complaining about the opulence of George Washington's carriage, for example, as being a demonstration of not having egalitarian Republican principles, which seems kind of similar to complaining about Catholic or nateness against Protestant austerity, right? Yes. I think there's something to that. Although I wouldn't necessarily cite Hamilton as among the founders who were keen on opposing... Monarchy. Monarchy, yeah. It's a good point. Monarchy. I think he's sort of, he's a little bit more an egalitarian. The real star of the American Revolution from an egalitarian point of view was Tom Paine. And Tom Paine really embodied a style of radically egalitarianism that was also quite libertarian and that informed radical movements, not just in the United States, but in France and importantly in England. The Chardis movement took a lot of its ideas from Paine and a lot of those ideas resonate pretty strongly with contemporary libertarian critiques of the state. You've, so far what we've talked about has been mostly this quality of power distributions and an anti-hierarchy view, but there has been, I mean, there has been a strain in egalitarianism of what you've called a quality of fortune or distribution. And is that, when did that come in? What is that? And also when did it come in? Yeah. Right. So why don't we go back to the levelers for a moment, because they represent a really interesting kind of movement. The levelers were called the levelers because people accused them of wanting to level all differences in wealth. And they disavowed that completely. In fact, they argued in favor of free trade and private property. They were totally in favor of these institutions. But if you look at the core of what they opposed, they opposed monopoly privileges that were granted by the state. That's the sense in which they were free traders. They saw the state as creating a bunch of cronies by granting monopoly privileges to various manufacturers and merchants that would then shut everybody else out of access to opportunities to set up their own businesses and compete on a level playing field with everybody else. So there is a true sense in which they were levelers. They wanted to level down privilege. They wanted the state to grant everyone an equal set of rights. And in that sense of leveling down, there's really nothing objectionable to it. It just means getting rid of a class of cronies whose wealth is founded on special monopoly privileges that the state has granted them. So you can see in this sense, if you think that the source of property inequality is due to the privileges that a particular class has obtained from the state, libertarians should equally well oppose that kind of inequality and equally well call for leveling down or perhaps what you should say is leveling up everybody to equal rights to set up their own business and compete with the people who at the time had been granted monopolies to engage in certain kinds of trade and manufacturing. So that's a point at which distribution comes in. But I think that concern with distribution I think is something that libertarians could sign on to completely. It's only later really with the rise of socialism that you get a much more strongly distributionist sense of egalitarianism, which is founded in a critique of the unequal outcomes that free markets deliver. But that's really a 19th century idea. You look at the 17th and 18th centuries and egalitarianism is not fundamentally about distribution except in so far as it's opposed to unequal distributions that are created by state privilege and monopoly. And then industrialization though of course changes the world a little bit more because if everyone's more or less farming, it doesn't seem like anyone can really shoot ahead of everyone else without having these large factories and industrial things to create that level of wealth. That's exactly right. So if you read somebody like Adam Smith, who I take to be the star of an earlier fairly moderate kind of egalitarianism, as Smith was not a radical like Tom Payne because he hadn't really signed on to a fully Republican program. He was more or less happy with monarchy, although he certainly had his critiques of the ruling class who we thought were largely either a little bit dull if they were landowners or conspiring against the public if they were manufacturers trying to get their monopoly privileges. We're going to leave that aside. Smith didn't really have a clear alternative to to monarchy in his day, but he did share a lot of the radical Republicans sympathy for free markets precisely because the alternative that was on the table at the time was government granted privilege. And it's one of the reasons why Smith, he opposed monopolies, he opposed also primogenitor, that is laws that forbade the breakup of estates through inheritance where right all the land would just go to the first born son and that would consolidate these huge estates and disinherit all the other second and later born children. He wanted, there were all kinds of other laws in England too that opposed the breakup of large estates and he thought a free market in land would naturally lead to more industrious yeoman farmers. They would be more efficient at farming the land and so you would generally see a breakup of these huge estates because the aristocrats were not very entrepreneurial. They were sort of dullers. It'd be better actually if the rules of inheritance were changed to allow the estates to be sold off in pieces and enable more people to lead independent lives of self-employment. And then the Marxist critique or I guess socialists even predate Marx a bit but then they start talking a lot more about wealth or actual holdings I guess. Right and the key thing as you noted before that what happened was Smith was writing before the industrial revolution or right at the beginning and he was actually fairly skeptical that you would need huge large-scale enterprises. He thought oh there'd only be a couple occasions where you'd need that say for building a canal. Once the industrial revolution is well underway in England around the 1830s you see people starting to worry about the factory system and here you have huge numbers of people who were formerly self-employed in small workshops now they have been tossed into unemployment because the giant factories are much more efficient producers so they lose their independence and then they have to hire themselves out to the factory owners for poverty level wages. That's the point at which people start realizing that the older egalitarian vision in which in principle all enterprises would be small scale and consequently there would be a huge number of opportunities for self-employment. People see that vision isn't really working out as anticipated. The industrial revolution means the vast majority of people are going to be wage laborers. They're going to have to be working under the subjection of their employer who orders them around in every little motion minutely for most of their waking lives. Remember in those days the length of the working day could easily be 12 or 14 hours and then people start thinking well okay if we can't break up the big factories into small workshops then we have to find other ways for workers to have fulfilling lives and there are two main techniques. One of them is to reduce the length of the working day so workers have more hours where they can be under their own reconnaissance and decide what they do just for themselves without having to take orders from an employer and secondly ensuring that they have a decent enough level of income so that they can do something with those free hours other than just barely scraping by the means of subsistence and that's the point at which a concern for distributive justice in and of itself becomes really prominent especially in socialist movements social democracy and so forth in Europe and it took longer for that to come over to the United States but in Europe it was already very prominent by the mid 19th century. When did egalitarianism emerge as I guess a self-consciously like recognized school within political philosophy because so far we've been talking about you know we talked about Adam Smith we talked about Karl Marx but these people didn't see themselves as necessarily part of a school that would be called a egalitarian but nowadays it's a it's a branch of political philosophy. Now that's a great great question in fact it's highly controversial whether Marx would have thought of himself as a egalitarian I think not there's a lot of good scholarship I think that shows that equality wasn't really what he was up to so you see at least intellectually the late 19th century is appointed which self-conscious egalitarian thinking in the distributive sense starts becoming prominent and the reason for this is you have this long 19th century during which all the theories of distributive justice are essentially founded on some notion of class conflict. The older painite radical republicans basically hated the lazy idle landowners and the government cronies who were living off of tax revenues in these no-show jobs that the state had set up for them those were the idlers and they should be you know dispossessed and pain all the way through George with his single land tax right they think the landowners are the parasites of society and to a certain extent people living off tax revenue in these no-show jobs and then you have on the other hand you have the socialist tradition coming out of Marx who sees capitalists as the exploiters the coupon clippers they're not doing any work the workers are doing everything um so you see a little shift but it's still a very class conflict point of view and even the laissez-faire capitalists people like Spencer and Sumner they explicitly endorse class warfare and they said look it's the capitalist versus the workers and you know whatever pops out of that conflict uh is going to be the just distribution by the late 19th century people are coming to realize that that way of understanding distribution is really problematic a main reason is that obviously you can't get any kind of consensus so the late 19th century you see theorists trying to come up with ideas of distributive justice that could in principle be inclusive of everyone's interests in the united states you can even look around world war one you see these ideas being formed in england it's a bit earlier uh a late 19th century picture people are striving for a notion of equality that will be inclusive of of all classes but distributive justice in its contemporary formulation with clear principles of distributive justice is mostly starting to happen around world war two you see for instance the famous beverage report articulating the principles of a welfare state and comprehensive social insurance in britain before then you actually had bismarck and his plans for social insurance uh uh that was already in the late 19th century and bismarck basically was trying to figure out a way to make capitalism acceptable to the workers and to to dislodge the popularity of the socialist movement by showing that capitalism could deliver real benefits to the workers and that's why bismarck the arch reactionary anti socialist was in fact the author of germany's welfare state it seems like you start having a conversation about dessert obviously what do you deserve and responsibility too to some extent workers versus capitalists or underclass versus versus rich people and whether or not people are getting what they deserve and what they're responsible for yeah if anything i see dessert based notions of distributive justice are much more where the 19th century class conflict view was coming from right that the labor theory of value is based on a theory of productive contribution you you should get in accordance with what you contribute but the labor theory of value said workers for the only people who are contributing at anything right so the workers should get 100 percent of the product and that himself had a problem with that and he criticized that view but that was a very popular view among you call popular Marxism if not Marx himself yeah the harder you work the more blisters you have the yeah the more sweat on your brow the more you deserve quite right uh and it's really later on starting with ideas of social insurance you see both the social democrats and people like bismarck people get the idea that look uh a lot of times people can be prone to illness and industrial accidents and unemployment it's not no fault of their own you have a recession and millions of people are thrown out of work it's not because of anything wrong that they did but now they no longer have an income it's not their fault um and so uh instead of deserved as productive contribution you get the notion of well this suffering is not deserved because it wasn't their fault and that can be a rationale for social insurance that you could see that people are prone to systematic risks of illness disability unemployment and so forth and the workers who get together pay into a fund managed by the state or sometimes by private entities so that if this risk befalls them they'll have something to fall back on and will not suffer destitution as a result of some undeserved bad luck you've been talking a lot about political and social movements and and views of egalitarianism within those within the academy at this time was where i mean were philosophy professors kind of mirroring what you're describing on the outside world or were they going off in different directions yeah i mean the academics too uh already by the late 19th century as i say people are trying to move towards a vision of distributive justice that isn't just going to be based on class conflict but something that could unite all classes of society around a common vision so you see in england people like uh uh tawny or in the united states ralph barton perry famous philosopher around world war one they're kind of groping towards this but you don't see really uh sharp analytical accounts of distributive justice uh until the post-world war two era and of course in the united states uh really difficult thinking about distributive justice uh was largely propelled by john ralph's theory of justice where he puts distributive justice back on to into academic discourse in a major way uh by articulating and defending egalitarian principles of distribution but it seems like he kind of has a responsibility theory or maybe in the what you call luck egalitarianism of the things that are not your fault such as your natural intelligence or natural speed or maybe your birth parents should not factor heavily into your placement in society ah so yeah there's a cup there's a number of different ideas that are that are connected here many people have thought that ralph is with what is known as a lucky egalitarian who says that nobody should be less well off than anybody else because of uh uh bad luck or factors that are not their responsibility i actually think that's a deep misreading of what ralph is up to uh ralph in fact uh was ready to tolerate uh quite a lot of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth that could be traced to things like the genetic lottery that some people are just born with uh with talents that are highly valued by the market and other people are born with uh genetic endowments that are not highly valued by the market ralph's actually did not have a fundamental objection to the fact that any qualities generated by an efficient market-based system would reward some people with some genes rather than others even though they didn't deserve obviously nobody deserves the genes that they were born with that's pure luck um ralph's more fundamental uh kind of egalitarianism is based rather on uh a certain conception of how the rules of the market game should be designed it's about the rules of the game and not about the outcomes okay so his idea is you should design the rules of the economic game the rules of property and contract and regulation and so forth and taxation in such a way that um those rules will ensure that inequalities that that help the better off will also help the worst off in society what you want is inequalities to be to the advantage of everyone so ralph's fundamental idea is look he's going to tolerate inequality but he wants to make sure that inequality is serving everybody's interests and not just the interests of the people at the top this is what he called the difference principle uh and there's a lot of inequalities of that sort right some people have much nicer jobs that involve a lot of intellectual thinking and discretion and freedom of judgment and responsibility those things are generally enjoyable features of the job but if you're going to be a doctor uh you need a lot of discretion and a lot of opportunities for intellectual labor it's not a good use of a doctor's time uh to have her scrubbing toilets or something she everyone benefits if she can devote her energies uh at work uh towards uh serving patients and the the poor also benefit uh from the fact that her professional life is relatively cushy in the sense that it's insulated from dreary drudgy uh uh burdensome labor but in fact it's pretty interesting work uh but hey otherwise you wouldn't have enough doctors you'd be way more expensive to help the sick uh uh get better i wanted to talk about luck egalitarianism because you have you've raised some really interesting criticisms of it in some of your writing but before before we turn to that i wanted to see if you could give us a sense of what egalitarianism broadly looks like now i mean one of the things that trevor and i have talked about in past episodes of free thoughts is the idea that libertarianism is not one philosophy but it's a it's a group of different views that share some traits in common but also have meaningful differences between them and egalitarianism is is the same way there are different kinds of egalitarians who can disagree with each other about very fundamental issues so i was wondering if you could give us kind of the bird's eye view of what some of these different sorts of egalitarianism are the the big ones today and how they differ from each other yeah so i broadly divide egalitarianism into two groups of theories one i call lucky egalitarianism and that's based on the view that nobody should have less than anybody else due to factors that they're not responsible for or that they don't deserve okay so if somebody's worse off than somebody else due to sheer luck that's considered unjust according to lucky egalitarians and then they derive a whole bunch of other ideas about distributive justice from that fundamental idea that inequalities due to pure luck should be eliminated the other group of theories i call relational egalitarianism because what they're most interested in is not the distribution of income and wealth and other goods in and of themselves but rather how people relate to each other in society uh so according to a relational egalitarian the fundamental egalitarian objective is basically to eliminate oppressive social hierarchy relations of domination and subjection relations of stigmatization where some people are despised or degraded because of their social identity you know their race or their sexual orientation or things like that and also social relations in which some people basically just don't count in the eyes of others say relations in which the state is organized in such a way that whole groups of people and their interests just don't figure into the state's calculations of how to formulate public policy so those three sorts of hierarchy hierarchies of domination and subjection hierarchies of honor and stigmatization and hierarchies of high and low standing uh uh in the eyes and calculation of others uh those are the three kinds of social hierarchies that relational egalitarians oppose and they want to replace those social relations with social relations of equality where you know people recognize that they have to interact with others on terms of mutual respect in regard for their interests and can't go around uh uh just despising them because of their social identity and treating them as outcasts on that account and that second relational form of egalitarianism is what i've been trying to promote i'm arguing that you can trace this all the way back to the earliest days of egalitarianism with the levelers and that this former egalitarianism also it can accept a variety of modes of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth although on this view there will be some inequalities in income and wealth that will be uh too extreme to be acceptable then before we get into exploring those exploring what sorts of inequalities are acceptable and what's not and why and what we ought to do about it um you're on on the topic of luck egalitarianism you're pretty down on luck egalitarianism and so in a way that that many i think libertarians would would appreciate your critiques of uh what they generally think of luck egalitarianism right and so i was could you tell us what's what's wrong with luck egalitarianism sure well um there's a lot of problems i have with lucky egalitarianism um they uh for one thing lucky egalitarians i think just foundationally they have not articulated uh any realistic sense of what could possibly be an injustice so i'm on my view for something to count as an injustice you have to identify somebody who is uh suffering something uh that they're entitled to complain about and you have to identify somebody else to whom they can address that complaint who is uh responsible for it which is actually a view that that Friedrich Hayek actually also expressed about justice that you you have to identify a person not just a volcano or something impersonal like that that's exactly right and my problem with it is that if somebody's born with less talent say than somebody else number one i fundamentally don't think that that is in itself anything to complain about uh it's nobody's fault here we're assuming that you know the person wasn't subject to uh you know like the mom when she was pregnant with this person wasn't maliciously uh drugged with something that caused a genetic mutation will set aside those kind of perverted cases in the normal case if somebody's born with less talent than somebody else it's just a matter of luck there's nobody to blame for it but at the same time i also think that it's kind of perverse to uh direct ones anger or complaints against the more talented in a well-ordered society uh the more talented the exercise of the talents of the more talented should read down to the benefit of everyone right we all enjoy watching the superb athletes do their great performances in the sports they engage in most of us of course will never be that athletically talented similar for musical talent or any kind of artistic talent and also various productive and entrepreneurial talents when society is running well the more talented when they exercise their talents are actually doing stuff uh that redounds to everyone's advantage and so if one is less talent one should feel happy that other people have talents uh uh that are helping them so i don't think that kind you know and and the lucky galatarianism i think inspires a kind of unjust envy towards the more talented uh and we should discourage that uh that sense of grievance against the more talented it also seems to as you write uh have something more like pity rather than compassion in one line in your essay which we'll put a link up to in the show notes uh you say compassion and pity can both move a person to act benevolently but only pity is condescending quite right right so the other the other side of the complaint is that lucky galatarianism not only inspires envy against the more talented but also a kind of condescending pity towards the less talented right oh it's because they're so pathetic that we have to give them more to make up for their innate deficiencies i think that is also a very in egalitarian thought uh it's obnoxious and offensive and people should not want to uh claim resources on the basis of their inferiority to others i that was one of things i really liked about your critique of luck of luck egalitarianism was this this sense that it's at a very deep level is simply disrespectful and not not respectful of human dignity yeah that's right yeah and you bring it up in a variety of ways uh saying that uh putting yourself on the obligation things that a lot of conservatives would it would resonate with conservatives which uh probably would maybe strike people as odd but uh there's something about these these laws that are insulting uh both to the people administering them and the people they're being administered to i think that's right now i do want to stress though that both kinds of egalitarianism that exist today both the relational egalitarians and the lucky galatarians are willing to accept quite a lot of distributive inequality i've already explained how ralls accepts inequalities that as a matter of fact redown to the advantage of everyone but lucky galatarians too are perfectly happy to accept inequalities that really are due to say somebody working harder than another person or more prudently managing their assets they're perfectly happy to allow that or even people being being misfortune for their own fault sometimes through their own fault so lucky galatarians are perfectly happy to say that you know if you screwed up and it's your fault that there's no injustice and you're being less well off than somebody who behaved uh more industriously and and more prudently so you don't really see it's a very rare today to see somebody who is trying to advance a really radical distributive equality that rejects any inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth i can't actually think of anybody right now who's who is that extreme in either egalitarian camp on the relational egalitarianism as you've described it a lot of it seems to be stuff that libertarians could get behind i mean we could say like people should be equal in in their rights they should be equal in treatment before the law and and that sounds great so i'm wondering where does relational egalitarianism as you advocate part from libertarians what are we going to disagree with as far as your vision for for egalitarian justice right so um here's one place uh where i think libertarians and relational egalitarians uh might part ways uh relational egalitarians do see a pretty strong rationale both for a ceiling uh i'm sorry a floor below which people shouldn't fall so you know we believe in safety nets uh and also see some rationales for limiting extreme accumulations at the top and why don't i focus on the top because i think people are more familiar with the idea of safety nets uh but relationally egalitarians are are pretty worried about say the contemporary distribution of wealth in the united states with more and more wealth accumulating to people at the top the fundamental reason for that is is political uh it's that the more extreme the wealth inequality the more likely you're going to end up with a plutocracy where the rich are calling all the shots uh in government and i think we see some evidence for that so if if you want equality of standing in the sense that the state should treat everyone's interests as on a par and not just curry favor with some privileged group uh then the current dependence of people in congress on having to spend about 60 or 70 of their time fundraising from rich people uh and having to offer attention and agenda setting power and return for that uh is very problematic but so the prime objection to extreme inequalities of wealth is not that some people just get to be really rich but rather that that wealth gets translated into unequal political power until the rich just capture the political process you don't have a democracy anymore that that seems like a concern that a lot of libertarians are actually on board with i mean when we rail against say cronyism it's it's that people who are politically connected and people who are wealthy can bend the government to their will to get special favors that the rest of us can't but the the libertarian solution to that is simply to reduce the the size of government and the scope of its powers to the level that no one can kind of get it to call shots in their favor that that the government if it's limited to simply protecting rights say then no matter how much money you have you're not going to be able to get it to give you favors because it doesn't have any favors to give right and so yeah and here's the rejoinder from relational egalitarians is that uh contemporary capitalist systems actually depend on a very complicated infrastructure of property rights uh these are the constitutive rules of the game for how capitalism is supposed to run and it turns out that as technology and the scale of production get larger and larger you need more and more complicated rules things like intellectual property for instance they can get pretty arcane and the difficulty is i think most people acknowledge that some form or other of intellectual property is going to be needed to stimulate innovation but at the same time intellectual property is a state grant of monopoly rights at least for a temporary period so here we have a problem because you can see how you can game the system of intellectual property rights in order to shore up massive monopoly power but it's but you can't say we're not going to have the state engaged in acknowledging or creating intellectual property rights i don't know maybe some libertarians think that there actually are a lot of libertarians who think that and for exactly the reasons you said one of the reasons first one being that they don't think it's really property in the sense of it's not rivalrous i don't take anything from you by taking an idea from you and then the other sense of it's just constantly political gamesmanship for an intellectual monopoly established by the state in almost the same thing going back to the levelers and saying it's just as good as a king's monopoly over over shipping to the east india company right and that happened of course with the mickey mouse protection act of 1998 when the sunny bono copyright act is what it's actually called when when disney was complaining about the fact that mickey mouse was about to go into the public domain and that was one of the biggest reasons they extended that right so you know i think it would be an interesting experiment to see whether we can come up with some alternative method for encouraging innovation you know i'm sort of of two minds of this my own personal view is that copyright is completely outrageous and beyond the pale and that the term of copyrights if you allow it at all should be radically reduced from what they currently are and the evidence for this is that as we can see from the explosion of information on the web it looks as if people are perfectly willing to share their ideas with each other for free they just want to be read and yeah creative media it's very impressive actually how many people just just want to communicate ideas to others and they're not asking for any money for it or or perhaps only a voluntary contribution on the other hand with patents i have some worries that there are certain kinds of invention that requires spectacular amounts of upfront investment and if other people could just kind of seize the results uh say for pharmaceuticals uh it's not to say i'm not a great fan of big pharma but hey it really is objectively expensive to develop effective new drugs and it's hard to see how that could happen if without patents as soon as you invent it other people can start manufacturing because a marginal cost of manufacturing a pill is almost nothing at all the cost is in development well yeah we'll probably we'll definitely have some intellectual property episodes in the future um probably on both sides it's a debate within libertarianism i wanted to go back a little bit though when you were talking about political influence i think this really gets to a core of relational egalitarianism that it's not just a wealth that's a problematic steve jobs brought us a bunch of awesome things but if steve job starts courting government power it's different but one of the things that's interesting in your work is when you're talking about egalitarianism you sort of have to start talking about uh who and what what trait should get equal access or should create equality what what thing should we be maximizing equality on and if you remove money from the political process it's not the case that representatives would therefore then treat all of their constituents the same or even more interestingly it doesn't even seem to be the case that the representatives should treat all of their constituents the same and not prioritize certain people in their districts over other people not just like anyone who calls i will give you as much as say about public policy as anyone else well you know it is true that given that we have uh that all modern democracies are based on uh competition among political parties and parties themselves are organized around various constituencies um and ideologies that you can't expect any given representative uh to treat absolutely everyone equally so uh given the realities of modern democracy uh the best you can hope for is not each individual representative treating every constituent exactly equally but that the interplay of competing parties will bring about uh a rough parody uh but do you think do you think it should be a pair i mean that's the question of like in that some i think about this is some things might make it unequal which goes back to the core question wealth other people might have inequalities such as the ability to be well spoken or the ability to have uh create political coalitions and have a lot of friends and rally and that would be an inequality in some sense that guy's super charismatic and he gets people behind him so he gets more of the ear of the legislator than someone who is not charismatic and can't rally people behind him so you could have egalitarian concerns about that oh i see yeah so yeah i'm not so much concerned about that because they're purely individual so it is true that the smooth talkers and the better lookers are liable to have an advantage in electoral politics uh you know in the age of mass media and so forth i that doesn't worry me so much um yeah that's just another way in which unequal talents uh tend to uh uh give people unequal advantages in competing for certain kinds of jobs what i more and more worry about is uh once the person is in office uh how are they treating everybody else and here i acknowledge that you know any given politician is is uh not going to be strictly impartial among all constituents because they're representatives of political parties that are coalitions of different groups of constituents but that in the aggregate uh in a well-run democracy uh the play of interest interest group politics uh should in the aggregate uh work in such a way that everyone gets adequate representation of their interests uh uh you know in in a representative democracy in this democratic equality as you've referred to it you talk about a need for for a quality of capabilities that we should make sure that everyone is as capable of participating as everyone else we've talked about this just now in the in the political sphere of you know political influence but you also say that this we need this equality of capabilities within civil society as well what what do you mean by that right so remember i don't think that uh i'm not advocating literal exact mathematical equality of capabilities uh because that's really impossible there will be some people who uh will be more highly educated than others partly just because they have a taste for studiousness right they study hard they learn a lot more they're really interested in in academic learning so they'll move further in the educational system but but i do think any egalitarian society is interested in ensuring that everybody has access to a decent education at the primary and secondary levels and has a reasonable shot given their opportunities for primary and secondary education that if they work hard and are studious that they have a reasonable shot at a college education too uh that they that you know that their k through 12 education is not so deficient that they could never qualify themselves for higher education i think that's unjust uh you know the state should provide decent opportunities uh for everyone but it doesn't follow that they would be that the outcomes would be equal uh nor even necessarily that um every single public school say would offer exactly the same opportunities as every other i i think that's both impossible and probably unjust because different communities have different tastes for education too some people some communities would rather spend their money uh uh on other things and that's not inherently unjust as long as every kid gets a shot at uh decent education so they have the capabilities they need uh both to function successfully uh in the economy and to function effectively as citizens but in in the essay in your essay what is the point of quality um i guess one of the things that you you say that egalitarianism demands for each of us is quote the social conditions of being accepted by others such as the ability to appear in public without shame and not being ascribed outcast status and i was curious about that when i read it because i was wondering is that it seems to be like there are we could say you know for for races it's it's not okay to shame or ascribe outcast status to people on the basis of race or sexual orientation but does that extend even to say cultural attitudes or beliefs or behaviors because it seems there can be you know beliefs that one holds that might in might make it so that one deserves outcast status if you're a you know just virulent bigot uh or a member of the kkk or you know hold their views that are just really repugnant the phelps church right and so and you should and so you absolutely ought to be shamed when you're in public right yeah well the phelps church has uh almost uniquely among political actors in contemporary america figured out a way to be equally offensive to all groups right or left that's an achievement of itself yeah yeah it takes hard work to do that um so yeah you know we we do live in a free society freedom of speech and so the freedom to speak your mind uh is very very important but of course it doesn't mean that you that you are thereby entitled to be insulated from harsh criticism uh and uh rejection by people who hate your views so in that sense right if we're talking about pure ideological disagreement uh we can hardly uh ask people to uh restrain their denunciation views that they find uh appalling i mean that's all part of a free society and it could be that right some some groups then on the basis of their uh ideology uh will not fare well but at the same time remember this is just a cultural matter it's it's a matter of civil society it's not the state's business to go around enforcing real outcast status even on the falst right they're entitled to freedom of speech and all the legal rights that everyone else has but then in civil society that is ex you know not not in the legal or the state sense but just in terms of their day-to-day interactions with other people uh you know other people despise them and don't want to have anything with them well they have a right to despise them so uh we're almost out of time but um it was a final question erin and i had talked about this uh for a long time but the the question about uh the efficacy of the state being a consideration for political philosophy so you could have one situation this something libertarians take very seriously you could say that what should the state do is the first question and then what can the state do is a second question and generally political philosophers sort of sit in the should realm and we've talked today about egalitarianism and a theory of it and different theories of it say the state should be doing this but if the state is unable to do certain things if it if it can't do it and if ought implies can which might be something you disagree with then could that ever change the should could the fact that the state is unable to do something effectively mean that we shouldn't even be saying that the state should be doing it in the first place or erin or or not just that the state might not be capable of of executing the mission that's been given to it but that it might be able to do it but granting it the the amount of power that it would take to carry out that mission carries huge risks as far as the state could then use that power and i mean as if history serves in many cases will use that power to do really awful things to us or even in the education sense too of just i completely agree in the principle that i would love i would live in a world where people have the best opportunity to succeed but i don't think that state education does that and and so we can we show that principle but it's different efficacy different use of the tools that we're going to use for that right certainly on the principal ground i entirely agree with you that ought implies can so if the state can't do something then you shouldn't give the job to the state to do it i i agree entirely with that and of course it's an empirical question what the state is capable of doing or not and it's also worth vigorously exploring alternatives to state provision and seeing what other sorts of institutions can solve the the problems that we face yeah absolutely yeah unfortunately a lot of times the state sometimes keeps people from thinking about those other possibilities which is uh because they think they have something in front of them but maybe uh there are better possibilities outside of it yeah for libertarians who are listening to this and aren't i mean we're not ready to get on board with egalitarianism what what do you think what should we still take away from this what do you think is even without abandoning libertarianism what can we learn from egalitarianism well i think if you if you look at the relation egalitarian tradition i think libertarians would see a lot to like libertarians and relational egalitarians are united in their suspicion of some people wanting to boss other people around and and that's where we really have a lot of common ground then the question is what kinds of social practices and institutions do we have to construct in order to nemy step bossing around well thank you very much for coming on free thoughts professor inderson ah it's a pleasure to talk to you thank you for listening to free thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on twitter at free thoughts pod that's free thoughts pod free thoughts is a project of libertarianism.org and the kato institute is produced by evan banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org