I’ve been reading some Hayek lately, specifically The Constitution of Liberty, in which Hayek talks about freedom/liberty and what exactly those words mean and why they are so desirable for society.

Hayek believes we should all be “free from coercion.” He is very much concerned with men being able to choose freely between available opportunities and not very concerned at all about what opportunities are available to each one; I feel like a non-libertarian response would involve asserting some equivalence between the two, but I haven’t taken the time to explore that line of thought.

Hayek’s main points, however, rest on the concept of distributed knowledge, or the idea that no individuals have enough knowledge to reliably make coercive decisions that improve the lives of others.

I find these arguments very appealing. It could be argued that, today, computers and the Internet help with the knowledge problem to a useful degree, and I concede there are many instances of coercion that at least appear to have improved lives – such as the airplane smoking ban currently being attributed to the late New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg (due to externalities, that’s something I’m at least ambivalent about).

But I think it’s much easier to find examples of allegedly knowledge-based intervention backfiring and causing unintended consequences, like the ethanol boondoggle, or California’s high speed rail boondoggle, or NYC’s taxicab mess, or the entire War on Drugs, or, oh, almost any time the government has tried to implement price ceilings which led to shortages of the very goods they were trying to make more available.

Incidentally, this is all partially related to why I’m so interested in all the data around climate change. For quite a few years the Smart People have been extremely confident in their predictions about the globe getting warmer and the weather getting worse, but enough time has gone by that I believe we are starting to see results that are beginning to deviate from their earlier oh-so-confident predictions.

Maybe they didn’t have as much knowledge about the way the world works as they thought they did. Maybe the interactions of the Sun and Earth and atmosphere and carbon dioxide and everything else are even less well understood than the reactions of people to artificially suppressed prices.

If true, it would be no surprise to Hayek.

I read a book by Callum Roberts called The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. I read it because I’m not afraid of facts that might support positions I oppose, even though it’s basically an environmentalist tome about how we’re destroying the ocean through overfishing, climate change, chemical pollution, plastic dumping, habitat destruction, invasive species, noisy ships, and a few other things I don’t remember. It’s almost enough to make you wonder how the ocean is still around, tempting you to believe in what the theologians call “common grace.”

These things don’t “keep me up at night” or “scare the pants off me” like they do the author, partly because I suspect some of those bad things cancel out, partly because I have more faith in the general size and resilience of the ocean, and partly because I have more faith in the ability of markets to respond to incentives to reverse and preserve it (and partly I suppose because of more faith in common grace).

But I found the chapter on overfishing very interesting. I had stumbled on info about overfishing in the past, but I had never seen the case presented so starkly and fully. Apparently we’ve been removing fish from the ocean so much faster than they’re being replaced that it’s starting to show pretty badly; despite all the huge advances in technology and productivity in the last hundred-plus years we’re catching far fewer numbers of a whole bunch of species simply because there’s so few of them left.

To catch the most fish in the long run, you should catch at a rate no quicker than the fish are replenished. Even though it might be easy to catch twice as many fish in one year, if you fish at that rate for too long, you are “depleting” the “fish stocks.” There won’t be as many fish left to reproduce next year, and you’ll have fewer fish to catch in the future – killing the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg.

But even if you’re smart enough to leave some easy fish alone this year as an investment that will pay off later, you don’t own the ocean, and you can’t really stop someone else from coming along to take extra fish now for greater short-term profits – even though it diminishes the long-term profits for everyone who’s trying to save those short-term profits for later.

This is a sort of market failure that economists call the “tragedy of the commons,” and I think it’s a reasonable case for some sort of government regulation – perhaps in the form of limits on how many fish are caught each year. There are apparently cases of governments doing that sort of thing and seeing some sorts of successes.

Part of the problem is that no one really owns the ocean, which is hard to do anyway because the water’s always moving, so it’s harder to have the property rights that give people the incentive to consider long-term profits over short-term profits. Callum’s book does mention some government efforts to establish private ownership in the fishing industry, and he hinted at its success, though he expressed skepticism at its broader potential. (I’m a little more biased to be optimistic that it could work quite well, but I doubt it’s a workable solution for the whole ocean.)

I can imagine a self-correcting fish market that would not require government intervention. As depleted fish get harder to find (it’s very hard to kill off all of them), their price goes up until demand drops, allowing the stocks to be replenished until they are plentiful enough to be caught again at a lower price. But the market has produced innovations that allow us to keep finding fish faster than price signals affect their demand, so if self-correction has potential, it hasn’t kicked in yet; supposedly we’ve already “reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.”

There is also potential in private fishing in fish ponds on land, and I could imagine prices favoring them once fish finally get too hard to find in the ocean. But Callum claims that most of these fish are fed quite inefficiently from smaller fish from the ocean, so that’s not really any more sustainable. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the industry figures out how to keep the entire food chain in the ponds.

In short, I see a lot of potential ways for the market to keep fish around even if we keep taking them out of the ocean at what is currently unsustainable levels. But due to what seems to be very obvious negative externalities, I also don’t have a problem with governments trying to help things along with quotas, even as I expect the quotas to often be affected by industry lobbying (and they’d be incorrect due to lack of knowledge anyway even without the lobbyists).

But as far as government regulations go, I don’t think the unintended consequences of fish quotas can get that bad. If they’re set too high (as Callum believes some certainly are), then it won’t be any worse than not having any at all. If they’re set too low, the fish stocks would just replenish so much that they could be adjusted later – it’s only temporarily adding to the public good. Yes, the government is limiting short-term profits, but since the fishers don’t own the fish anyway, that’s not much of an intrusion into personal liberties.

I’m probably missing some things from both sides, and I’m definitely no expert on fish, but these are my thoughts after reading that book and thinking a bit about it.

Kenneth Anderson has an essay in Commentary called “The Case For Drones,” arguing that conservatives should accept drones as effective, moral, and basically awesome, and that any conservative who doesn’t is a kooky isolationist. I suppose some drone pushback from the neoconservative wing was expected after Rand Paul grabbed the spotlight for the libertarian wing a couple months ago, but I’m not sure I’m convinced by Anderson’s case.

To be fair, he makes some good arguments against the weaker, more tangential anti-drone claims, such as the hazards of remote impersonal killing (he asks how is it any less impersonal than an old-fashioned pilot dropping bombs on things he can’t see, and says we still need ground contacts for drone-able countries), or the slippery slope that killer drones will soon be circling London or Paris (he says we only need them in countries with weak governments that can’t control their insurgents). But those kinds of things were never my real problems with our drone policy. Regarding the heavier claims, my anti-drone bias remains skeptical.

Are Drone Strikes Effective?

Anderson argues against the claim that drone strikes are counterproductive because the resentment of civilian casualties creates more militants for every one we take out. In a response that seems bizarre to me, Anderson claims that “village-level resentments fueling recruitment… matters far less in terms of war fighting when the United States no longer has infantry in those places.”

Maybe I’m missing something, but I thought we were striking militants because they were planning attacks against the United States, not because they might attack our nearby soldiers. So, hey man, villagers might join al-Qaeda after we drone-kill their civilian relatives, but it doesn’t matter because we’re getting our troops out of there anyway and sending them back home, which is actually the place those new members are plotting to attack. What?

Anderson also seeks to downplay how much Pakistani citizens hate the drone strikes, apparently putting more trust in something a soldier “remarked” to him than the actual data, which he also misrepresents:

Do Gallup polls of the general Pakistani population indicate overwhelming resentment about drone strikes—or do they really suggest that more than half the country is unaware of a drone campaign at all? Recent polls found the latter to be the case.

There was a Pew poll indicating that “just over one-in- three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes,” but Anderson conveniently leaves out the rest of the details: “Nearly all (93%) of those who are familiar with the strikes say they are a bad thing.”

Instead, Anderson takes the time to make red-herring arguments against ever fearing blowback, because, hey, if George McClellan hadn’t been replaced because he was too concerned about blowback, “the Union would have lost the Civil War.” Ah, so we point out how different the global war on terror is from traditional warfare to defend the necessity of drone strikes, but we’ll draw random historical parallels to downplay the arguments against them. What?

If anything, I might argue that blowback is more likely from arbitrary targeted killings that drop out of the sky into normal life and accidentally kill civilians than it is from the sort of traditional bombing of countries at declared war. So I don’t think Anderson has made a convincing case that the drone strikes are not counterproductive.

Continue reading The Case Against The Case For Drones