R.I.P. Richard Cornuelle, "prince of classical liberalism"

Peter Boettke  on the passing of a great thinker Richard Cournuelle.

In Healing America (1983) Cornuelle argued that what was required was a radical reconsideration of the scope of government responsibility.  Public policy had come to a dead end.  We had come to believe that we cannot make society habitable without making government bigger, and yet we cannot pay the cost of the bigger government without creating more problems that add to the cost of government.  A vicious cycle ensued following the Great Depression --- "Government is growing as it fails, and, to a chilling degree, it is growing because it is failing."

By the late 1960s and 1970s, the failure of government programs was recognized even by those who were entrusted with their management.  By the 1980s, the extent of the failures of the bureaucratic attempt to address the social ills of poverty had intensified.  We don't have much of a choice, Cornuelle tells us, when our policy options are humanity or solvency.  To solve the crisis we didn't need to starve the state of resources (this is not ultimately a tax and spend issue), we needed to starve the state of responsibility (it is a question of scope and fundamentally about political theory).  In other words, if we can theoretically and empirically demonstrate that the voluntary sector can outperform the state sector in the delivery of basic social services, then we can avoid the crisis of the fiscal state (and the inhumanity of bureaucratic 'solutions') and unleash the power of people and the communities they live within, and actively participate in, to tackle the social ills of poverty, unemployment, health and education.  The American Dream is of a society that is at once free, prosperous and caring.  The "good society" Cornuelle argued did not result from grand designs, but from "millions upon millions of caring acts, repeated day after day, until direct mutual action becomes second nature."

Here is his essay "New Work for Invisible Hands."

Will Wilkerson versus the Marxist intellectuals

What We Are Not Embarrassed by: "Here is a good debate proposition: It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx." But the intellectuals love the jargon.

Who says the natural state is equalitarian?

Why left intellectuals despise Richard Epstein of the Chicago School: Because he's one smart legal scholar and a very good political philosopher.

Now that yesterday's market nosedive shows the disappointing Congressional bailout has not calmed markets, let the post-mortem begin. Disasters like this latest financial meltdown don't just happen. Mistakes this huge require an impoverished political philosophy to grease the skids. Fannie and Freddie didn't design their horrific lending policies by chance. No, behind this lending fiasco lay the strong collective preference for the "patterned principles" of justice that Robert Nozick attacked so powerfully in his 1974 masterpiece, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Believers in patterned principles hold that there is some preordained social order that is more just than others. Accordingly, the function of the state is to use the levers of powers to manipulate behavior to achieve the desired outcomes. These patterned principles stand in opposition to historical principles of justice, which are content to establish the rules of the game and then let the legal moves by individual players determine the social outcomes. For Nozick, the key rules were rules of justice in acquisition (to set up the initial property rights) and justice in transfer, whereby those rights (and others derived from them) could be exchanged or combined through voluntary transactions.

Because Nozick was no utilitarian, he did not dwell on the powerful efficiency features of this system, which shine through for ordinary real estate transactions. The key function of the legal system is to minimize the transactional barriers and increase the velocity of voluntary exchanges, all of which generate mutual gains for the parties. So long as one is sure that the given distribution of resources is obtained by legal moves from the original position, don't worry about the relative positions of one person vis-à-vis the others. Don't, in other words, use state coercion to create a distinctive pattern of rights deemed ever so desirable in the eye of some political beholder.