41 Comments
Mar 6, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

It is impossible to understand how so many intelligent people fail to see the vulnerability of societies that fail to pay for sound and broad infrastructure which includes education, research, health care, legal, transport, and housing as well as military (which will fail if not part of a sound society).

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BTW Ray Dalio's latest book shows education as a leading factor in the rise of nations, and educational decline as a leading factor in the decline of empires.

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The other side of this is that if you're going to ask people to take up arms to defend Libertaria, they might ask for something in return, like, say, a welfare state.

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Libertarians and cryptocurrency disciples are free-riders on the resources and protections provided by modern capitalist democracies, intent on benefitting from them and contributing ever less to their maintenance until the resources are exhausted. At least a parasite doesn't suffer from this lack of moral clarity.

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You've put into words thoughts that I've been mulling over for some time about the proper role of government.

Even if, in libertarian fashion, you believe that the state should handle only those items that the state is solely capable of handling (leaving all other areas to the private sector)—and you then arrive at the conclusion that public safety and (especially) national defense are thus properly the state's only remits—you're kidding yourself if you don't consider a strong, technologically advanced, productive economy as a necessary component of that national defense. That was true centuries ago. It's only grown more so with the passage of time.

Even leaving aside considerations of human development and living standards (and for lots of reasons that's not a good idea), the reality is a society simply isn't safe from predation without a government that possesses substantial state capacity presiding over and guaranteeing the necessary conditions for robust economic health.

Put simply, the way of our world is that the rich and strong prey on the poor and weak.

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I think most libertarians believe that a more libertarian America would have a higher GDP. Now of course that's highly debatable, and absolutely worth debating. It's a central question. But I don't think you're going to get much pushback on the second step of "GDP is important for defense". Is there such a thing as a libertarian who says "libertarianism will make us all poorer but it's worth it"?

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Not clear to me what this argument adds to arguments you are making that these policies would lead to higher GDP. Obviously libertarians disagree. Moreover, I think it's a bit of a caricature of a pretty broad ideological category with many different views about public goods funding based on the most anarchist end of its spectrum.

There are certainly examples of countries that completely lack any state capacity, such as Somalia, and those are bad. But most other examples of bad governance don't involve insufficient spending intended for public goods. Instead, they involve those funds being directed to cronies or, at best, inefficiently to politically favored groups. And an important part of the libertarian critique of your policies is going to be that education spending gets funneled to teachers' unions and fancy university buildings for the study of whatever the latest repackaging of Marxism is, that infrastructure spending builds bridges to nowhere. There are plenty of examples of this even in developed countries with high taxes and supposedly high provision, such as Belgium.

Of course, you can say that your principle requires all this be done effectively. But then you are just assuming utopia.

There is clearly a policy debate to be had here. But hard to see how this adds anything to simply debating the underlying issues.

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Ok but what about the argument that strong centralised states also increase the risk of tamerlane? State concentrate too much power and their vulnerability to be taken over by greedy tamerlanes in the long run make them too risky. Yes we need to defend against potential external tamerlanes but not with institutions that could generate more tamerlanes. I guess a libertarian approach would be to look for more decentralized institutions that efficiently provide public goods and reduce risk of tamerlane rising in the first place.

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This doesn't feel like a strong argument to me. Take Luxembourg, for example. No matter what type of government they have, their population is so small that they can't mount a significant armed forces. Fortunately, they're currently under no threat whatsoever, neither from their neighbours nor from anyone else.

For the United States, they could have a vastly weaker military and still be under no threat on home soil.

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A purely laissez faire free market is exactly what Russia has, not the US.

Only a government of the People, by the People and FOR the People, democratically establishing norms and boundaries through Enforced laws, rules and regulations... keeps the US from looking like Russia.

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Libertarianism seems a weird strawman--how is it relevant to governance in the US? The modern US state is the antithesis of liberty. Economic decisions are made by bureaucracies, not by entrepreneurs and individuals. Has a strong state made feel safer now than I did in October, 1962? No. Do I feel more free to speak my mind? No. Is economic opportunity improved as food, car, and home prices skyrocket? No. Am I morally repulsed when US leaders invade and destroy countries, joking that "We came, we saw, he died." Yes, I am morally repulsed. Seems like this essay needs some editing. One might start by asking about those "state-provided public goods". A state may pass laws and order things to get done. The Soviet Union did a lot of that. It failed. It's always creative and willing people who actually go out and build infrastructure, complete an education, and get useful ideas for improving life and opportunities.

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While I agree that public goods are integral to a high productivity economy, couldn't you make the argument that we need public goods and it's possible to pare back the state simultaneously? About 40% of federal spending is just on welfare and social security, and that isn't even including healthcare which is another 20 or so percent. While I wouldn't advocate for such cuts, couldn't cuts to these programs coupled by massive increases in R&D spending, universities, research credits, infrastructure etc lead to both a decrease in state size while increasing government investment in public goods?

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This is a grossly false analogy.

Reality is we're seeing a parallel situation to the Cuban missile crisis. The mistakes of 2014 - astroturfed revolution etc. - are coming home to roost. We can't expect Russia to not respond the way they have. Imagine what US would do if the Chinese backed a "peaceful" regime change in Canada or Mexico that favored their interests? We would go ballistic.

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I think Tamerlanes are very rare these days. Tamerlane's thing was that he'd conquer anyone too weak to resist. We haven't had one of those since Hitler. Every subsequent war has had some other casus belli. Usually it's a historical claim to the territory being invaded, as with Putin's wars. Of course these claims are not an adequate moral justification for a war, but if you were never part of Imperial Russia you can be pretty confident that Putin's not going to invade you, especially if you're not anywhere near Russia. The US, and to a lesser extent the Europeans, are threats to any state that's Communist or autocratic, but a hypothetical libertarian state would be as far from either as you can get. If you don't have any neighbours with territorial claims on you, you don't oppress your people, and you don't piss anyone off with terrorists or the like, you're actually pretty safe.

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This seems to be an intriguing argument for Ukrainian prioritization of a strong central government offering generous public goods and focusing on rapid economic growth as a bulwark against Putin-as-Tamerlane. Alas, that’s not Ukraine (as Noah has explained well).

From the perspective of the US, I’d say that taking refugees and talented Russians who want to flee Putin while investing at home is more in line with the kind of Tamerlane protection Noah argues for.

It’s not worth talking about any of the Tamerlane-esque policies the US is sustaining or tacitly abetting elsewhere because “whataboutism” has no purchase.

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I always thought the principal lesson of Thomas Hobbes was that civilization was a thin veneer, always at risk of being destroyed by Pol Pot, Saddam, or other such. Who thought of the idea first is less important than the teaching itself. The Tamerlane Principle serves that purpose quite well.

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