Category: Analysis

On the varieties of free lunch worth having

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch! Or at least that’s what this acronym stands for. The pithy but unpronounceable term is a favorite rhetorical cudgel of libertarians, who are convinced that there is a deep truth in it: a core economic principle that (conveniently) justifies anti-social behavior and uncontrolled greed.

Libertarian SF writer Robert Heinlein popularized it in his novel, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress“, and libertarian economist Milton Friedman entitled one book “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch“, which is more grammatical but less catchy. The Libertarian Party put it on their flag made it their logo. And anytime anyone anywhere suggests helping people, libertarians can be counted on to repeat this mantra as if it was self-evident proof that morality is pointless and counterproductive.

The supposedly profound core is that even a meal you get to eat without paying for isn’t “truly” free because there’s a cost that someone, somewhere is paying, individually or even (gasp!) collectively. This is, depending on how you interpret it, either trivially true, significantly false, or completely irrelevant.

It is trivially true that even something that isn’t charged for is not free “all the way down“. Those “free” salty peanuts at the bar are more than paid for by the additional drinks that thirstier patrons buy. Here, the cost is displaced and concealed but remains.

It is significantly false, in that making something freely available can take advantage of economies of scale and create sufficient positive externalities to more than pay for itself. For example, the road system generates much more wealth for society than it costs to maintain, so not only don’t we bother charging people to cross the street, but these streets are better than free because they’re profitable. Charging money would make them less profitable by discouraging their use and creation.

It is completely irrelevant because, to the person eating it, the lunch is simply free. It might not be free in a way that satisfies a libertarian, but who cares? Libertarians are greedy idiots, so what they think doesn’t matter anyhow.

Idiocy is not rare. There’s a long history of deep thinkers mistakenly insisting that something is essential when it doesn’t even exist. They raise the bar impossibly high, then act as if it matters that nothing real can meet their arbitrarily high standard. The classic example of the failure of this essentialist approach is vitalism.

Like the rest, this one begins with people facing a question that, at the time, has no available answer and being unwilling to accept this with intellectual honesty. Not knowing what it is that makes an organism alive, some were not content with admitting they had no clue, but instead hung a lampshade on their ignorance by plastering over it with a meaningless label.

They declared that the source of life was some sort of “vital essence” (or if you’re French, or pretentious, “élan vital“). Like the God of the gaps argument, this spurious placeholder not only offers no additional explanatory value, but leads to artifacts and illusions because it creates a rift between the behavior and its cause. Due to their theoretical baggage, they find themselves compelled to deny the legitimacy of what is observed.

With vitalism, the obvious artifact is that it becomes logically possible for an organism to act in all ways as though it’s alive while somehow lacking that “vital essence” that is (they insist) required for “true” life. In this way, vitalism allows for the existence of zombies.

Worse, it makes it impossible, even in principle, to ever distinguish someone from a zombie because no amount of “merely acting” alive is (according to them) sufficient. And if you believe that a vital essence is required for life, then the absence of any evidence for such a thing must mean that nobody is “truly” alive; we’re all zombies.

A similar, but more explicitly religious, error is the dogma that what makes us alive is a supernatural essence; the soul. The result of this move is that anyone denying the existence of souls will be accused of denying the existence of life itself. If not for souls, they insist, we’d just be “bags of chemicals“. It’s zombiism all over again, only with Jesus.

Parallel to these errors is the claim that what makes us conscious is yet another ineffable and utterly undetectable essence: qualia, which are defined as experiences (somehow) severed from behavior and behavioral dispositions. A consequence is that, according to this idea, it is now possible for someone to act in all ways conscious while somehow not being conscious: a mindless philosophical zombie.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern here, and it’s a frustrating one. It’s hard to know what to say to someone who insists that there’s more to a behavior than everything about the behavior itself, and who defines it so that no evidence about the matter is even logically possible.

Earlier, I casually (yet entirely fairly) bashed libertarianism, but this term has an older meaning from philosophy. In contrast to political libertarians, who are just greedy anarchists and Nazis, metaphysical libertarians are convinced that what makes free will possible is yet another very special essence.

According to them, the only reason we can be held accountable for our actions is that they are (somehow) uncaused, making them ours and ours alone. In other words, they define free will as will that is free from causality itself, and conclude that we obviously have it. They attribute this seemingly magical ability to everything from Cartesian dualism and God to emergence and quantum mechanics. (In other words, their excuses span both the genres of fantasy and science fiction.)

Ironically, the opposite-but-equal hard determinists agree on the requirements but disagree on whether they’ve been met. They say, correctly, that acausality is physically impossible. They say, incorrectly, that this means we don’t have free will. I don’t blame them, though, because they were obviously predetermined to make that mistake.

Collectively, these two groups are called incompatibilists because of their shared belief that determinism is incompatible with free will. If you try to tell a metaphysical libertarian that it’s physically impossible for our actions to be uncaused, they’ll accuse you of denying that you have free will. If you say the same to a hard determinist, they’ll nod and say that this proves you don’t have free will. Tweedledee, meet Tweedledum.

The shared mistake is that they misdefine free will. First they ask the wrong question, then they disagree about the answer. But a broken question can’t be answered, only itself questioned and ultimately unasked. It generates a problem that cannot be solved, only dissolved.

Free will is, first and foremost, a type of will; wanting some things over others. We are capable of wanting because we form beliefs about how the world is and ought to be. These are formed as the consequence of interacting with external reality.

The world at large causes our will, so anything interfering with this, whether it’s supernatural or random, only undermines that will. If you want something for no reason at all, in what sense do you want it?

Causality is a requirement for any sort of will; acausality doesn’t make our will free, it destroys it. So why would we even want our will to be free from cause? Why would we make it a requirement?

Incompatibilists believe that, if our choices are determined, then we can’t be held accountable for them. As in: “Sure, I killed her, but I was predetermined to do so, therefore it’s not my fault, so you have to let me walk.”

This is bad, not only because the conclusion is both morally repugnant and obviously mistaken, but because we actually want to be able to be held accountable and to hold others accountable in turn. Otherwise, how can we cooperate? Without it, we cannot form a social contract.

Consider a more literal contract. In order to make a binding agreement, both parties must accept a responsibility to follow it and be held accountable for choosing not to. But this is only possible if entering into it was your choice in the first place; if you agreed to it of your own free will.

If you sign a contract with a gun pointed at your head, you didn’t really have a choice. Rather, you acted under duress—under the control of another’s will—so you can’t be bound to it. Likewise, if you genuinely agree but then violate it at gunpoint, that too was under duress and therefore not your fault.

We don’t have will that’s free from causality, because that’s physically impossible, but we don’t need it because it doesn’t matter. Will that is free from duress is the only sort of free will required for us to be held accountable and to hold each other accountable. Freedom from duress is not only sufficient for this, but unlike freedom from causality, it’s actually possible. In fact, it’s ubiquitous.

The conclusion that causality and free will are compatible is, predictably, called compatibilism. Much as those who deny the existence of various other essences—élan vital, souls, qualia—are accused of denying the existence of what the essence purportedly explains, compatibilists are accused of denying that free will exists.

This is true and false. Compatibilists do deny that acausal free will exists, but they also deny that it’s the sort of free will we need and have. They believe in free will, but not Free Will. When they make this clear, they’re accused of equivocating, of lying about what free will is, but the issue is deeper than definitions.

While compatibilists and incompatibilists disagree about the meaning of “free will”, this isn’t a purely semantic argument. It’s not just about which sort of freedom is meant, but which matters: which one we ought to mean.

Therefore, compatibilism isn’t distinguished by its definition of free will, but by its endorsement of this sort of free will as ethically sufficient. All three stances agree that freedom from duress exists, but compatibilists are the only ones saying it is worthy of fulfilling the ethical role of free will.

Why do incompatibilists disagree? I suspect it’s because they are in the thrall of an ontological error. Attributes like will, and beliefs, and thoughts, and so on, are mental. They are only defined in terms of minds, hence only visible at the level of the intentional stance. Physical causes therefore cannot undermine the will, but are instead required for it.

It’s something of a subtle point, but minds are not caused by bodies; they supervene. The mind exists in terms of the body, much as software exists in terms of hardware, as a pattern in it, an abstraction. But hardware doesn’t cause software; software is hardware seen from a distance, much as words are formed from letters but not caused by them.

(Naturally, yet another form of essentialism, Platonic idealism, insists that these abstractions are more fundamental than what they abstract from. Essentialism is the gift that keeps on giving: like herpes.)

This confusion about the relationship between the physical and the mental is what drives incompatibilism. It creates a categorical error, akin to trying to answer “Why did the chicken cross the road?” with “Because its molecules moved in that direction”.

Such an answer misses the point so badly that it’s not even wrong, and it’s a daunting task to even begin to unwrap the layers of false assumptions that underlie it in order to get through to them. You have to break down their beliefs, educate them with replacements, and then show them the connection.

So when compatibilists say that we have free will (because it’s free from duress) and incompatibilists insist that it’s not free enough for their standards (which require freedom from causality), it’s much the same as a political libertarian bothering you as you eat your free lunch by insisting that it’s not free enough.

And I counsel the same reaction: just enjoy what’s free and ignore them. Their requirements are solely their own and therefore completely irrelevant. Also, use condiments, even if they tell you not to.

When it comes to politics, the tips are not made of the same meat as the rest of the wing. The demographics of the supporters show that it’s some sort of white meat, but it’s not clear just what sort, hence the mystery.

In the traditional right/left spectrum in America, the people who lean to one side or the other are called conservatives and liberals, respectively. But some people don’t just lean, they fall over, and this makes them qualitatively different.

Despite being on opposite extremes in one sense, these radicals are united by a shared political style: populism. But they often hide behind misleading terminology that allows them to deflect criticism, generally by sounding like they’re not extremists. This rant is mostly about calling them what they are instead of allowing them to maintain their disguise.

The correct term for the extreme right—whether it’s the hard right, far right, or the trendy alt right—is not conservative. The literally correct term is fascist. Of course, this word has long applied to the lunatic fringe: the neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, Birchers, and many libertarians.

Back then, these people were taken for granted by the mainstream Republicans—after all, it’s not like they could vote for the other party—and pointedly excluded from public events because they are embarrassing nuts.

The Republicans would still feed them red meat in the form of dog whistles and tacit support for bigotry. But they maintained plausible deniability by pretending that their actions were in the service of high-minded, bland-sounding, abstract principles such as small government or individual responsibility or states’ rights.

Conveniently, the social programs they attacked so as to harm minorities were the very same ones that the oligarchy hated. In this way, poor and middle-class white people were tricked into supporting policies that helped only the rich. It was a con, and it worked.

That con is no longer necessary. Where it once would have been hyperbole to call the Republicans, as a whole, fascists, things have changed. There are still conservatives in the party, particularly among the voters, but the people in charge are overt fascists.

Trump, Miller, Bannon: not one of these is a conservative in any sense. They are not defined by their caution about radical changes or their adherence to tradition. They’re just goose-stepping fascist scum.

Now, particularly outside of America, but increasingly even inside, fascists are often referred to as nationalists and populists. Trump even bragged about his nationalism. This is accurate, but doesn’t tell the full story. The source of confusion is that both of these terms also fit the other side: the left-wing extremists.

In America, the far left refers to itself as progressive, which is misleading in many ways. The biggest problem is that the term is sometimes used by actual liberals, due to the history of Reagan turning the l-word into a slur. Since the rise of St. Bernard, socialism has also been embraced as a label, but it’s not necessarily socialism in any Marxist sense, except when it is.

It’s also misleading in that it omits their populism, which is what distinguishes them from liberals, even more so than their extremism. Whereas liberals are equally focused on social and economic justice, left-pops give lip service to the former but care only about the latter. They are also nationalists, although more isolationist than expansionist.

Populism is a style of politics that entails both rhetorical and policy commitments, and is overlaid on top of political extremism on both ends. The rhetoric defines supporters as the only legitimate representation of “the people”; the ones who actually matter. Invariably, these special people are primarily white and male and otherwise non-minority.

Populism demands radicalism, activism, and ideological purity, and has no respect for experience, objectivity, or competence. There is no room for progress, only immediate, revolutionary change, and it doesn’t matter that revolutions always kill people. Populism denigrates the competent people as “the Establishment” and insists that, due to a willingness to compromise to get things done, they are inherently corrupt. This is ironic, as populism is, in practice, strongly associated with corruption.

While the populist right deserves to be called fascist, there is no equally handy term for the populist left. As I’ve written elsewhere, socialism is inherently ambiguous, and it since become a boogie man used by the Republican fascists as a cudgel against all Democrats, even the liberal base. But there is clearly a constellation of left-populist associations, which include such things as the Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Young Turks, and Bernie Sanders, and they need a name.

Aside from the generic left-populist, the best term I’ve found is based on their parallel with the Tea Party Movement, which is the right-populist faction that took over the RNC. Taking over the DNC is the stated goal of the left-pops, which is why some of us call them the Herbal Tea Party.

But you don’t have to love or use that term, unless you want to. You do have to distinguish between conservatives and fascists, and between liberals and leftists. That’s because extremism is an entirely different beast, no matter which extreme.

The base of the Democratic Party, the group that votes consistently and reliably for it, consists largely of women and people of color. One of the ways that some Democratic presidential candidates have been differentiating themselves while playing to that base is by backing reparations for African-American slavery.

This idea not only takes the moral high ground, it is a genuinely liberal goal that outflanks Bernie Sanders from the left while showing how his color-blind approach to (primarily economic) equality does not serve the base. Politically, it’s a bold move because it’s very much one of those broad, sweeping agendas that is ambiguous yet capable of alienating. In its current form, we can expect it to turn off white people broadly, even ones who genuinely oppose racism.

One answer to the ambiguity and skepticism comes from Marcus H. Johnson, a Twitterati celeb with a solid track record of compelling, well-thought-out political analyses. This rant is my sympathetic but partially dissenting response to his most recent one, entitled “Here’s What A Reparations Plan Could Look Like“. Read it. I’ll wait here.

There is much to admire about the approach he takes here, but also one fatal yet fixable flaw. First, he makes the moral case, which is honestly the easiest part. No amount of money can make up for what America did to the people they kidnapped, imported, and enslaved, but it can go a long way to countering the lasting harm by, as he says, “closing the racial wealth gap”. Otherwise, slavery’s effects continue through the generations unabated.

Second, Johnson does the math about how much it might cost, showing that it’s economically feasible, not only in terms of being a manageable ongoing expense but also due to savings from second-order effects, such as lowering incarceration rates.

If he wanted to, he could probably make an even stronger argument here. For example, any substantial downward distribution of wealth has beneficial collateral consequences because of the increase in demand and subsequent creation of jobs, leading to a positive feedback cycle that strengthens the economy.

Finally, Johnson recognizes that reversing the effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutionalized racism (particularly redlining) is a multigenerational project, not something that can be accomplished with a lump sum payment.

He offers a few alternatives, including a persuasive hybrid. And he is entirely cognizant of how such a program would be at risk of being, as he says, “siphoned off by outside actors”, both before and after the money is spent.

The problem that remains is the elephant in the room, which is that “reparations would be race-specific as opposed to a race-neutral plan”. Only Black people—by whatever definition—would be eligible. He defends this by saying that, while race-neutral plans are popular, they “have a poor track record of actually curbing the racial wealth gap”.

That may well be the case, but I don’t believe that race-specificity is necessary, plausible, or good for reparations.

We know it’s not necessary because Jim Crow laws, not to mention modern voter-suppression techniques, successfully target Black people while ostensibly remaining race-neutral. It’s a simple trick, but one that goes both ways.

The fallout from historic white supremacy is plainly visible in a variety of metrics, so economic reparations can be targeted to disproportionately help those who were disproportionately hurt while still remaining race-neutral in form. This would amount to turning the methods of systemic racism back against itself.

It comes down to the difference between equality and equity. The truly color-blind approach leads to equality, which helps everyone but still leaves some people out. That’s because it assists those who don’t really need it while not giving enough to those who truly do. However, helping people on the basis of their identity uses group membership as a proxy for need, with errors in both directions and at the cost of abandoning equality, which generates backlash.

The alternative is to bring equity by focusing on context, not color. Under this doctrine, people get as much as they need of what they need, not just a nominally equal share, with distribution based on metrics, not demographics. For example, in the cartoon above, the second frame shows boxes assigned based on height, not hair color.

Race-specificity is not plausible because predicating benefits on racial identity is politically and intellectually self-defeating. It feeds the narrative that the equal rights movement is nothing more than a constellation of partisan agendas, each seeking to boost its own identity group over others.

This false narrative thwarts intersectionality, undermines support from equalitarians, and provides cover for white supremacists. St. Bernard will deride it as identity politics, and just this once, he’ll have half a point. Moreover, the whole concept depends on an essentialistic notion of race as a biological fact, which is literally the core of racism. This will never fly.

Practically, there is no principled, reasoned basis upon which to define Blackness for this purpose. The #ADOS movement insists that reparations should be limited to “American descendants of slaves”. By that measure, neither our first Black president, Barack Obama, nor our (hopefully) next one, Kamala Harris, would qualify. After all, neither Kenya nor Jamaica are part of America, and both of these people are “mixed race”. Many Americans would, in practice, be unable to prove that they qualify due to a lack of birth records dating back to the days of Lincoln.

Johnson’s version is more sane and would apparently include both Black presidents, but it’s not clear where he’d draw the line or on what basis. If history teaches us anything, I can only imagine that any attempt at legislating Blackness at this level would collapse into the same absurdities that led to terms like quadroon, octoroon, and hexadecaroon, all of which are based on the overtly-racist “one drop rule” of hypodescent. This just won’t work.

Race-specificity is not morally good because it leaves out all the other groups that are the targets of systematic oppression, both historical and ongoing. African-American slavery was not just an economic crime, but a cover for rapes, beatings, and murders, yet it exists on a spectrum of badness that is populated by other forms of oppression against other victims.

Native Americans were enslaved, massacred, and forced into reservation ghettos. Where are their reparations? How about the Japanese-Americans who were rounded up into internment camps? Or the Hispanics who were mass deported in the 30’s or the ones who have more recently been separated from their families and caged? Or the women who could not vote, were excluded from professions, and to this day make dimes on the dollar? Or the gays or the Jews or the Muslims? Why some but not others? It’s not fair.

A wise man, martyred for the cause, once said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. Yes, we do need reparations, much along the lines that Johnson outlines, but they have to be aimed at closing the discrimination gap for everyone; not in a blind way, but in one that counters all forms of discrimination against irrelevant and effectively-immutable traits instead of feeding them.

We want to create an America that not only has a low Gini coefficient, but where Black men can feel safe when the police drive by, and women can feel safe in their own homes. By serving the greater goal of fostering equality of both civil rights and economic standing, we can achieve true social justice.

The two goals are interdependent, so we must fight both heads of the hydra—bigotry and oligarchy—at once in order to achieve them. If we focus on just one aspect of hierarchy at a time, the other will defeat our efforts. Systemic and social discrimination are not just attacks on the obvious targets, but a proven way to undermine unity among the oppressed so as to let the already-rich and already-powerful become even more so. Likewise, equality of opportunity depends on economic equality in order to yield equitable results.

The solution is intersectionality; the recognition that, whether seen in terms of identity or class, there is only one war for equality, no matter how many fronts its battles are fought on. We can only do this by crafting policies that focus on context, not color and use metrics, not demographics so as to serve each person in each group according to their own needs, never leaving anyone behind.

There is strength is unity, but only if the unity is fair. That’s why I support all the reparations for all the people in the form of a Newer Deal. This includes reparations for African-American slavery, but is not limited to them.