Someone—we’ll call him Jack—recently told me (and others) that he’d be seeing a bunch of his big government friends at an upcoming wedding. Jack asked us for ‘tips’ as to how to handle inevitable disagreements and defend free markets.
Below is a suite of tips I sent Jack’s way. It’s a hodgepodge of rhetoric, debate tactics, explanations, and insights from economics and epistemology. People are complicated, and dialogue can be messy.
Brush past character slanders—“It’s called having empathy.” “You don’t care about poor people.” “So you hate America?” “That’s racist/sexist/X-ist.” You know how it goes. It’s all very boring.
Temping as it may be, do not go on the defensive. “No no, I do care, I promise!” First of all, you’ve allowed your interlocutor to shift the conversation away from the problem-situation at hand to a conversation about your character. You’re no longer defending free markets—you’re defending yourself. How’s that going to persuade anyone of your ideas?
Secondly, you’ve shown the interlocutor that you care what he thinks of you enough that any time he slanders you, you’ll drop the main topic and defend your honor. In other words: he owns you, and he knows it.
Don’t take the bait. Much better than weak-kneed, defensive responses are retorts such as “You’re attacking me, not my argument,” or “That’s not an argument,” or “That’s not a criticism of what I just said,” or “You haven’t refuted my idea.”
More generally, if they respond with a non-argument, politely call it out as such.
Don’t let them move the goalposts—You explain how and why private property and free trade works better than public property and taxation. Instead of offering a counterpoint, they call you utopian, or idealistic, or naive. See (1).
More interestingly, instead of calling you names, maybe they reply by asking you how we could possibly get to a Stateless society from where we are now. But wait! See what they did? They moved the goalposts. Don’t follow their lead. If the topic of conversation was comparing and contrasting public property and private property, stick to that. If you’ve explained why the latter is superior to the former, don’t let them get away with switching topics.
With respect to this example in particular, the conflation of ‘comparing public property and private property’ with ‘how to shrink the State’ is extremely common. When it happens, expose it for the mistake that it is.
I chose this example deliberately—see (4).
Hypothetical catastrophes go both ways/there are no guarantees—“How would a Stateless society deal with a crazy individual with a nuke?” “What happens if a bunch of security agencies gang up and take over your town?” “What if there’s only one food provider, and that company chooses not to sell their goods to people?”
Most libertarians have encountered this kind of questioning. Implied in it is that a State can somehow guarantee that disaster will never strike, that governments are magical problem-solving machines.
While exploring stress-inducing hypotheticals is very interesting, the burden of proof is not on the free market advocate. Solutions are never guaranteed, whether a society has a State or not. The best we can do is compare the attributes of various cultures and institutions. Predicting what will happen under such-and-such conditions is impossible, since people are inherently unpredictable. If that doesn’t satisfy you, take it up with the Laws of Nature.
Stick to the fundamentals as best you can—whether they’re arguing for universal healthcare, welfare, or any other ‘goods as rights,’ don’t bother getting into the nitty gritty of the details of that particular industry. See my previous post, Economics: A Universal Acid.
Mankind was born into utter poverty. Our ancestors created goods and services through ingenuity in cultures that adequately valued progress and respected private property rights. If you want more goods and services—and at ever-lower prices and ever-greater quality—then you should call for precisely the aforementioned civilizational ingredients. No amount of governmental force, taxation, and legislation can magically conjure wealth (including whatever good or service you have in mind) into existence.
Wealth is not a fixed pie. This fact implies that economic inequality is morally irrelevant, full stop. It also implies that we want to optimize the conditions that best lend themselves to wealth-creation—see the above paragraph.
Free trade and private property better lend themselves to error-correction and wealth-creation than do taxation and public property. It’s a mouthful, but this is the money shot. Private property allows individuals to calculate profit-loss, solve potential tragedy of the commons issues, and harmonize their own interests with those of the rest of society. Free trade allows for mutually beneficial interactions between individuals. Public property makes profit-loss calculation impossible, engenders tragedy of the commons, and causes conflict over how to employ public resources. Taxation raises the cost of creativity, wealth-creation, and pro-civilizational activity.
Don’t play the ‘studies show’ game—one way political arguments go sideways is that the interlocutors throw studies at each other that ‘support’ their respective positions. You’re just lobbing Pokemon at each other until one person runs out of them, making the discussion more a battle of memory than one of ideas.
Reject this game entirely.
You may be asked, “So no amount of data could change your mind about the minimum wage/universal healthcare/anti-discrimination laws?” To which a good response is, “Correct. It’s not a question of data (of which there is an infinite amount to cherrypick, anyway). It’s a question of what our best economic and epistemological explanations say about the conditions under which wealth can and cannot grow.”
For instance, a society could become wealthier while price controls are implemented. Without theory, we cannot say whether the growth of wealth was because of, despite, or independent of the price controls.
We live in a culture that mistakenly venerates data over theory. Who cares. Bite the bullet.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here for brevity’s sake. Hopefully this is helpful. Let me know.
I have trouble with conversations as a shy person, so I appreciate these tips.