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Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Consensus And Constitutional Order, Part Six: Look To Your Margins!
After a sad event a few years back, Ann Coulter came out stridently against the decriminalization of recreational drugs. The sad event was her failure to gain the nomination of the Connecticut Libertarian Party for United States Congressman, which she wanted in order to run against Republican-In-Name-Only Chris Shays. Since Coulter is self-diagnosed as suffering from “Irish Alzheimer’s” ("We forget everything but our grudges"), denigrating libertarians and libertarianism as a false front for legal drug abuse became a major motivating force in her life, second only to finding a boyfriend who’d just shut up and listen, for Pete’s sake!
Today, Ace Of Spades saw fit to remind us of that particular sadness. It got your Curmudgeon thinking about...what else? Economics.
They who argue about drug use on the basis of moral absolutes are taking the short end of a big bet. Moral absolutes are premises. You simply can’t argue about premises. You can argue about the consequences of acting on a certain premise—and you should. After all, what could change a man’s mind about his premises, other than a demonstration of the ruin that would follow from their widespread adoption?
This is the practical import of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, the most important economic statement ever disguised as a philosophical dictum.
I’ve argued in previous segments of this series that even a consensus that appears overwhelming might not be strong enough to sustain its enactment into law. For many, this is a hard idea to grasp. The reasons are several, but the most important one is the Law of Unintended Consequences. This mighty Statute derives from both physical law and human nature:
- You can never do only one thing.—Marc Steigler, David’s Sling.
- Living systems don’t react to your thrusts according to what you want; they react according to what they want.—Your Curmudgeon, Eternity Road.
Like the Categorical Imperative, the Law of Unintended Consequences is fundamentally a statement about economics. More specifically, it’s about incentive changes at the margins of an ongoing process, and the responses to those changes by the persons concerned with the process.
Before the Harrison Narcotics Control Act, there was a small—tens of thousands—opiate-using populace in the United States. The great majority of these persons were originally from China; they’d come here to build the railroads, and had brought recreational opium use with them. They were not considered a social problem by anyone except hard-core xenophobes, who passionately wanted them gone from the country. The Harrison Act was one of the strokes in the xenophobes’ campaign toward that end.
The Harrison Act made the coolies’ drug practices illegal, which imposed a disincentive on them to stay here. But, as Marc Steigler wrote, you can never do only one thing. The Act also changed the incentives for people at the margins of the drug trade, and in so doing reshaped our society in a calamitous way.
Laws that forbid voluntary transactions between consenting individuals are essentially unenforceable. The consenting individuals will still find one another. If they have any privacy available to them, they can transact without anyone ever knowing about it. In the case of drug criminalization, the incentives for selling drugs increased greatly. Prices exploded. Organized crime, which shortly thereafter would be deprived of the liquor market by the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, saw the opportunity and pounced. Black markets are ruled by violence, and who had more capacity to wield violence than the great criminal families ensconced in the cities? Drug users, now classed as enemies of society, said to themselves “might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb,” and abrogated all allegiance to civil law.
All the State could do was introduce false faces into the mix: persons trained to simulate sincere interest in the banned practice, but who are really either police officers or informants for them. This involves enormous effort and a huge commitment of resources by the police, but the return on investment has been poor, and has brought a set of hideous secondary consequences of its own, ranging from police participation in the drug trade to the murder of unmasked “narcs.” Kim Wozencraft’s fictional autobiography Rush gives the reader a close look at the resulting dynamic. That dynamic arises from the desires and ingenuity of what would in any other setting be considered a pitifully small minority of Americans.
To oppose a powerful dynamic requires an equally powerful counter-dynamic. As long as the percentage of Americans interested either in selling drugs or buying them remains above the infinitesimal, no such dynamic can be constructed. Ever-harsher penalties won’t do it; the probability of getting caught, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced is simply too low. Greatly intensified anti-drug efforts won’t do it; every dollar or man-hour spent on drug crimes is diverted from other venues for law enforcement that sensible people know are far more important—and most Americans, no matter how they feel about illegal drugs, are sensible.
Drug use is rampant in America’s prisons. Wardens’ conference after wardens’ conference has proclaimed it to be the worst, least tractable problem the penal system faces. There could be no better demonstration of the unenforceability of these laws.
But we have yet to address the central tragedy of the anti-drug campaign. When the Harrison Act was first proposed, the small populace of opiate users was of no particular interest to most other Americans. They were few, easily avoided, and made little mark on society. The changes at the economic margin brought about by the Harrison Act, most particularly the violence in the drug black market, the huge revenues flowing to organized crime, and the creation of a lawless subculture at odds with above-ground American society, have imposed huge costs on all of us: risks to our lives and property, disorder in our larger cities, and fears for the well-being of our children.
No sensible man would argue that drug abuse is a good thing. That’s a self-refuting argument. But no sensible man, given the history of drug prohibition in the United States, would claim that the benefit sought by the promoters of the Harrison Act has been achieved—or even that, had it been achieved, it would be worth the terrible human cost paid for it to date. Yet this is what happens when you mess around with the margins through the force of law.
Like other Americans, most American libertarians have no personal interest in drugs. No doubt a few do; that’s the nature of large populations. But the typical libertarian is much like anyone else: outside of his politics, he’s concerned about earning a living, raising his family, and providing security to his children. He believes that the Drug War impedes the attainment of other social goods in a catastrophic and ruinously expensive way. It’s slanderously unfair to tag him as a druggie because he views this particular bit of extended social engineering as a tragic failure. After all, quite a lot of “mainstream” conservatives believe the same thing.
When the subject is electoral politics, the party Libertarian—note the upper-case “L”—gets slapped around more than is due. Yes, those votes, if they were directed to a GOP candidate, could make the difference in a close election. But to hear the critics talk, you’d think the votes were stolen from the Republican candidate, when in fact he had no claim to them that would hold water for five seconds.
I’m not a party Libertarian. I was once, but I became disenchanted with the LP and decided to disaffiliate myself from it. But take heed, ye loyalists of the major parties: you will not seduce party Libertarians out of their fold and into yours by insulting them and deriding their convictions, regardless of the issues involved.
Imagine if the party under discussion were the Right-To-Life Party, which still runs candidates of its own in New York and several other states. Are party Libertarians, who’ve dedicated so much time, money, and effort to popularizing their views over the thirty-two years of their history, less deserving of their autonomy of mind than these others? Would you who deride them deprive them of the opportunity to exercise their franchise as they please, if you had the means to do so?
Just how many margins do we want to mess with before we grow up?
Comments
Well-reasoned, as usual.
Your recent essays, revolving on the hub of Unintended Consequences, remind me that there’s a huge difference between enacting laws, on the one hand, and planning and executing in order to achieve results, on the other. It’s frustrating to see that divisive issues—gun control, abortion, welfare, what-have-you—are seldom if ever formally discussed (i.e., by policy-makers, as opposed to wonks and pundits) in terms of real-world goals and priorities, and in terms of the planning, schedules, budgets, conditions of execution, responsibilities, metrics and accountabilities needed to reach these goals. And of course, in terms of the side-effects and unintended consequences entailed in reaching for them.
For example, it seems perfectly possible (to me) to contemplate the goal of “general reduction in the number of abortions performed, and large-scale reduction of the number of pathological (i.e., late term, oft-repeated) abortions performed.” But it’s impossible to do so without considering a whole realm of issues, motivations, inequities, attitudes and enablers, and creating a plan that changes all these dynamics and conditions.
But that is explicitly “social engineering,” whereas modifying one condition (e.g., the legality of abortion) is (arguably) not. So what is one left with, in seeking mechanisms for beneficial social change?
Posted by on 10/27/2004 at 09:42 AMWhy bother having elections at all, if the major parties have already decided that our votes belong to them? Silly me...I thought they belonged to us.
I have never in my life cast a ballot for a Republican. And frankly, I can’t see myself doing it in the forseeable future either. (I might, this year, if I lived in a state that was in play. But the only thing that would put Illinois in play would be a nuclear detonation in downtown Chicago...and I’d surely be among the vaporized if that were to happen. In a really close race I’d vote for the lesser of two big evils...but I don’t plan on moving, and as long as I live here no race in which I’m eligible to vote is going to be that close.)
The price for my support of the Republicans would be too high for the party as now constituted to pay. And so I’ll continue casting third-party ballots that have exactly the same chance of altering the election as a Republican ballot would here in Chicago (ie, zero), but will at least get my infinitessimal share of the statistics counted as speaking on behalf of things I actually do believe.
Posted by on 10/28/2004 at 01:20 AMExcellent piece, as usual, Francis. I need to link to this and back to my own It is Not the Business of Government as a companion.
Posted by Kevin Baker on 10/28/2004 at 10:52 PM
