Brad Delong writes, quoting Noah Smith:
Libertarians Who Tell You What to Think
Somehow I don't think Bryan Caplan understands what "liberty" is.
Noah Smith:
Noahpinion: The libertarian solution to inequality: Reviewing a book about happiness, George Mason University professor and Cato Institute blogger Bryan Caplan writes:
[The author] suggests that large differences in relative income can have a large influence on happiness...[but even if he] is right about the unhappy effects of income comparison, you shouldn't conclude that redistribution is the solution. Yes, you could fight inequality of income. But you could just as easily fight comparison of income. Instead of praising those who "raise awareness" about inequality, perhaps we should shame them, like the office gossip, for spreading envy and discontent.
So, the libertarian solution to the problem of inequality is to socially persecute anyone who talks about inequality?… Who wants to live in a society in which certain topics are verboten? Would we really be happier if the words "Gini coefficient" were NSFW? And, more fundamentally, when did restricting the free flow of information - by any means, governmental or social - increase our liberty?
Like I said, a very odd notion of what the word means….
The bottom line, libertarians, is that people care about what they care about. Telling them "No, do NOT care about that, care only about my arbitrary, rigid, and counterintuitive definition of liberty!" is not going to win your movement a lot of followers in the long term.
Today, Matt Yglesias posted about an example of the sort of change Bryan Caplan is suggesting, just in another sphere:
An amazing Anna Holmes column takes a look at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s relatively short-lived stint as an advice columnist for Ebony in the late 1950s.
The results are a powerful reminder that the past was a very different place:
King’s response to a cheated-on wife was to suggest that she “study” her rival to learn what her husband wanted in a woman. (“Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag?” he asked.) He informed an unmarried woman grappling with whether to have sex that “real men still respect purity and virginity” and instructed an abused wife to determine whether there was anything within her personality to justify such treatment. “Are you sure that you have a radiating personality, a pleasant disposition, and that feminine charm which every man admires?” he asked a Miss Lonelyhearts. To a newlywed having troubles with her mother-in-law, he remarked, “There is an expression that no home is big enough to have two women at its head.”
People naturally focus on formal policy change as the essence of “politics,” but clearly one of the biggest social and political changes of the past 50 years is that nobody would say that stuff in a prominent magazine column these days. And yet we certainly haven’t made it illegal to tell abused wives that their problem is bad personality. Nor should we. People were persuaded to change their thinking.
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