In a recent interview with Sky News, London resident Viral Bhundia described what it was like to watch his young son Jay struggle with speaking. 

“If he wanted something he would scream, and it was up to us to kind of decode it and figure out what he wanted,” said Bhundia. “Does he want a cup? Does he want water?”

Jay’s struggles are not an anomaly. They are part of a broader trend of children across the world lagging in basic language communication.

The latest evidence comes from Speech and Language UK, which found one out of every five children in the United Kingdom are behind in basic speech. This is reportedly the “highest number of children with speech and language challenges ever recorded” in the UK, Sky News noted.

It’s not difficult to glean why so many children are deficient in basic language skills. Around the world, governments responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with an arsenal of blunt tools— lockdowns, mandatory mask orders, endless social distancing, and travel restrictions—which had a devastating impact on learning development. (Of these, masking in particular is viewed by many as the primary cause of speech delays.) 

The pandemic years were a challenge for everyone, but it was particularly damaging for children, an abundance of evidence shows. In the United States, for example, ACT scores fell to 30-year lows, while teenage girls reported record levels of sadness and suicidal tendencies, likely because of widespread social isolation. 

It’s important to understand such social outcomes were not caused primarily by the virus, but by government responses to the virus.

The distinction matters. In previous pandemics, government officials had considered similar “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) but opted against them, believing they would do little good and cause serious economic and social harm. In 2020, government officials opted for a different approach, embracing the idea that central planning could be used to enforce policies designed to ameliorate the spread of the virus. Healthy people and sick people alike would be masked and quarantined. 

The decision was disastrous. 

Lockdowns have been described as the worst policy mistake in modern history. Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci was recently embarrassed on CNN after being confronted with damning evidence showing how ineffective masks and mask mandates were in preventing the spread of COVID-19. 

The government’s response to COVID-19 was a total failure, and one some of us saw coming. In March 2020, I pointed out there’s a lengthy track record of governments responding to crises and making things worse. 

Basic economics helps explain why some of us predicted (correctly) that the government responses would prove counterproductive. 

First, anyone who has read the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society understands that central planners lack the knowledge to effectively plan economies because they lack local knowledge. 

Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. 

It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation.

Hayek understood that societies are incredibly complex—almost infinitely so—something many people fail to grasp, especially those who seek to engineer society. This was always the fatal flaw of centrally planned societies, and there was no reason to believe that central planners would be any more effective at managing an invisible pathogen than they are at planning economies.  

Second, any student of economics understands the reality of tradeoffs, loosely defined as “any situation where making one choice means losing something else, usually forgoing a benefit or opportunity.” Once one understands tradeoffs, it becomes clear that even if governments did have the knowledge to mitigate the spread of COVID—a dubious assumption—it would come at great cost. 

Economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan made this very point when they exposed the “if it saves one life” mantra politicians were using to justify lockdowns in 2020.

Five-thousand Americans die each year from choking on solid food. We could save every one of those lives by mandating that all meals be pureed. Pureed food isn’t appetizing, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing. Your chance of dying while driving a car is almost double your chance of dying while driving an SUV. We could save lives by mandating that everyone drive bigger cars. SUVs are more expensive and worse for the environment, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing.

If these policies sound absurd, there’s a reason for that: they were meant to. Harrigan and Davies were making a point about tradeoffs. 

“The uncomfortable truth is that no policy can save lives; it can only trade lives,” they explained. “Good policies result in a net positive tradeoff.”

Sadly, tradeoffs were not even part of the conversation in 2020 and 2021. Not one government bothered to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of its COVID policies. Indeed, the idea that government policies might actually cause harm was not seriously entertained (and in some cases it was treated as “misinformation”).  

Yet the tradeoffs were apparent. In some cases they were deadly, like children denied heart surgery because of travel restrictions. In other cases, the tradeoffs were deemed “minor”—like lost learning because of school closures or mask mandates. (One should ask Viral Bhundia if he believes Jay’s speech challenges are “minor.” I suspect he’d answer no.)

It’s a sad reality that many people had to learn about tradeoffs the hard way during the pandemic. CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen was a vocal supporter of mask mandates, until she learned about one of the tradeoffs of the policy. 

“Masking has harmed our son’s language development,” Wen stated. “There is a tradeoff.”

Indeed there is. And widespread speech development issues are just one of the countless unintended consequences of turning individual decisions over to government bureaucrats. 

To their credit, workers at Bhundia’s nursery made it clear to Sky News that they believe government policies are to blame for Jay’s language struggles. 

The government’s response is also telling.

“We are conscious of the effect the pandemic has had on pupils’ education which is why we have made almost £5bn available for education recovery,” a Department for Education spokesperson told the paper.

You read that correctly. Lawmakers are now spending billions of taxpayers’ money to fix the problems they created. A very government response, indeed.

Javier Milei, the surprising frontrunner in Argentina’s presidential primaries, has a bold plan for reducing inflation: getting rid of the peso altogether. His proposal, which involves adopting the US dollar as the official currency of Argentina, is gaining traction. 

The allure of Milei’s dollarization proposal rests on its simplicity: Since Argentina struggles to produce monetary stability, it should just import its monetary policy. Earlier dollarization efforts in Ecuador and Zimbabwe show how fast adopting the dollar can make high inflation rates converge to US levels. 

Some are concerned that dollarization would leave Argentina without a lender of last resort and, in doing so, remove any hope of achieving financial stability. The classic lender of last resort doctrine maintains that a central bank can promote financial stability by lending freely to solvent but illiquid financial institutions on good collateral at a penalty rate of interest. By injecting liquidity when needed, a central bank can prevent solvent financial institutions from failing when they shouldn’t.

Since dollarization relinquishes the ability to print money, it eliminates the traditional tool for combating bank runs.

How might a dollarized Argentina deal with financial instability? Surveying the experience of existing dollarized countries, like Ecuador, El Salvador, and Panama, reveals viable alternatives to the conventional central bank lender of last resort policy.

In Ecuador and El Salvador, banks contribute to an emergency fund managed by regulatory bodies. The access to funds is divided into tranches, with easier access to the earlier portion of funds and stricter conditions for later tranches. In later tranches, a bank may be required to present and have approval from the authorities for a restructuring plan before funds are disbursed (in much the same way as a central bank may require the failing bank to ask for an emergency loan). Despite adopting the US dollar as their legal tender currency, both Ecuador and El Salvador kept their central banks. These entities provide short-term liquidity through open market operations and manage the emergency liquidity fund.

Unlike Ecuador and El Salvador, Panama has never had a central bank. Its financial institutions are well-connected to international financial markets, and rely on those markets when additional liquidity is required. International banks with operations in Panama rely on their headquarters. Domestic banks secure credit lines from foreign banks. 

There is a critical difference between the incentives key decisions makers face under traditional central banks and the alternative arrangements described above. In Ecuador and El Salvador, banks must provide meaningful oversight to ensure emergency funds are allocated properly, lest the fund become insolvent. In Panama, international banks have a strong incentive to ensure their domestic branches are run prudently; and, since foreign banks will only lend if they expect to be repaid, there is little risk that insolvent banks will be bailed out. Traditional central banks, in contrast, need not worry about insolvency, as they can always print more money. Consequently, they will be more inclined to extend credit to insolvent banks, which should be left to fail.

Concerns about losing the lender of last resort as a result of dollarization are probably overstated. A country with rampant inflation, like Argentina, typically finds that its central bank is unable to function as a lender of last resort, since the demand for liquidity is not a demand for local currency, like the peso, but instead a demand for foreign currency, like the US dollar. In these cases, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) might fill the lender of last resort role, but there is little the domestic central bank can do. If such a country were to replace its local currency with the dollar, the IMF would still be able to function as a lender of last resort. It would make no sense to attribute such a country’s loss of a domestic central bank as lender of last resort to the dollarization policy: you cannot lose what you do not have in the first place.

It is easy to understand why economists in rich countries might worry about the loss of a central bank as lender of last resort. They have access to a lender of last resort and are less familiar with alternative institutions that might serve a similar role. Typically, there is little risk of losing a lender of last resort in countries with troubled currencies that are considering dollarization because such countries don’t have a lender of last resort to lose. And real-world cases of dollarization show how the lender of last resort role can be reallocated to the market with more effective incentives for all parties involved.

Since COVID, the world as most of us have known it has turned on its head with democratically-elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats seizing the moment to amass enormous powers for themselves that violate civil liberties en masse. In the process, the World Economic Forum (WEF) rose to public consciousness for many who had only been vaguely familiar with the organization beforehand. The organization’s founder, Klaus Schwab, issued a call to action, declaring that “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” 

For many among the billions of victims of totalitarian COVID policies around the world and for those familiar with the WEF’s rejuvenation of Malthusian thought (frequent warnings of overpopulation), its call to “degrow” the global economy, for us all to integrate insects into our diets while consuming less (or no) meat, its push for CBDCs (despite enormous public opposition), the “narrow window of opportunity” that Schwab calls for to “reset our world” hardly instigates feelings of excitement. It instead highlights the importance of remaining vigilant against ever-looming new rounds of human rights violations on a global scale. 

Thomas Sowell distinguishes between the two Visions in A Conflict of Visions. The ‘Constrained Vision’ sees human nature as flawed, selfish and fixed; while the ‘Unconstrained Vision’ sees it as endlessly malleable, like clay or putty—something that can be shaped and molded into something from a designer’s imagination. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker builds upon Sowell’s framework in his own book The Blank Slate, where he argues that the ‘Unconstrained Vision’ (which Pinker calls the ‘Utopian Vision’) is a denial of human nature, rejecting that the human mind possesses an innate biological programming. It is this fallacy that inevitably led to some of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, each committed in the name of egalitarianism. Among the several examples he cites are the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, China’s Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong (responsible for as many as sixty-five million deaths), and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot (during which a quarter of the nation’s population was killed). 

Pinker quotes Lenin’s admirer Maxim Gorky: “The working classes are to Lenin what minerals are to the metallurgist.” Mao echoed this sentiment in writing that “It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written.” Similarly, a Khmer Rouge slogan stated that “Only the newborn babies are spotless.” 

In some important ways, our time is reminiscent of the French Revolution. As Sowell notes in yet another book, Knowledge and Decisions, “The French Revolution was based on abstract speculation on the nature of man by intellectuals, and on the potentiality of government as a means of human improvement,” while the “American Revolution was based on historical experience of man as he is and has been, and on the shortcomings and dangers of government as actually observed.” 

The French Revolution’s attempt to develop “the perfectability of man” is characterized by its combination of massacres and public executions of tens of thousands (many by guillotine) during the “Reign of Terror,” and Robespierre’s statement that the bloodshed would end only “when all people will have become equally devoted to their country and its laws.” 

The French revolutionaries also sought to bring about a new scientific man by means of reshaping institutions. One failed attempt consisted of instituting a 10-day week that was “designed to swallow up the Christian Sunday in a new cycle of work and recreation,” as the 7-day week of the Gregorian calendar “was viewed as nonscientific and tainted with religious associations.” In other words, if the French public was to hold an allegiance to a higher power (God), this would only distract from the utopian visions of revolutionaries who demanded absolute allegiance to themselves and to their plans. 

Beyond the week, standardization of measurement also brought about the so-called “metrical revolution.” As James C. Scott notes in his book Seeing Like a State, there was some organic demand from the public to standardize measurement in France (to facilitate commerce and from Enlightenment philosophy), but “the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire.” In other words, the metric system didn’t gain mass adoption on merit alone; it took a dictator (who even crowned himself emperor) and all the carnage that comes with such a figurehead. 

The American Founding Fathers, by contrast, (generally speaking) sought to deal with man’s nature head on, warts and all. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, 

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

History is full of instructive examples that reveal the conditions that allow for both human flourishing and those that end catastrophically. There is no shortage of examples to suggest what might happen if we redesign (or “reset”) a society from the imaginations of intellectuals pushing an agenda for the rest of us to comply with. Freedom is, above all, (to quote Sowell) “the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’”

“Elbow room for ordinary people.” Now that’s a slogan worth repeating. 

Do you feel like we’re living in the end times?

We do, sometimes. With each hit of unprecedented bad news, the country feels more and more as if it’s careening toward apocalypse. Over the last few years our society witnessed race riots, lockdowns, reckless fiscal and monetary policies, citizens expressing skepticism on election integrity and, to top it off, a return of bloody war in Europe. Underlying all of this is a growing awareness of a dangerous rift opening up between the elites and their non-elite counterparts. 

Thus, we were attracted to Peter Turchin’s new book, End Times. Turchin is a scholar whose aspiration is to build a new scientific approach (what he calls “cliodynamics”) to understand the forces that cause the rise and fall of societies. The book is a compelling read, and we like Turchin’s modeling, but we think some of his theories fall short.

The novelty of Turchin’s approach is his application of biological ecology models to help understand history’s cycles of flourishing and disintegration. Ecology uses many such models, such as the predator-prey model (you can try an online simulation here). Imagine an ecosystem consisting of two species, rabbits and wolves. Initially, the rabbits, being rabbits, multiply substantially. As they do, they provide an increasing food source for the wolves, resulting in a parallel increase in the wolf population. As as the increasing wolf community depopulates the rabbit community, however, their food source diminishes, resulting in wolf starvation. As the wolf population decreases, the rabbits are once again able to repopulate, which leads to the cycle’s starting all over again.

In addition to his formal modeling activities, Turchin has spent nearly a decade building the Seshat Global History Databank in an effort to “systematically collect what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies.” Working with researchers across disciplinary boundaries,Turchin’s team put together data on historical prices, health outcomes, demographics, legal institutions, social structures, and other factors relevant to measuring social dynamics. This is a major achievement in data collection, and provides a great complement (and legitimacy check) to researchers doing mathematical theory-building.

Turchin’s theory identifies four main drivers of social instability: popular immiseration, elite overproduction, bad fiscal policy, and geopolitical pressure. The cycle begins with a well-integrated, materially productive society composed of non-elites and elites. The elites manage the system and, eventually, begin to prey on the non-elites by creating a “money pump” that transfers wealth from non-elites to elites. Like the predator-prey model, this has two effects. The first is that the non-elites become increasingly immiserated. The second is that the population of elites increases. Vanishing resources and a growing elite population leaves an increasing share of the elites with nothing to do. Facing “starvation,” the disenfranchised elites find work by becoming counter-elites; i.e., they opportunistically lead the immiserated non-elites to revolt against the status quo elites.

Turchin uses the antebellum and Civil War periods as a historical example of elite overproduction. As the US industrialized during the early 1800s, the new millionaires started vying for more political power. “Sons of merchant families chose to go into the law profession.” The growing number of lawyers included Abraham Lincoln and his peers, who ran for political office. Unfortunately, there are only so many offices to go around. As aspirants fought harder for positions of power, the country’s divisions became more obvious, and we progressed from compromises over slavery to caning on the Senate floor. The established political parties turned in on themselves, leading to a political collapse that had four major candidates running in the 1860 presidential election. Violence escalated to the bloodiest war in American history. 

As much as we like Turchin’s biological ecosystem metaphor and his focus on the grabby elite as the source of the dis-integration of society, his analysis strikes us as incomplete. Although Turchin does not appear to be a fan of Marx, his approach shares the Marxian problem of envisioning the sweep of history in a very mechanistic way. His human agents are materialistic and, like the rabbits and wolves, act in (obviously shortsighted) ways  to maximize their take in the great tug-of-war for social resources between the classes. Human agency has little place in his theory. As he says, “The great-man theory is the most ‘anti-cliodynamic’ theory of history I can think of,” (where “the great-man theory” is one that makes the agency of individuals pivotal to the flow of history). As with Marx, Turchin’s “scientific” theory posits mechanistic individual behavior and focuses on groups as the essential unit of analysis. 

This approach raises some questions. What exactly do elites do, for example? Are they simply leeches on society, or do they serve some productive function? Presumably, during the integrative phase of society, elites are leaders tasked with organizing its resources toward greater productivity. As the economy expands, what exactly causes the “elite overproduction?” Aren’t more productive resources good? Aren’t entrepreneurs a subset of the elite class? Using Turchin’s musical chairs metaphor, don’t entrepreneurs add more chairs? And isn’t the non-elite class expanding as well, thereby providing more productive resources for the expanding elite to manage toward good ends? 

As economists, we think Turchin fails to account for the moderating role of prices. In a market society, a surplus of elites should change the relative wages of elite versus non-elite jobs. Indeed, the federal government’s persistent subsidization of college education has created a surplus of low-skill college graduates and a shortage of technical workers. The typical salary for a grievance studies graduate is a pittance of what an arc welder makes. Not surprisingly, many people are rationally forgoing college and opting, instead, for trade careers.

Finally, as people who have lived through recent history, it strikes us that at some point a pivot occurred at which the elite became contemptuous of their non-elite fellow countrymen. As anyone who has spent time in the modern university will tell you, this contempt was accompanied with a healthy dose of self-entitlement. Thus, today’s elites do indeed appear to be behaving like the predatory wolves in the ecology models upon which Turchin draws. But, what caused the pivot in elite attitudes in the first place?

End Times is a great read, especially for those of us who are interested in the apparent unraveling of society happening right under our noses. Turchin’s model does appear to shed some light on the “elite-vs-deplorable” dynamic playing out in our national drama. We applaud Turchin’s aspiration to bring formal modeling into historical analysis in a serious way coupled with his willingness to confront those models with empirical evidence. Ultimately, the theory strikes us as being too mechanistic, which tends to raise more questions than it answers.

In 1964, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was formed as an institutional response to the ascendance of developing countries taking part in the global marketplace. UNCTAD sought to establish a means for addressing developmental concerns for countries reliant on the sale of commodity goods and to promote an inclusive economic system in an era of decolonization.

UNCTAD was specifically tasked with implementing Part IV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which granted favour to developing countries through the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP). Part IV of the GATT allotted poor nations special and differential treatment and the GSP enabled the administration of preferential tariffs to imports originating from the developing world.

Thus, the UN embedded itself in global economic affairs and by the mid-1970s, UNCTAD put into place the Integrated Programme for Commodities (IPC). The IPC was to manage and monitor market structures for generating remunerative and consistent prices while taking into account the interests of countries purchasing from the developing world. The IPC had a Common Fund containing buffer stocks that could be increased when prices were down and sold off when prices rose, and this led to the creation of a variety of international commodity agreements.

Consequently, though, by the 1980s, the ability to stabilize prices had fallen short and the IPC was viewed as ineffective given the political power of the agricultural sector regarding production and transactions. When new low-cost commodity suppliers emerged from East Asia, namely cocoa and coffee producers, they were set to benefit from the higher prices established by Latin American and African governments. Accordingly, suppliers had no interest in limiting their harvests to keep prices high which then rendered the IPC’s Common Fund defunct.

The IPC only made sense in the politico-economic context and, given that it came about largely due to political concerns, it took little account of the actual dynamics of trade transactions, much like the Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics being used today. Nevertheless, despite the minimal economic impact of the IPC, development was posited as a political right and embolden the UN, World Bank, and World Economic Forum’s interest in business interference.

In 1986, the UN adopted the Declaration on the Right to Development (RtD), which was established by a working group put forth by the UN Commission on Human Rights. In accordance with Article I of the Declaration, RtD is defined as “an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development.” Economic and social rights were positioned as being intertwined with civil and political rights and so, in conjunction with RtD, the concept of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) emerged.

RtD and NIEO were distinct from neoliberal ideologies that criticized state interference, and the proposals put forth proved to be somewhat controversial given the various preferences and ideological positions of countries involved.

Principles laid out in the NIEO Charter mandated a cooperative fight against inequality, fairer prices for commodities, benefits for disadvantaged communities, eliminating any waste of natural goods, promoting the use of natural resources, and so on and so forth. It is not hard to see the connection these principles have with current ESG ratings systems.

Like the IPC, the ideas and initiatives put forth by NIEO and RtD never had a substantial impact due to the lack of mechanisms for formally establishing ‘development rights,’ let alone implementing or enforcing adherence to the policies and principles proposed. Perhaps it is no surprise then that focus shifted away from development rights in the early 2000s and new working groups were formed, albeit with similar calls to action, to reinvigorate the UN’s role in global transactions.

In 2000, the Millennium Summit was held at the UN and eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were proposed and signed on to by world leaders. The push for socially responsible investing took off shortly thereafter and the MDGs evolved into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In support of the MDGs/SDGs, companies adopted the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investing (PRI) and the Global Reporting Initiative was later established to hold firms to account for progress regarding the development goals. The GRI, in partnership with the UN, has become a primary framework for ESG reporting and the PRI solidified ESG as the new mantra over RtD.

Now, as concerns and criticisms for ESG are gaining ground, and companies are shying away from ESG affiliations, the business community must be alert for the next call to action featuring another do-good moniker. Centralized planning shows no signs of slowing down, and this was made clear at the Sustainable Impact Meetings last September as well as at the World Economic Forum’s sessions in Davos at the start of 2023. So although ESG backlash has resulted in even the likes of Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, no longer referring to the contentious acronym, ESG won’t be going away. It will be renamed and reinvigorated as mechanisms for oversight and reporting are revamped and rolled out, and the recent development of the Integrated National Financing Framework (INFF) will secure the status of SDGs as being engrained in capital markets and the UN’s involvement.

“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one.” -Abraham Lincoln

So Friedrich Hayek opens his book The Constitution of Liberty. Those words are just as descriptive of the world today as they were in Lincoln’s time. Arguments over the nature of liberty are not only dividing the political left from the political right, they are also causing fissures among conservatives and libertarians: New Right, Post-Liberal, NeoCon, NatCon, FreeCon, Libertarian – people are searching for a label to put on a package of beliefs about society and government, not least of which is the nature and purpose of liberty.

I don’t propose to settle the debate over the meaning of liberty here. Rather, I want to highlight a recent abuse of the word and remind people of the incisive arguments Hayek made about liberty over sixty years ago. 

But first, the abuse.

Sohrab Ahmari recently published a provocative book called Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty – and What to Do About It. My colleague Samuel Gregg has already reviewed it at length. But I want to accentuate Ahmari’s abuse of the word “liberty” because it undergirds his entire argument and is in the very title of the book.

This abuse or confusion about liberty is widespread. We can see it in James K. Galbraith’s favorable review advocating “countervailing power” in the market. We can also see it in the Rebuilding American Capitalism report. These authors are concerned about uncertainty, limited choices, power, family formation, and inequality, not liberty. As Hayek notes, the oldest and fullest sense of liberty means freedom from coercion – that is, freedom to act according to your own plans and goals rather than according to someone else’s. 

That’s it. Liberty does not equal happiness. Nor does it guarantee it.

Liberty, defined as freedom from the arbitrary wills of others, also does not mean unconstrained choice. As Hayek points out, a rock climber with only one handhold option to continue his ascent cannot be said to be “coerced.” Nor, if that rock climber fell into a crevasse and had no way out, could we appropriately call him oppressed, except in a metaphorical sense. There are no violations of liberty here, even though there is nothing the climber can do. He has a different kind of problem.

And so it often is in cases that many people call violations or infringements on liberty – from limited job opportunities to social media censorship to unhappiness. None of these things are good, and we should think about how to change them. But to argue that people’s rights or liberty have been violated in these cases puts the wrong foot forward. Such claims distract us from the real issues while opening the door to all kinds of abuse in the name of promoting “liberty.”

For example, Amari’s argument implies that liberty corresponds to wealth. Poor people have the least liberty and rich people have the most because of the differing resources and options they have. Hayek notes that people who confuse liberty with “the power to satisfy our wishes, or the extent of the choice of alternatives open to us” will come to just such a conclusion: identifying “liberty with wealth.” 

They are also likely to confuse liberty with political participation – a belief common among post-liberals. Yet Hayek warns that “a free people in this sense is not necessarily a people of free men; nor need one share in this collective freedom to be free as an individual.” In fact, western civilization has recognized the dignity (and liberty) of all men regardless of wealth or status, and the equal protection of the law extending to all persons, be they rich or poor, liked or unliked, for centuries.

Hayek makes compelling arguments for the efficiency, productivity, and innovation that stem from limiting coercion as much as possible by governing society through clear, stable, general rules. He wrote one of the most famous articles in economics describing how freely set prices within a system of private property transmit knowledge that free people can act upon given their local circumstances and their individual plans.

But we should also consider the ethical dimension of the liberty that Hayek champions and post-liberals dismiss. Hayek writes: “Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.”  We rob people of their moral agency when we force them to follow our plans and work towards our goals against their will.

Amari may not like the options many blue-collar workers have, but it is an unfounded leap to call them oppressed, coerced, or lacking in liberty. Such a view diminishes their moral agency and the importance of self-direction. It also distorts ideas of cooperation, consent, power, and the purpose of law. 

The road Ahmari and others who abuse the notion of negative liberty want to travel involves eroding rules, laws, and structures in society, like weakening or watering down corporate law, or property rights, or punishing people and companies we dislike and replacing them with the legislators’ goals. Yet in a free society, people have the responsibility, and the privilege, of navigating the world under a clear set of rules and institutions as they pursue what they see as good and right. 

Arguing that we should undermine institutions and erode the rule of law for the “public good” differs little from Rousseau’s subversive, and nonsensical, claim that people “must be forced to be free.”

George Will ranks very high in my pantheon of intellectual heroes. He’s one of America’s leading living champions of freedom and free markets under the rule of law. When I disagree with him, which fortunately for me is very seldom, I sincerely worry about the soundness of my own judgment or the accuracy of my understanding of history as these might connect to the disagreement at hand. And so it’s with no small bit of self-doubt that I express my disagreement with Mr. Will on the question of drug legalization.

George Will was a recent guest on Jay Nordlinger’s podcast, Q&A. Interesting and informative throughout, the discussion briefly turned to the legalization of cocaine. After expressing his dissent from the pro-legalization stance taken by men who he deeply admires – men such as Milton Friedman, George Schultz, and William F. Buckley, Jr. – Nordlinger asked Mr. Will’s opinion about legalizing cocaine. Mr. Will agrees with Nordlinger that cocaine should not be legalized.

Mr. Will correctly points out that cocaine is dangerous – deranging, even – to persons who take it. Because legalizing this harmful substance would, in Mr. Will’s view, create for society additional problems, legalization is inadvisable.

For three reasons, I disagree.

Freedom Is Inherently Valuable

My first reason is normative: There should be a presumption of liberty, and overcoming this presumption should be very difficult. I’m aware that this reason is unpersuasive to all but already-committed libertarians, but in my opinion it is nevertheless important.

Under a presumption of liberty, adults should be free to harm themselves. Although actions that harm one’s self often have effects that spill over as harms to innocent others, the government should focus its efforts on preventing the spillover harms and not on preventing harms that are self-inflicted. For example, Jones’s consumption of alcohol can result in his, as he drives while drunk, harming Smith. By all means, punish Jones with appropriate harshness for harming Smith, but do not attempt to stop the general adult population from drinking. The relevant wrong committed here is exclusively the harm to Smith, not the harm that Jones inflicts on himself by abusing alcohol.

One can respond by insisting that the least costly, or perhaps even the only possible, means of protecting third parties from such harms is to outlaw the substance that raises Jones’s prospect of harming Smith. In the abstract, this possibility cannot be denied. And were it to describe reality, the case for prohibiting substances such as cocaine would be greatly strengthened. Yet largely because of the realities that form my final two reasons for disagreeing with Mr. Will and others who support continued prohibition, I believe that the practical case for prohibition is too weak to overcome the presumption of liberty.

Prohibition Intensifies the Potencies and Impurities of Drugs

A second reason for supporting legalization of cocaine is that the substance called “cocaine” that is now sold, bought, and ingested is not the substance that would be sold, bought, and ingested under a regime of full legalization. The substance that we now know as “cocaine” is an ugly artifact of prohibition. Prohibition makes this substance more potent and dangerous than it would be otherwise.

The smaller the bulk of a substance that is illegally peddled and purchased, the lower the chances of those engaged in these illegal activities being detected by law-enforcement authorities. Sellers and users of prohibited substances, therefore, each has an interest in intensifying the potency of these substances. Because people use drugs for their mind- or body-altering effects, if a seller packs more potency into a given volume of substance, the market value of each ounce (or whatever unit of measurement you prefer) of the substance increases. This value increases both because that given amount of substance now supplies a greater quantity of the effects that drug-users seek and are paying for, and because that amount of substance reduces buyers’ risks of detection compared to the risks of detection buyers would confront were that same amount of potency packed into a larger volume of substance.

Obviously, as cocaine and other such substances become more potent, the ability to regulate dosing becomes more difficult. One regrettable result is a relatively high rate of overdosing and of other ill side effects not sought by users. Whatever today, with prohibition, are the rates of overdosing and other ill side effects, these rates would likely fall if prohibition were ended.

A related effect of prohibition is to cede the market for prohibited substances to unscrupulous producers and dealers. Decent and honorable people tend to be law-abiding. Persons willing to produce and supply illegal drugs thus tend to be less scrupulous than would be suppliers under a regime of legalization. But even if the decency and scrupulousness of sellers would be the same with and without prohibition, with prohibition in place the illegal substances that are produced and sold nevertheless are more likely – compared to what would be the reality under legalization – to contain dangerous impurities. Prohibition reduces competition among drug producers and sellers. Seller A cannot easily share with buyers his knowledge that Seller B’s product is inferior to Seller A’s product. Ditto, of course, for Seller B. The incentive of each seller, therefore, to improve, or even to maintain, product quality is diminished.

Reinforcing this sorry effect is the lack of brand names. In legal markets, a brand name serves both as a bond of the quality of a seller’s offerings and as an easy means for buyers to distinguish sellers of ‘good’ quality products from sellers of products the qualities of which are discovered, when consumed, to be lower than expected. Further, unlike for legal products, buyers and users of illegal products cannot easily hold negligent, reckless, or fraudulent producers legally accountable.

It’s simply a mistake to assume that the same products sold and used under a regime of prohibition will be the same products sold and used if prohibition is ended. Almost certainly, ending prohibition will reduce drugs’ potency and other dangers. Unless a prohibitionist believes that prohibition will completely stop the manufacture, sale, and use of illegal substances, this downside of prohibition is real and, I believe, should cause those who reasonably worry about the ill-effects of illegal drugs to seriously consider the benefits of legalization.

Prohibition Corrupts Law Enforcement

My third reason for disagreeing with Messrs. Nordlinger and Will’s belief that cocaine and like substances should remain illegal is that prohibition necessarily spawns noxious policing practices – practices fundamentally corrosive of the foundations of a free society.

The peddling, purchase, and use of illegal drugs are indeed victimless crimes in the sense that – unlike, say, with burglary or rape – no party to the criminalized activities has any incentive to notify the police. Therefore, to police against the illegal drug trade requires that police officers resort to deception. The use of undercover agents, sting operations, strip searches, and racial and other forms of profiling, as well as of wiretapping and other forms of secret surveillance, are unavoidable if law enforcement is to have any hope of carrying out its charge of shrinking the trade of illegal substances. Precisely because the police do not know beforehand – that is, before they get the results of their undercover operations and secret surveillance – who is and who isn’t involved in the illegal drug trade, such policing jeopardizes the privacy and freedom of everyone. And complaints by innocent persons who discover that they’ve been secretly surveilled by the police will fall on deaf ears. As long as the police are charged with enforcing drug prohibitions, they simply cannot be held accountable if, after the fact, it’s discovered that they intruded on the privacy of innocent people.

As I wrote in 1999 after learning of law-enforcement agents’ monstrous treatment of Jannerel Denson, a pregnant woman wrongly suspected of smuggling illegal drugs in her stomach and fed laxatives by government officials:

Because drug dealing involves only willing participants, drug warriors inevitably must guess whether or not an offense is occurring and who is committing it. Such guessing, of course, involves choosing targets according to their racial, sex, and age profiles. This is why [US Customs] Commissioner [Raymond] Kelly’s denial of racial profiling is unbelievable (and why Congress can end it only by ending the “drug war”). No matter how refined the technique for selecting targets, large numbers of innocent people will be detained, strip-searched, and humiliated à la Janneral Denson. After all, if Customs agents could identify drug traffickers without strip-searches, there would be no need for such searches.

(By the way, Ms. Denson never did get – as they say – full justice.)

And let’s not forget that the use of the banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture is commonly defended as a valuable ‘weapon’ for use in the ‘war on drugs.’

Legalizing cocaine and other hard drugs, much like the legalization of marijuana, will tempt some people into actions and life-styles that all reasonable adults understand to be unfortunate. Whether the total amount or depth of drug abuse will increase or decrease is an open, empirical question. No one can say. But we can say with great confidence, along with Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett, that ending the war on drugs would significantly shrink the scope of law-enforcement officers’ incentives and abilities to violate the civil and property rights of Americans – even, indeed chiefly, of Americans who do not and would never use hard drugs, be these legal or illegal.