The Pharaoh’s Freedom

Pileus blogger Jason Sorens recently released his co-authored study “Freedom in the 50 States.” This is now the second edition of the report, and it has deservedly generated a lot of attention. Even Paul Krugman has added his two cents.

At Salon.com, Andrew Leonard criticizes the report under the sarcastic headline, “Why do liberals hate freedom so much?” Because the Mercatus Center, which sponsored the research that led to the report, has received funding from the Koch Foundation, by a long chain of guilt-by-association reasoning, Leonard implies that the intent of the report is not really to gather and present data that provide an objective, quantifiable measure of both economic and personal freedom in each state, but is rather simply to bash liberals. A rather egocentric view of the world, that.

Of course, even if Leonard’s insinuations were true, that the study were part of Charles and David Koch’s nefarious plot to, well, extend economic and personal freedom, that fact would have no bearing on whether its findings were true. Attacking an author, or an author’s (alleged) motives, does not defeat the author’s argument. Philosophy 101: the ad hominem fallacy is . . . a fallacy.

But Leonard raises two other objections. The first:

[According to the report,] Most Americans are not free. A telling example: In the Mercatus rankings the two states blessed by the highest freedom quotient boast a combined population of a little over 2 million—South Dakota and New Hampshire (the latter of which, admittedly, went for Obama in 2008). The bottom three states were New York, New Jersey and California, which have a combined population of over 65 million.

Sixty-five million Americans in just three states cower under a totalitarian shadow! That’s a little distressing!

(Why “admittedly”? Is Leonard aiming to provide analysis, or advocacy? But that is by the by.)

As analysis, this is quite weak. Sorens and his co-author William Ruger claim that there are real differences between the least “free” and most “free” states in their report, but they do not claim that even residents of the, by their measure, “least free” state, New York, face anything like what people in, say, North Korea face. Although there are real relative differences among the states, no place in America is under a “totalitarian shadow.” To say otherwise is just moral posturing.

More substantively, however, one need not believe that their conception of economic and personal “freedom” is the only or the best one. They provide an explicit definition of their terms; they provide explanations and justifications for the metrics they use; and their data are openly available. If they make an error in their math or their reasoning, that should be simple enough to discover and point out. Leonard does not do that.

Leonard apparently wants to define “freedom” differently. Fair enough. He unfortunately is not as explicit about his own preferred definition as Sorens and Ruger are. Yet Leonard does, perhaps inadvertantly, disclose a clue about what his definition of freedom would be. He writes:

But from my perspective, not having access to universal healthcare is an imposition on my freedom. The fact that for most Americans healthcare is tied to one’s employer is a dread shackle limiting the freedom of movement of every worker. How much more liberated would we all be if we could switch jobs or work for ourselves without the fear that at any moment we might be crippled by an exorbitantly expensive health emergency? Similarly, a state requirement that employers offer paid parental leave (another black mark against California) clearly frees me to be a better father to my newborn. I’d really love to see what would happen to internal migration patterns in the United States if all the big blue states had universal single-payer healthcare, while everyone else was left at the mercy of a completely unregulated private market. That civil war would end rather quickly, I suspect. [Leonard's emphasis]

So his objection is that Sorens and Ruger do not consider the enjoyment of government-provided health care as an element of freedom, along with government-mandated (paid, presumably) parental leave from work. How much freer would Leonard be if he did not have to pay for his own health care? How much freer would he be if he did not have to work to support his family, but could instead simply spend time with his family?

How much freer indeed. The life Leonard wants for himself has its attractions. It is the life of an old-fashioned aristocrat, of a manorly lord. Leonard has the freedom of leisure to be a gentleman, pursuing properly gentlemanly ends—not the ignominious and base life of a man who has to actually work to support himself in the lifestyle he chooses. 

Now, Leonard has the feigned greatness of soul to allow that he would like this life of gentlemanly leisure for “all” of us. But that is dishonesty. He knows as well as anyone that we cannot all be leisured gentlemen. Someone will actually have to labor to provide the goods and services off which the gentlemen will live. Who are those people making his life free? Who are the people providing him his health care, paying his bills while he takes time off to romp with the kids, bearing the costs generated by his insousciant skipping from one activity to the next as he follows his bliss?

And now we see the real import of the “freedom” Leonard wants. It is the freedom of the pharaoh: the serfs, whom I never deign to see and whom I never condescend to consider, will labor to provide me the comforts and enjoyments and leisure I require. I am not held responsible for them—that would be beneath me.

I believe that is not only a loathsome attitude, but it is a morally reprehensible position. Mr. Leonard, you have no right to live off the fruits of others’ labor. Yes, it would increase your freedom if you could command others to work for you, but yours is a moral code that entitles one group of people to live at the expense of unwilling others, that requires one group of people to be held responsible for the leisurely lifestyle of another, that treats one group as superior to others and fails to respect the inherent dignity of the members of the other group as independent moral agents and indeed as fully human.

Realizing that we are not entitled to others’ labor, and that we are ourselves responsible for the choices—and the consequences of the choices—that we make is bracing and can be, depending on where our moral heads were to begin with, startling. But it is the only way to respect human dignity, both in ourselves and in others. And it implies the only freedom worth the name.

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The Koch Foundation and Florida State

Conversations among academics have been buzzing lately with talk of the Koch Foundation’s alleged interference in the Florida State Economics Department. The rumor was that the Koch Foundation was requiring veto rights over the hiring of new faculty from a $1.5 million grant to the department, which would indeed have seemed heavy-handed. According to James Piereson’s full-throated defense of the Koch Foundation, the foundation in fact collaborated with the department in putting together a list of 50 (later expanded) job candidates, from which two were ultimately hired. Vetting the applicant pool is apparently a common practice among grants-giving foundations and certainly does not have the sorts of potentially negative implications for faculty self-governance that the initial rumors suggested. Will the new facts put the controversy to rest? We’ll see.

More Pileus on the Kochs here.

Disclosure: Several of us here at Pileus have at one time or another received small grants from Koch-related outfits, including myself.

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The Koch Brother Speaks

By now you have probably seen the article in the Wall Street Journal written by one of the “notorious Koch brothers” (as a colleague of mine put it), in which he explains why he “is speaking out.” After all the feverish hate speech directed his way over the last several months, including in particular the insinuation that he and his brother were somehow orchestrating Gov. Scott Walker’s actions in Wisconsin, it was probably time that we heard from Mr. Koch himself.

I find the suggestion that the Koch brothers are orchestrating anything silly. It is not that they do not have their viewpoints; they obviously do. It is not that they do not seek to promote their viewpoints; they obviously do that as well. It is not that they do not contribute to organizations with political ambitions consonant with their own; again, this is obvious.

What I find silly is the inference from those facts to the conclusion that people in Wisconsin or elsewhere are doing what they are doing because of the Koch brothers. This gets the causality exactly backward. The Kochs do not cause people to behave in a certain way or believe in a certain thing; rather, they look for people who are already behaving and believing in ways that they agree with, and they support them.

I, for example, was at one time the “Charles G. Koch Senior Fellow” at the Fund for American Studies (I am now a Senior Scholar), which means that the Koch Foundation sponsored some of the work that I did for TFAS. But I did what I did, said what I said, and wrote what I wrote because I believed it. I am happy to have someone supporting my work, but whether anyone did or not I would still have the beliefs I do and try to do the same work. Donor support allows me to do more of it than I otherwise would, but it does not alter the character or substance of what I do. I would not have it any other way. Neither, I am sure, would the Koch Foundation.

But even that is putting it too strongly. I give talks, I lead discussions, and I teach classes all sponsored by TFAS, and thus in part by the Koch Foundation, but I do not ask permission from the Koch Foundation to teach what I want to teach; I do not ask them to review my talks; they give me no advice about what books or articles or historical figures to discuss; and they do not ask to vet my views on any philosophical, economic, or policy-related issue. Instead, I have made proposals to them about projects I wanted to work on for which I asked support, and in some cases they have agreed to support me.

That’s it. Nothing sinister, nothing underhanded, nothing untoward; no secret meetings, no strings pulled, no threats, no “offers I couldn’t refuse.” In fact, that is exactly the way that almost every other grant-making entity in America works. It sometimes happens, I suppose, that donors will approach people or institutions and say, “we’ll give you $x if you do A, B, and C”; but even in those cases, people and institutions with integrity will accept only when the “A, B, and C” are consistent with what they are interested in doing anyway. Certainly that is true for me.

It makes me wonder whether one of the most flummoxing things about the Koch brothers to their detractors is precisely the fact that the Koch brothers really believe in their ideas. They actually believe in the beneficial powers of free markets, of limited government, and of regimes based on private property and voluntary contract. They genuinely believe that these institutions would benefit not only themselves, but, as if by an invisible hand, everyone else as well.

It turns out not only that they have a lot of empirical evidence on their side, but also that some other people have independently reached similar beliefs. Perhaps detractors of the Kochs find it hard to imagine that thinking persons could come to economic or political conclusions that differ from theirs, which is why they seek for a shadowy master-manipulator villain to explain it all. Sorry to disappoint: Sometimes people who are neither ignorant nor benighted nor bigoted nor unintelligent nor toadies nor acting in bad faith nevertheless disagree with you. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to deal with that.

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Defending the Kochs

[Author's note: Although I wrote it before the election, I embargoed this essay until today, lest anyone think I was advocating for a political party or for an electoral victory. The sentiments expressed below are unrelated to any partisan agenda.]

Billionaire businessmen and philanthropists Charles and David Koch have come in for a lot of criticism lately, and in all the best places: among others, in The New York Times (both Paul Krugman and Frank Rich), in New York Magazine, and in an improbably long piece in the The New Yorker. The charges in all the accounts are the same. The Kochs are “covert” bankrollers of the Tea Party, shadowy “tycoons” funding a relentless campaign to discredit President Obama and his policies, and, more generally, financial supporters of numerous initiatives whose real goals are to help them line their pockets—all either in secret or behind a false mask of charity and patriotic rhetoric. According to critics, when the Kochs talk about “individual liberty” and “free markets,” what they really mean is “get the government off our backs so we can make even more money.” And people supported by the Kochs who espouse similar notions are just puppets pulled by the strings of the Kochs’ billions.

As someone whose work has sometimes been supported by the Koch Foundation, the criticisms directed at the Kochs are thus also directed at me, as they are at the other professors, students, academic institutions, charitable organizations, and others that have benefitted from the Kochs’ giving over the years. If the Kochs really are this bad, however, am I required, in good conscience, to abjure any and all connection to them?

Luckily I don’t have to answer that question: The charges are in almost all cases either false or grossly misleading. They may fit a narrative typical of a Hollywood movie, where evil rich businessmen connive to manipulate others for their own benefit, but conspiracy theories like those rarely match reality. The Kochs themselves have responded to the various allegations, but there are at least two clear reasons why the allegations must be either false or misleading.

The first relates to the Tea Party movement. Attending a Tea Party rally or listening to people sympathetic to the movement, one cannot help but be struck not just by how articulate they are, but how genuine. They mean what they say, and conviction like that simply cannot be bought. By contrast, paying people to claim they believe things that they really don’t is a rather dicey affair: It is almost always transparent, and mercenary offers like that appeal to only a small number of people in any case. But the Tea Party phenomenon is astonishing precisely because it is not orchestrated from the top. Indeed, its decentralized, bottom-up character is one of the keys to its success. The hundreds of thousands of people who have attended rallies nationwide have done so because they have sincere beliefs on which they decided to act.

The second reason that charges against the Kochs are false or misleading relates to their alleged influence in higher education. The Kochs have given millions of dollars over several decades supporting students, professors, academic institutions, and nonprofits that are either sympathetic to their worldview or at least willing to give it a fair hearing. Yet what proportion of professors today subscribe to the Kochs’ view? Less than one-tenth; probably more like one in twenty. How could this be, if the clandestine reach of the “Kochtopus” is so far and wide?

Consider what they are up against. According to the New Yorker article, Charles and David Koch “have given over one hundred million dollars to right-wing causes” since 1980. That sounds like a lot, but it averages only about $3.5 million per year. Generously adjusting for inflation, assume it is the equivalent today of even $10 million per year. That is enough to pay the full salary and benefits of perhaps seventy professors in the country per year. That would be seventy out of some 1.7 million, or a vanishingly small .004%.

Considering, moreover, the substantial predominance of left-leaning political and economic worldviews on today’s campuses, one begins to see why the money the Kochs are donating hardly warrants the hyperventilating rhetoric it is receiving. For better or worse, theirs is a small minority view on college and university campuses, and the money they give is dwarfed by the resources that left-leaning faculty, centers, programs, and institutions regularly devote to discrediting positions like theirs and to advocating contrary views.

But putting aside money and numbers, what of the Kochs’ ideas themselves? The Kochs support limited government, free markets, protections of private property, individual liberty, and peace. This is approximately the political-economic vision of America’s founders. Perhaps that is a “radical” view in the minds of an average New York Times columnist, but it still resonates with many Americans who understand that that vision has enabled more freedom and prosperity for the average person than any other system of political economy ever tried. It is moreover an inspiring moral vision: human beings as unique and possessing a dignity that requires both individual freedom and personal responsibility, and a system of social institutions that leads to prosperity and peace.

These are the ideas that are so ominous and threatening?

Charles and David Koch are those rare specimens who take their convictions seriously enough to put their own money where their mouths are. One might in the end disagree with their vision, but for standing up for what they believe, and for being willing to shoulder their part of the burden of maintaining a free society, I say they should be not vilified but applauded.

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