Why do you stop at red lights?

I recently asked a co-worker this question when we were talking about law.  It went something like:

Me:  Why do you stop at red lights?

Her:  Because it’s the law.

Me:  You mean the law as in the rules on the books?

Her:  Of course.

Me:  Do you drive the speed limit?

Her:  Well close to it.

Me: But over it, right?

Her:  Well, yeah, doesn’t everybody?

Me:  Okay. Are you still sure that you stop at red lights because it’s a rule that’s written down?  You just admitted that you don’t follow another written down rule.

Her:  Not really.  So, why do I stop at red lights?

Me:  I’m going to give you a choice.  I can give you the answer and the way you look at the world may change.  Or, I will not give you the answer and you can go on believing the world around you behaves in a way that it does not.

Her:  Okay, quit the Matrix b.s. and tell me for crying out loud.

Me:  Well.  There’s a couple reasons you stop at a red light.  One is your own safety.  You know that you don’t stop at green lights.  And you know that nobody else does either.  So, if you ran red lights, the direct consequences could be great and you could do you and others serious harm.  The main reason you stop at red lights is because it pays off well for you to do so.

Her:  Okay.

Me:  Another reason is that at some point in time, the color red became associated with stopping in traffic.  No central body sat around and said red lights will be the standard for that.  It emerged somewhere as a practice and stuck.  As far as I know, most traffic laws are passed by city and state governments.  Yet, somehow, without a centralized standards committee on traffic signaling, red emerged as the signal for stopping and green for go.  And it’s just not in the U.S.  It’s pretty much everywhere there’s traffic — other countries, railroads, airport runways, boats and so forth.  So, that’s why you stop at the color red.  (This website claims that the traffic signal was adapted from the railroad by an innovative officer in Michigan).

Her: Okay.  So what’s your point?

Me:  My point is that you, like most people, think you stop at red lights because “it’s the law”.  It is in a sense, but not the sense you are thinking.  You are thinking of legislation, or the law that some governing body has written down on paper.

However, if we investigated all legislation, we’d probably find many “laws” that we break.

You stop at red lights because “it’s the law” in the sense that it’s an evolved social norm.  This norm evolved to help keep us safe.  And it works.  Do you know how I know it works?

Her:  Because we still practice it and it more or less keeps hundreds of millions, if not billions of people safe.  I’m guessing if we looked into history, we might find that there were other things tried, but they didn’t work as effectively.

Roundabouts and cloverleafs, for example, also seem to be effective ways to handle intersections in traffic, the real estate and additional construction cost probably doesn’t make them as cost effective as traffic signals.

Laws are really developed in the crucibles of human interactions and emerge as social norms, customs and practices.

They rarely emerge from legislators or judges, even though most people think that’s exactly where they come from.

Her:  Gee.

This conversation was inspired by this lecture from Don Boudreaux:

The video is worth your time.  If you don’t have that kind of time to sit at the computer, then you can also download an EconTalk podcast from 2006 that’s essentially the same material.

Listen to it if you want to escape the Matrix.

What’s a libertarian?

In this post at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux points us to a 1 and a half minute long video of himself describing why he is a Libertarian.

He cites two reasons:

1) The way he was raised — don’t be envious, make no excuses, be responsible for yourself.

2) His exposure to economics — Supply and demand curves showed him how the government imposition of price ceilings on oil caused him to have to wait in long lines at gas stations in the 70s.

If these two things led naturally to libertarianism, like Boudreaux indicates in the video, I would expect there to be many more libertarians out there.  I would especially expect there to be more libertarian economists.

A self-described “left-of-center” commenter made the observation that he could agree with almost everything Don said in the video, but not be libertarian.

I tend to agree with this commenter.  Maybe Don is trying to get the point across that libertarians aren’t extremist hermits.  That most anyone right of “left of center” have a great deal in common with libertarians.  Perhaps, even if they were to take a blind political challenge that many would fall out as libertarians — and they don’t now because of branding (libertarianism isn’t cool) or misunderstanding (libertarianism doesn’t mean an ‘on your own society’).

But, I do think that Don leaves out a key element of what causes one to appreciate liberty.  I think there are many good reasons for liberty.  It seems morally right.  It also generally results in better outcomes than other things.

But, the key difference I see in libertarians and others is when they feel the use of force is warranted.

Libertarians (though they come in many flavors) tend to think the use of force is warranted only to prevent someone from infringing on the liberty of others.

Ron Paul is not an isolationist

Rarely do I defend politicians.  I’m not sure this is a defense.

It’s more of a correction, or maybe clarification on one distinction between conservative and libertarian thinking.

I’ve often heard Ron Paul’s “foreign policy” referred to by conservatives as “isolationist“.   My local conservative talk show hosts are guilty of this charge.  I’ve heard Dennis Miller do it repeatedly — even though he often interviews Ron and Rand Paul on his show and each time Miller calls Paul an isolationist, they correct him.

I’ve heard that exchange now three or four times in the past year, with the latest being Miller’s interview with Rand just before the Iowa debates (I believe it was around August 10, available on iTunes).  I listened to it today.

Miller said:

He’s a little isolationist for me, but on everything else he makes a lot of sense.

Rand Paul replied:

The foreign policy isn’t isolationism, it’s just that we should not go to war without declaring it formally, you know, like the Constitution intended.

I’ve also heard Ron tell Miller that he is not isolationist.  He said he support individuals trading with other individuals in other countries.  He just doesn’t think we ought to use our military beyond what it was meant to do — defend us.

I’m waiting for Miller to stop the flow of the show for a minute or two and ask one of them, Okay, maybe I have it wrong.  Can you explain to me how it is that you are not isolationist?  I’m not sure that has occurred to him to do that yet.  I’m also not sure it has occurred to Miller that perhaps he doesn’t know what isolationism is.

I’ve heard others do it. (Full disclosure: I might have done it a few years ago).

I think part of it is the conservative way to discount Paul and distance themselves from appearing to agree with a fringe candidate (we had this same struggle with identity when we went from liberal to conservative).

I think another part of it is, like Miller, conservatives don’t know what isolationism is and they haven’t thought much about when we should use our military and what the Constitution says about that.

Miller, and other conservatives, would do themselves a big favor if they read a blog post from George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux entitled, A Conflict of Visions Different than the one Sowell Identified, from March of this year.    The post is a copy of a letter Boudreaux sent to the Washington Post in response to George Will’s Column, Is it America’s duty to intervene wherever regime change is needed?

Here are Boudreaux’s key paragraphs:

Most modern “liberals” believe that domestic economic problems are caused chiefly by unsavory characters – “business people” – who impose their destructive rule on masses of innocent workers and consumers yearning for more prosperity, and that the best solution to these problems is government force deployed using armies of regulators to subdue these bad guys and to keep close watch over them and their successors.  Failure to intervene is immoral.  These same “liberals,” though, believe that foreign problems are typically the result of complex forces that can be understood only poorly by American-government officials; it is naïve to suppose that even well-intentioned foreign intervention by Uncle Sam will not have regrettable unintended consequences.

Most modern conservatives believe that domestic economic problems are typically the result of complex forces that can be understood only poorly by government officials; it is naïve to suppose that even well-intentioned economic intervention by Uncle Sam will not have regrettable unintended consequences.  These same conservatives, though, believe that problems in foreign countries are caused chiefly by unsavory characters – “dictators” or “tyrants” – who impose their destructive rule on masses of innocent people yearning for more democracy, and that the best solution to these problems is government force deployed with armies of soldiers to subdue these bad guys and to keep close watch over them and their successors.  Failure to intervene is immoral.

Can we all agree?

This and this from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek are must reads for anyone who has mistaken skepticism for government solutions with lack of compassion or ignorance of a greater good.

The second link is a response to a person who charged Boudreaux with not giving enough priority to “public morals”.   Here’s a key paragraph:

Where do the “public morals” that you so admire come from?  Isn’t it true that the very reason you support the welfare state is that your own private moral code tells you that helping needy people is the right thing to do?  I don’t see how you can casually cast aside one “private moral” (namely, that it’s wrong to take other people’s stuff just because you fancy that you’ve found better uses for it) in order to clear your way to justify the state acting to satisfy another of your private morals (namely, that it’s right for those of us who ‘have’ to give to people who ‘have not’).

Exactly.

If you happen to agree with the “public morals,” great.  Everything is just fine and you don’t usually question your own legitimacy in overriding the rights of others to fulfill your desired ends.

It’s usually not until such a person runs into a situation where they disagree with the “public morals” that they begin to understand that there may be errors in their thinking.

Preferential treatment

I like Don Boudreaux’s post on Cafe Hayek entitled Go Arianna! for two reasons.

First, it illustrates that the value of voluntary, mutually beneficial transactions is not just in the money that changes hands.

In this case, writers provide content for Arianna’s (or AOL’s) online Huffington Post (HuffPo) for free.  They must be getting something they value from the transaction.  What could it be?

Second, (paraphrasing Boudreaux) even well intentioned third parties are in a poor position to second guess voluntary acts among consenting adults.  In this case, Boudreaux is responding to an op-ed piece by Michael Walker in the LA Times, who asks Why should writers work for no pay?

We like to impose our own preferences on the voluntary actions of others without bothering to first understand why they choose to participate voluntarily.

Walker provides a great example of this by giving Huffington’s rationale for why she doesn’t pay writers.  But, he didn’t ask any HuffPo writers why they willingly provide free content.

Added: The Onion provides another nice example of the third party preference lesson in its spoof article, Continued Existence Of Edible Arrangements Disproves Central Tenets Of Capitalism.

The authors of the article can’t figure out why folks willingly buy arrangements of fruit that resemble flowers and they commit the same error of omission as Michael Walker.  They didn’t ask any of the customers who do willingly pay for it.

Contrary to the title of the article, Edible Arrangements’ continued existence actually proves the central tenets of capitalism.

Darwinian Common Law

Last week I had a discussion with Ed Darrel about law.   In response to the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ quote that his job is not to do justice, but apply the law, Ed wrote:

…in western law, we have given judges the ability to apply justice where the law fails — which is, by the way, where we get common law.

I asked by whose judgment do we determine when the law fails.  Ed responded:

We use the judge’s judgement.

I should have pointed out that the parties in dispute determine when law fails.  When they cannot reach an agreement privately, they then may decide to bring their dispute to court to be settled by a judge.

I then confused the term ‘common law’ with law when I wrote that I believe ‘common law’ emerges from custom. Ed wrote:

Common law is judge-made law, not custom…

I agree that judges codify common law through their judgments in court cases.  However, I still contend the true source of common law is custom or evolved social norms.

The view that law, in general, emerges from evolved human interactions is that of economist F.A. Hayek and others.  Don Boudreaux (an economist with a law degree) does a great job of laying out his own Hayek-inspired emergent order view of law in the video I linked to in this post.  At the 20 minute mark, Boudreaux defines law as:

Law is socially imposed constraints on behavior, that emerge from everyday, ordinary human behaviors, and that become embedded in widespread expectations.

When deciding a case that will become a part of common law, judges try to make sensible decisions.  How do they do that?

They listen to the arguments from both sides, consider the judgments on similar prior cases, refer to social norms as a guide among other things.  But the key is that evolved social norms weigh heavily on judgments that will set precedents for future similar cases.

In this interview with Richard Posner, regarding his book How Judges Think, Posner said (emphasis added):

American judges operate in a setting of extreme uncertainty, which forces them to exercise an uncomfortably large amount of discretion, casting them often in the role of de facto legislators. They are reluctant to admit that they are (as I call them in the book) “occasional legislators,” and have been skillful in concealing the fact from the public, being abetted in this regard by the legal profession, which has an interest in depicting the law as a domain of sophisticated reasoning rather than, to a considerable extent, of politics, intuition, and emotion. The secrecy of judicial deliberations is an example of the tactics used by the judiciary to conceal the extent to which such deliberations resemble those of ordinary people attempting to resolve disputes in circumstances of uncertainty. The concealment feeds a mystique of professionalism that strengthens the judiciary in its competition for power with the executive and legislative branches of government, the branches that judges like to call “political” in asserted contradistinction to the judicial branch.

What do ordinary people do when attempting to resolve disputes?  They heavily consider what is customary.

It’s not always perfect.  None of us perfectly adhere to social norms.  Sometimes we modify existing norms which might result in a new norm.  That’s what makes it an evolutionary process.  And one of our evolved social norms is when we cannot settle a dispute on our own, we seek the help of a third party.  Sometimes those are judges.

Maybe a better way to make the point of norm-based common law would be to ask this question:

What do you think might happen if judges made arbitrary decisions that had no basis in social norms and customs?

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that judges and the legal system would quickly lose credibility with the people.  We might even see the rise of alternative dispute resolution methods, like private arbitration (hmmm…).

All I can say is that I for one feel more comfortable with judges who agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes on the matter.  Especially in cases where codified law fails (or doesn’t exist), I’d much prefer a judge who thinks his role is to discover the existing non-codified law that is “embedded in widespread expectations” than the judge who thinks he can make it up as he goes.

Why some folks don’t like markets

Commenting on this enjoyable post by Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek about the realities of health care, JohnK, originator of the 8 word Constitution writes of the “believers in socialized medicine”:

Markets deny them the ability to arbitrarily deny access to people because they don’t like them.

I suggest that this is a corollary of a broader distrust of markets:

Markets deny believers in collective decision-making the ability to arbitrarily tell others what to do.

Boudreaux on the Law

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek linked to this video talk of his a few months ago at the Future of Freedom Foundation website.

I linked to it then as well, but the post was on a different topic and I’ve had a hard time finding it so I thought I’d re-post to make it easier to find in the future and because I think it’s worth while.

It came up again in an enjoyable exchange I’ve been having with commenter and fellow blogger Ed Darrel on an earlier post (which is inspiring a new post).

In the video, Professor Boudreaux lectures on what he views as the source of law.

After watching it, you might better understand why you stop at red lights and drive above the speed limit.

Everything’s Amazing

Here’s an excellent TED video, which is a new take on a classic: How to Build a Toaster.  (Credit: Don Bourdreaux of Cafe Hayek)

Plot:  How to build a toaster from scratch if a modern person found himself on a planet inhabited by primitives.

Subplot:  The benefits of trade and specialization.

Some of the comments on the TED site ding Thwaites for taking for granted the other tools he used while making his toaster.  I also find it suspicious to assume that a 240 volt electric source would be readily available on a primitive planet or that he would have much to toast.

But the video is still eye-opening for its subplot exposes how much we take for granted the special, distributed, evolved and advanced knowledge and coordinated effort that goes into making something as seemingly simple and unremarkable as a cheap toaster and making it available at a local store to pick up at our convenience.

Here’s the first remake of the classic in the video world:

And here’s the original classic: I, Pencil by Leonard Reed

Tee up the discussion on the Constitution

I don’t agree with E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post on much, but I do agree with this from his column:

We badly need a full-scale debate over what the Constitution is, means and allows – and how Americans have argued about these questions since the beginning of the republic. This provision should be the springboard for a discussion all of us should join.

I came away from my high school civics class with the impression that the Constitution was a living document that could be interpreted by the Supreme Court for the times.  I believe many share that view because I often hear that repeated.

That understanding is not correct.  But, the incorrectness has had good company, including a good number of Supreme Court justices.

There’s two reasons that understanding is incorrect.  First, the idea of the Constitution is to compartmentalize authority in government and to provide checks and balances to prevent the consolidation of power into too few hands — something that motivated the founding of our country.

The legislature has the power to make laws.  The judiciary has the power to determine if something is lawful.  Giving the judiciary the power to interpret laws as they see fit for the times essentially gives the judiciary a power it was specifically intended not to have — to make laws.

If the judiciary can interpret the Constitution like soothsayers interpret Nostradamus prophecies, then there really isn’t much that the judiciary cannot do.  And that isn’t much of a check or balance.

So, you might ask, but the Constitution is a living document designed to change with times, isn’t it?

That brings us to the second reason that the general understanding of the Constitution is incorrect.  It is a living document.  But its life emanates from Article V not judicial interpretation.  Article V is titled Amendment.  The Constitution can be amended at any time.

The Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times.  If we’d like to change the scope of government powers, then we should do it correctly through amendment.

Hopefully this renewed interest in the Constitution will lead to more people unlearning incorrect knowledge about it, just like I have done.  I owe that unlearning primarily to Thomas Sowell and his books, The Vision of the Anointed,  Conflict of Visions and Intellectuals and Society.

Here are a collection of other Constitutional comments from today.  From Roger Pilon in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Thus the first question the new Congress should ask of any proposed law is: Does the Constitution authorize us to pursue this end? If not, that ends the matter. If yes, the second question is: Are the means we employ “necessary and proper,” as constrained by the principles of federalism and the rights retained by the people that are implied by a government of enumerated powers? In essence, the Constitution is no more complicated than that. It was written to be understood by ordinary citizens.

From Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek (see the comments section of the linked blog post):

Even the leftist Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman – quite a respected scholar, and justly so – admits that the text of the Constitution, read as it is written and as the framers intended, would get rid of the vast majority of what Uncle Sam has done since the early 1930s. See Ackerman’s fine 1991 book We the People. Ackerman goes on to argue that the Constitution was amended informally (i.e., not via Art. V) by a change in Americans’ understanding of the proper role of government.

Constitutional originalists want the Constitution to be read as closely as possible according to its actual texts; scholars such as Ackerman want the ‘amendments’ created by changes in Americans’ attitudes to be read into the document.

Finally, Charles Rowley on his blog:

The Constitution places a dagger right at the heart of the progressive movement in its efforts to overturn limited government without resort to major constitutional amendments.

I am thankful that we are finally getting to the point where we are going to have this discussion.  This is a much better climate than a year ago when asked about the Constitutionality of the health care legislation, Nancy Pelosi replied, “Are you serious?”  I guess it proves the old saying, sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.