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This question was posed by PolicyMic.com:

“I’m an American underwater in debt and with a stagnant income. Which group should I support: the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street?”

I took one side, Peter Rothberg of The Nation the other. You can see the discussion here.

Featuring Kim Chung Ho of the Korean Center for Free Enterprise:

Pass it on, friends!

“The Structure of the Libertarian Argument and Liberty as a Worldwide Phenomenon” with Tom Palmer, 05/04/2011 from Students For Liberty on Vimeo.

I took my time to read this book, but it was worth it. Gurcharan Das‘s The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma is a worthy companion to a long journey, or something to be read like one sips a cup of hot tea on a very cold day. It’s a meditation on living a good life, organized around the virtues and vices exhibited by the characters in the great Indian epic The Mahabharata (here’s a shortened prose version from R. K. Narayan). Das weaves together examples from the text, experiences from his life in business (he was CEO of Procter & Gamble India), and insights and comparisons from his wide reading in moral philosophy to form a book that is favorably comparable to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

A dominant theme of the book is that “dharma is subtle,” i.e., doing the right thing is not just a matter of having a good will; rather, it’s often hard to know what is the right thing to do. (Das is widely read and his work introduced me to some ideas and books of which I was previously ignorant. The Difficulty of Being Good would have benefited from a comparison of the idea of dharma with Aristotle’s discussion of practical judgement, or phronesis; perhaps such a comparison would provide a good topic for a student working in comparative moral philosophy.)

In addition to being a subtle writer and thinker on matters of living well, Das is an articulate and outspoken classical liberal (libertarian) who writes a column for The Times of India. He is the chairman of the Centre for Civil Society. Here is his speech April 8, 2011 before a gigantic crowd in Tahrir Square, Egypt, the most rousing speech to a mass audience on the rule of law that I’ve ever seen.

I’m in Cairo at a conference right now (in a country in great turmoil at the moment; there are huge numbers gathering in Tahrir Square to demonstrate against the military’s consolidation of power) listening to Dr Nouh El Harmouzi criticizing “social justice” as a foundation for economic development, in contrast to simple “justice.”

In the meantime, the hard work of promoting liberty is going on all around the world. I just got a really great new prospectus describing their work from the Tajikistan Free Market Institute. If you’d like a copy, write to freemarket.tj@gmail.com or info@freemarket.tj.

Egypt Will Never Be the Same: What I saw on the streets of Alexandria, by Kareem Amer (Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2011)

(I was involved, with many others, in the four-year Free Kareem campaign. It is good that he is free. I want him to remain so.)

Egypt’s Front Pages, from The Economist

Some countries don’t allow it internally; almost no country allows true freedom of movement externally (passports are required). Most people don’t think about it, but the US has essentially required the internal passport over the past few years, as you can now be required to provide identification whenever it is demanded by a state official and in order to get on an airplane or a train you are now required to show, or be prepared to show, a “government-issued ID.” A good book to read to understand the positive benefits and the overuse of identification is Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, by James Harper.

The Central Asian Free Market Institute, based in Bishkek, but active throughout Central Asia, has called for elimination of the propiska, or internal passport and residency permit. (China still has the same system, known as the hukou system, and Chinese libertarians are working to eliminate that, as well. It has been described as “China’s own apartheid system.”)

Text follows: link to English text here.

Elimination of Propiska for freedom of movement in Kyrgyzstan

Central Asian Free Market Institute offers its recommendations on reforming Kyrgyztan’s policy on internal migration. The current article is part of “Kyrgyzstan’s Reform Program” that was prepared by CAFMI. For all questions on this chapter and the reform program please contact the Institute.

VISION: Right of a person to free movement and choice of place of residence within a country is defined not only in natural rights of person, but also in the Constitution of Kyrgyz Republic.

PROBLEM: The registration regime, known as propiska in Kyrgyzstan and other post-Soviet countries, exposes Kyrgyzstan’s population, in particular the poor segment, to myriad difficulties. The propiska was introduced in the USSR in 1932 for the following reasons, “Accounting for population of cities, worker settlements and new buildings and unloading cities from persons not engaged in socially useful labor, as well as removal of kulaks, criminals and other antisocial elements in order to strengthen dictatorship of proletariat”.

Although Kyrgyzstan has been an independent country for 19 years now, the propiska still exists, and the political leadership seems uninterested in revisiting one of the sorest problems facing the country. According to propiska’s requirements a citizen who changed his place of residence, shall, within 10 working days from date of arrival to a new residence register with government authorities. For this purpose, one has to present:

1. passport or equivalent document proving one’s identity;
2. accommodation document, which is the basis for accommodation of a citizen (such as an order, rent contract or a statement of landlord or other document), or a certified copy of the document;
3. reference from chairman of local housing district, confirming place of residence with a street and house number;
4. proof of change of residence, in case of prior disposal of registration;
5. certificate, proving release from prison;
6. for male youth- military card (certificate of registration in draft office) with a note about removal from military account

Losses from propiska are hard to calculate in monetary terms, however, they are high and can be grouped in the following two categories:

I. Visible costs of citizen

1.1. Fiscal losses. Costs from state budget for the administration and enforcement of the propiska. These costs also includes expenses for police conducting raids named “illegal” with the aim of detention of people without a local propiska.

1.2. Individual losses. To change place of propiska one must incur real costs- the cost of a trip to home village / town and back and the time and cost of un-registering and then re-registering. This entire process requires up to six documents and.

II. Invisible costs of a citizen

2.1. Missed opportunities for citizens for a better life by making public services inaccessible without a propiska: legal system, education, health care, opportunities to register a company and to acquire and dispose of real estate.

2.2. Losses from detention:. Each detained person for lack of a local propiska incurred the following types of losses- the loss of time during the detention, the amount of fines or bribes one had to pay in order to be released, and other associated risks, such as beating and harassment.

2.3. Propiska has become a hotbed of corruption, which thrives on the despair of the poorest of the poor. According to research 56% of those arrested, get away with bribes. At the same time, 26% of those arrested, were physically attacked. According to research by Social Research Center at the American University of Central Asia, migrants with lower income are also more likely to have their documents checked and detained.

2.4. Not everyone is ready to pay the expenses to obtain a propiska and those without it experience lower quality of life, social stability and increased illiteracy, thus, pushing them to criminal activities.

SOLUTION

The system of registration like that in Kyrgyzstan is not only outdated but not used anywhere, except in some post-communist and communist states. In countries such as England, France, Germany, Italy, USA and Brazil propiska does not exist. Russia and China do have a propiska but are looking at abolishing it. Georgia, Latvia and Estonia have long ago understood the economic and moral benefits of free movement of citizens and eliminated propiska.

In some countries utility bills are used for confirming people’s residence. In Greece residence is determined by the workplace, while in Italy according to the individual’s own will. In Brazil, the state is interested in the citizens place of residence only at the time of tax collection or at the point of opening of their business. The United States operates an electronic system of registration of citizens, where each citizen has the right to receive information stored on him/her and has the right to correct it.

Kyrgyzstan should not repeat the mistakes of Russia and Belarus, in which registration system was replaced with a bit more simplified registration system but the problems arising from root cause remain intact. It is necessary to follow in the footsteps of developed countries, which remain true to the cause of freedom of movement and abolish propiska.

RESULT

By abolishing the propiska, Kyrgyzstan’s government would ensure:

* => Fulfillment of all international and constitutional norms that call for respect of the rights of citizens to freedom of movement within the country;
* => Labor mobility, which is an essential tool of modern economics;
* => Stopping discrimination of immigrants in regards to private and public services;
* => Maximum integration of citizens across regions;

Save citizens’ time and money that can be directed to other activities that bring concrete value to their living standard.

Author: Central Asian Free Market Institute

From Russia Today

It reminds me of other utterly crazy and despicable attempts to dust off communist tyranny and try it “one more time”: for example, G. A. Cohen on Self-Ownership, Property, and Equality. (That essay and many others, including my essay on “Classical Liberalism, Marxism, and the Conflict of Classes: The Classical Liberal Theory of Class Conflict,” are also available in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice.)

The great lawyer/economist Ronald Coase is cruising into his 101st year. His 100th birthday was a few days ago (December 30, 2010) and he is still at work teaching economics, helping us to understand the world, and spreading gentlemanly good behavior and the spirit of liberty. Recently a number of my Chinese friends took part in a conference in Shanghai (organized by the Fudan University department of economics, which is chaired by the distinguished economist Prof. Li Weisen).

Coase is among the founding parents of “law and economics” and a truly great thinker and scholar. (I had the privilege of meeting him and enjoying his insights at a conference I organized years ago in Aix-en-Provence, where we talked about “intellectual property rights”; the papers presented were published in the Summer 1990 journal of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, including my own paper, “Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects,” available here. His comments were insightful and during meals I learned a lot about the history of economic thought, including that his teacher was Arnold Plant, whose teacher was Edwin Canaan, and back in a line of teachers and students to Adam Smith.)

Coase’s essay on “The Nature of the Firm” revolutionized the understanding of institutions by focusing attention on transaction costs in structuring organizations. (It’s nicely summarized by Bob McTeer here: “Ronald Coase: The Nature of the Firm and their Costs.”) In 1960 (23 years later!), he revolutionized economics again with his essay on “The Problem of Social Cost,” which is nothing short of brilliant and has changed completely how serious social scientists consider human interaction. (Terry Anderson of the Property and Environment Research Center sheds some insight on the nature of social cost in “Coase’s 100th Birthday: No More ‘Externalities,’” [hat tip to Don Boudreaux for the link].)

There’s so much sheer ignorance floating around about Coase’s views on the role of property rights in “internalizing ‘externalities’” (sorry, Terry, but I did put “externalities” in double quotation marks), that it’s well worth reading Coase. He doesn’t say what some crackpots say he says, but he does help us to understand institutions, notably property. A short and very clear explanation can be found here.

From the Audace Institut Afrique.

I was giving a talk on Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit; I had edited a special edition of the Humane Studies Review on the book, and was in the process of commissioning a Russian translation by Rustislav Kapelushnikov, which came out in 1991.

Very well done and quite fun.

Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, “For the GOP, a risky wave to ride or turn back”

In America, the ideology of libertarianism is itself a scandal. It involves not only a retreat from Obamaism but a retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantaged, along with a withdrawal from American global commitments.

Libertarianism has a rigorous ideological coldness at its core. Voters are alienated when that core is exposed.

Our response in today’s Washington Post:

Michael Gerson ["The GOP rides a risky wave," op-ed, July 9] described libertarianism as “a scandal” because it “involves . . . a retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantaged.”

That is, he charged libertarians with a “retreat” from a welfare-state philosophy that is at odds with America’s heritage and with basic principles of limited government. Moreover, he charged libertarians with wanting to change policies that have not served the weak and the disadvantaged well because they encourage weakness and long-term dependence.

Libertarians warn that to continue down the current road leads to the Greek crisis, in which the cruelty of making commitments that can’t be kept is revealed.

Gerson also charged libertarianism with “rigorous ideological coldness.” He considers reason, arithmetic and a realistic assessment of what those “commitments” really mean to be “cold.” That says more about him than about libertarianism.

It might be kinder and gentler to try the Founders’ vision, the libertarian vision, of a limited state that provides a framework in which we can all enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Tom G. Palmer and David Boaz

The Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala, which is a real world leader in online education and media, has just released the full Hayek interviews organized by Armen Alchian of UCLA after Hayek’s Nobel Prize in 1974. The interviews are searchable and you can quickly and easily jump from place to place. Congratulations to UFM for this achievement. (And I’m pleased that I had recommended for an academic internship at UFM this last year one of the people who worked on it, Alex Weller of Penn State.)

My opening remarks (limited to no more than 5 minutes!) on the case against the state at FreedomFest: The Case for Ordered Liberty Without States

Just got in to my hotel in Tokyo. Very exhausted after the FreedomFest and then the travel!