Here’s a recent paint-by-numbers column on Spontaneous Order by John Stossel. It’s a passable introduction to the concept, and I will say that the opening illustration of spontaneous order in an ice-skating rink is nicely chosen. Then there is this:

At last January's State of the Union, President Obama said America needs more passenger trains. How does he know? For years, politicians have promised that more of us will want to commute by train, but it doesn't happen. People like their cars.

— John Stossel, Spontaneous Order, in The Freeman (May 2011)

It would be more accurate to say that people like their cars when they come with a massively subsidized network of government roads and a government-imposed glut of subsidized parking spaces.

Some subsidized trains cost so much per commuter that it would be cheaper to buy them taxi rides.

— John Stossel, Spontaneous Order, in The Freeman (May 2011)

As if subsidized highways and parking had no costs!

People’s cars are useless without this subsidized and monopolistic infrastructure, which is in artificially great supply due to the government’s monopolization of land use, which the people in question have to pay for, whether they use it or not, and which the people in question do then get to use at little or no marginal cost above what they were forced to pay in taxes. I wonder how much people would be liking their cars if alternatives weren’t locked out by government’s use of eminent domain and land-use mandates, or if people were free to pay — or to withdraw — the real marginal cost of driving, rather than the deformed structure of costs that government’s Infrastructure Monopoly has produced.

This is of course no argument for the desirability of ridiculous government-fueled high-speed heavy rail boondoggles, or any other sort of government funding of mass transit. Those are stupid too, and guaranteed to stay stupid as long as they are enacted through the political means. It’s not even an argument against the desirability of cars. But American car culture is no example of spontaneous order emerging from revealed preferences in a market free-for-all. It’s a perfect example of pervasive, intensive, map-redrawing government planning, from the repeatedly bailed-out, sometimes government-owned auto makers down to the parking lot of your nearest strip mall. The only way to find out how people will like to travel in a free market is to leave people free to experiment — and the current massive exertion of force to channel land into roads and parking lots, and wealth out of people’s pockets and into fancy new roads for the benefit of downtown merchants, billionaire sports team owners, and Wal-Mart distribution centers is anything but a free experiment or a spontaneous social process.

Randall O’Toole, The Antiplanner (26 April 2011):

The second problem with life-cycle budgeting is that its advocates want some sort of federal law imposing it on transportation agencies. … Just what those agencies need: more red tape consuming scarce transportation dollars and delaying needed transportation projects.

The real problem with federal transportation spending is that Congress has split federal funds into 40 or 50 pots of money and greatly restricted how state and local agencies can spend from each pot. Better incentives are the solution, not more bureaucracy. Congress should give state and local governments more flexibility in how to spend the money, combined with incentives (see pp. 7-8) to insure the money is effectively spent.

Actually, no. The real problem with federal transportation spending is that Congress spends other people’s money on subsidizing transportation infrastructure. Politically-appropriated incentives offer no more of a solution than bureaucracy, because there is no political solution to the problem. The only way to determine where people need roads, or rails, or planes, or bicycle lanes, or alternative uses of scarce resources that have nothing to do with transportation or infrastructure, is to leave us — people, not agencies — free to experiment and work it out ourselves. There’s no way to approximate that by jiggering the way that subisides are allocated because there’s no way to simulate the effects of free and mutual exchange while leaving political ownership and political control intact. Unless and until you dissipate the control, all you have is a different style for managing the subsidy. You can’t fix the damage of taxation with more flexible or efficient allocation of the spoils.

What Congress should do is go home, give back the scarce transportation dollars they stole, and take up an honest living.

• April 26, 2011. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (updated daily) (2011-04-25). WOOH! What an awesome day it was yesterday. Remember, the sooner you order, the more likely you are to get a signed copy. And now, ON WITH THE SHOW! (video NSFW) (Linked Tuesday 2011-04-26.)

• Two guys standing on an incline. admin, This Modern World (2011-04-26). (Linked Wednesday 2011-04-27.)

In comments on Those Damned Statists!, Gene Callahan gets pissy about the claim that he’s being fussy about word usage. Thus:

One of the most telling rhetorical tics one finds amongst radical libertarians is to refer to every single person who does not buy their entire program as a ‘statist’. Now, when Mises used that term, he was referring to people like, say, Mussolini, who were engaged in some form of state worship, who were making the State a God on earth. This made sense.

But many rad-libs today apply it to every person who does not want to destroy the State as a social institution. This is an extraordinary usage….

And so:

I am not being fussy about word usage; I am noting the extraordinary phenomenon of a group that represents .1% of the political spectrum lumping the other 99.9% under a single label.

You mean like when Jews (about 0.2% of the population of the world) refer to all of the other 99.8% of the people in the world as “Gentiles,” or when priests (about 0.03% of the total membership of the Roman Catholic Church) refer to all of the 99.97% of the Church as “laity” or atheists refer to absolutely everyone who believes in any way in any gods at all a theist? My, how extraordinary. Ah-HA! Gene will say, clutching his New Science of Politics — all of your examples are religious; isn’t that telling? Only if you think it’s equally telling that the residents of every country on earth refer to the 6.5+ billion or so other people in the world as foreigners, that gay men and lesbians took to using the word straight to refer to absolutely everybody who’s not gay, when BOFH types took to describing absolutely everybody outside of their subcultural circle of technical expertise lusers, etc.^[1] It seems to me the most ordinary thing in the world for members of a relatively coherent, exclusive group to spend some non-zero amount of time discussing (whether politely or abusively or neutrally) the much larger number of people who are not a part of that group, and to come up with a word to name them. (This does, of course, tell us that radical libertarians are a small group in a much larger world who spend some time arguing about the things that make them radical libertarians. Well, yes.)

Let me offer an alternative story here about what has happened, linguistically speaking, with statism. I haven’t done a lot in the way on paleontological research on the past uses of statism, so I am going to recklessly presume there isn’t much to say about it before where Gene starts — with the use of the word by Mises and the rest of the mid-century minimal-governmentalist coffeeklatsch. Now, those folks frequently employed a political term which was transparently polemical and had more or less no neutral analytical use. (State worship? Really?^[2]). They applied it to Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon quite as freely as they did to explicit totalitarians like Mussolini or Stalin.^[3] This certainly had its uses, but it was more or less an overt example of a persuasive definition, and had no descriptive content except by reference to the moving target of how much government, in what direction, the speaker considered decent or worthwhile.

Then some Anarchists came along, found this empty polemical term in the discourse, and gave it a new meaning — more or less, someone who accepts the legitimacy of government as a social institution, or someone who does not believe that the state as such must be abolished. Unlike the use by Ludwig von Mises or Ayn Rand, this use of the term statist included minimal-statists like Mises and Rand, since they too believed in at least some government. Their use of the term lumped together something like 99% of the population of the world under a single label, since it defined everyone else by contrast with laissez-faire/laissez-passer limited-governmentalism; our use of the term lumped together something like 99.9% of the population of the world, since it also tossed out folks who believed in minimal government. On the other hand, it also gave statist a non-polemical, descriptive, and analytically useful definition. Statist as non-anarchist meant something that the person being so described would probably accept as a self-description; it is analytically useful because it turns out that sometimes we argue about whether or not any government can be legitimate, and this gives a handy descriptive term for each side of the debate — anarchists on the one hand and statists on the other.^[4] Admittedly, this is an appropriation of the term and a redefinition of it. But, well, so? Planet used to include Pluto and New York City used to refer only to Manhattan. We take the words we find and apply them to our own circumstances; sometimes existing words get jiggered to have a narrower or broader extension, or a more technical usage, in order to make them more useful for purposes of discussion or analysis.

Then Gene Callahan came along and took it as another reason to gripe about the language that libertarians use rather than identifying any specific problem that this language-use has caused in any specific conversation. No doubt there are examples where this has happened, but I think that if you go looking seriously, you will actually find that the old, empty polemical use of the term in the hands of mini-statists like Mises or Rand (the use that Gene insists made sense) has caused far more conversational misfires than the newer, more descriptive meaning employed by libertarian anarchists.

See also:

• Crispin Sartwell, eye of the storm 24 April 2011

1. ^[1]In spite of the religious subject matter, the structured relationships between Jews and Gentiles, priests and laity, atheists and theists, etc., are in any case really nothing like the kind of relationships between the initiated and the uninitiated in Voegelian Gnosticism.↩
2. ^[2]Of course, I myself have frequently drawn parallels between religious devotion and the ways that states legitimate themselves. I hope there’s some insight in that. But the insight is insight by means of an acknowledged metaphor: hardly anybody accused of being engaged in some form of state worship … making the State a God on earth would accept that as a non-tendentious description of what they do or believe. And the talk about worship is clearly meant polemically — the real application of the term is wherever the speaker finds devotion or deference significantly beyond whatever she herself considers acceptable. For Mises, the critical point was supposed to be whether the person believed in limited government or unlimited government. But of course limited and unlimited in that context were just as contested as the terms they were supposed to define. Limited government for Mises certainly didn’t just mean any government with any constitutional limits whatever. Most mid-century welfare-state liberals, for example, believed very strongly that government should be subject to some constitutional limits. Just not the specific limits that Ludwig von Mises thought it should be subject to.↩
3. ^[3]Mises in any case explicitly included both socialism and American-style state-capitalist interventionism as forms of what he called statism or, as in Omnipotent Government, etatism. The claim that he reserved it for people like, say, Mussolini, is pure bosh.↩
4. ^[4]We’d use archist — Tucker, for one, sometimes did — but, ew.↩

• When Police Interrogate Children. Wendy McElroy, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2011-03-28). On its surface, a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court may seem to be legally trivial; it's about a juvenile who stole from neighborhood houses. But J.D.B. v. North Carolina could redefine both the law's "reasonable person" standard and what it means to be in custody. The case is… (Linked Saturday 2011-04-23.)

• Knowing the Real Enemy. Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2011-04-23). In an article in Tikkun last year, Rabbi Michael Lerner argued that "[f]rom the standpoint of the large corporate interests, nothing could be better than to de-fund government or dramatically downsize it, because then it can't constrain their economic power."  ("After the Health Care Legislation," April 5, 2010). And now… (Linked Saturday 2011-04-23.)

• Georgia to Execute Troy Davis, Despite Gaping Holes In State's Case. Francis L. Holland, Gangsters in Blue (2011-04-22). Troy Davis is about to be executed — even though he may be innocent. Tell Georgia to spare Troy Davis’ life. This is an emergency announcement from Color of Change: Dear Atty,In 1991, Troy Davis was convicted of murdering a white police officer. Though there’s major evidence that Davis didn’t… (Linked Sunday 2011-04-24.)

• Derek Colling – Most Dangerous Cop in America. Ademo Freeman, Gangsters in Blue (2011-04-23). Derek Colling might be the most dangerous (active) cop in the united states. In less than 5 years as a police office Colling has killed two, including one 15 year old boy, and was just caught on film beating a man for filming him – great write up and back… (Linked Sunday 2011-04-24.)

• well, gene, i do refer to everyone from james madison to benito. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2011-04-24). well, gene, i do refer to everyone from james madison to benito mussolini as a 'statist,' and to myself as an 'anti-statist.' this does not of course entail that madison and mussolini agree on everything, but it does pick out the fact that they agree on one big thing. (of course… (Linked Sunday 2011-04-24.)

• Help Christie Books publish Antonio Téllez Sol?@c3;a0;'s "Facerías" Shawn P. Wilbur, Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule (2011-04-24). Passing along a note from the Kate Sharpley Library: “Christie Books is planning to publish Facerías: Urban Guerrilla Warfare (1939-1957) by Antonio Tellez Sola and translated by Paul Sharkey, but needs your help. Please check out the link and consider donating to the publication fund through the chipin link on… (Linked Sunday 2011-04-24.)

• Bakunin on Proudhon and Marx. Shawn P. Wilbur, Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule (2011-04-24). James Guillaume, in the “Biographical Notice” in his French edition of Bakunin’s Works, includes part of an 1870 manuscript written by Bakunin on the subject of Proudhon and Marx:Proudhon, despite all his efforts to shake off the traditions of classical idealism, nonetheless remained all his life an incorrigible idealist, inspired,… (Linked Sunday 2011-04-24.)

• Changing Incentives Creates Security Risks. schneier, Schneier on Security (2011-04-14). One of the things I am writing about in my new book is how security equilibriums change. They often change because of technology, but they sometimes change because of incentives. An interesting example of this is the recent scandal in the Washington, DC, public school system over teachers changing their… (Linked Monday 2011-04-25.)

• In Other Words, Just About Everyone. Radley Balko, Radley Balko: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-04-20). CNN recently obtained a list of the "behavioral indicators" that could subject you to an enhanced security screeing by TSA. Included on the list: Passengers who display arrogance and verbally express contempt for security procedures. Because terrorists are known for drawing attention to themselves by irritating security screeners? Seems doubtful…. (Linked Monday 2011-04-25.)