Reading Moldbug - "Why I Am Not A Libertarian"

Content: I summarize the core of Moldbug's blog post Why I Am Not A Libertarian. This is a first impression. Usually I keep my distance from political philosophy, but tonight I needed a distraction from other things.

Liberty, like peace, is a desirable outcome. Reforming a government to restrict itself, in conformance with the desires of its constituency, is not an effective way to achieve that outcome, because the government can abandon those restrictions at any time, and probably will do when it becomes profitable. People do not behave morally alone by conviction and remembrance of sacred principle, and neither will government.

What then should be the design of a government? Moldbug introduces two principles, called formalism and neocameralism.

Before stating them, a digression into the nature of property, which will help us to define government: In contrast to the usual normative incidents recognized by western property law, let us say simply and summarily that a person has ownership of a resource if they control it. Then property is a system guaranteeing persons exclusive stable control of resources.

A government is an organization that controls property, stably and exclusively, through the use of military force (or through the threat of its use). A government also leases property to its constituents in exchange for rent, which practice is called taxation. In addition to securing its own resources against foreign militaries and domestic paramilitaries, the government seeks to prevent involuntary property transfer among its constituents. Now we are ready to introduce Moldbug's first principle of government design.

Formalism: A government should prevent involuntary property transfers among its constituents, regardless of whether the distribution of resources satisfies the egalitarian preferences of the constituents, or is in accordance with some conception of natural or contractual property rights, et cetera. Moldbug hints that this principle derives from his desire, and his engineer's realism about what is required, to reduce violent conflict.

Moldbug identifies two components to the practice of formalism, which are really two fronts on which deterrence is waged: the government maintains control of its property through military force, and it prevents involuntary transfers of rented resources among its constituents through the enforcement of law. In both cases, the government must make clear to parties that the distribution of property is secure against involuntary transactions: that a party attempting to produce an involuntary change in the distribution of property would fail in their attempt and incur costs of the conflict. This is of course not sufficient to deter human parties from violence generally, but it's a good start, and formalism remains an interesting principle, akin to legal positivism.

Before we state the second principle (neocameralism) another digression is in order. 

Why do observed governments restrict liberties of their constituents, in excess of what is needed to maintain a military force, collect taxes, and perhaps enforce laws to limit involuntary property transfer? Why do government prohibit some activities, when they could instead tax those activities and gain revenue (putting aside that we've here introduced quite a new form of taxation)? 

Moldbug poses an analogy: these prohibitions by current governments are like the poor customer service offered by companies controlled by employees. In contrast to joint-stock corporations, employees of such companies (and employees of governments) operate with "no capacity for unitary financial or managerial planning" and "no local incentive to steward the equity of the entire operation".

The principle of neocameralism is simply that governments should be designed like joint-stock corporations. Governments should be publicly owned, and their shares traded. Instead of elections, executives would be hired, because that's the effective procedure that markets have found for making corporations profitable. Moldbug suggests that this project could start through the founding of private cities.

One place I wish Moldbug had expanded this post is in addressing an objection to neocameralism that he mentions: that the sovereign corporation "might restrict not immigration but emigration, converting itself into a sort of large open-air prison or slave camp." His reply to the objection is this: "I invite the reader to imagine the effect that this decision might have on property values, or to think about how profitable it has proven for North Korea". Truly, I have heard more persuasive rhetoric.

If Moldbug has more principles of government design, I look forward to reading them some day. If these are the core of his philosophy, I look forward to understanding why he has selected these two for special attention, and what relationship he sees between them. On the whole, this post was surprisingly light on the obscurantism that I expected of Moldbug, perhaps unfairly?