Randall: What I’m calling democracy, the people as a group ruling the people as a group, and anarchy, each man ruling himself, are both possible interpretations of your broader definition of democracy. What I meant to say earlier was that while you’re looking on the bright side—calling true democracy what I call anarchy—what everybody else means when they say democracy is the other one.

Doss: I concur with Randall that a definition of democracy that necessarily overlaps with anarchy is too broad to be useful (i.e. it is not a connotation accepted by 95% of the people using the term).

I’ve been a bit unclear, so to clarify, I don’t think that “democracy” (“true” or otherwise) just means “each person ruling herself” or “anarchy.” What I think is that core democratic values (in particular popular sovereignty and political equality) strictly followed through, require a libertarian and, in the end, an anarchist society in order to flourish, because the only way you can end up with a polity of equals is ultimately through anarchy. I have no idea whether that end state is something appropriately called “true democracy” or “democracy” fully realized, or whether it’s something other than democracy.

What I’m arguing here is the more limited point that democratic values, as they are popularly understood, do entail a lot more robust protection of individual liberties and undermine the claims of elective oligarchies to govern “democratically.” You might object, “But look, democracy as almost everybody understands it just means elective oligarchy.” But I think that the problem here is that people are using the term confusedly: they use it in a way that appeals to certain values (like direct participation in political matters that affect you, sovereign individuals as the ultimate source of authority, political equality, etc.) while also applying it to institutions that (unbeknownst to them, because most people haven’t thought it through very carefully) betray those values.

If that’s true, there’s two different ways you could approach talk about “democracy” and “democratic” things. You could make it consistent by reducing the term to fit what it’s applied to: elective oligarchy under a mixed constitution. Or you could make it consistent by holding on to the more robust values, citing actual democratic historical precedents, and denying that the pretenders to democracy are what they are commonly claimed to be. If you do the former (which is what most libertarians do), then “democracy” is probably subject to most of the charges laid against it. If you do the latter, then whether or not it amounts to anarchism in the end, or amounts to something else, it’s susceptible to the charges commonly laid against it. Whether it’s susceptible to other charges is of course a further question.

As you mention, this may just boil down to an argument over whether to use the letters D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y one way or the other, and if so maybe it’s not very important as long as we just make sure we understand each other. But I’m not sure that’s quite all there is in the debate. A lot of people happen to attach a great deal of rhetorical weight to the idea of “democracy” and “democratic” decision-making, and I think they have both good (individualist) and bad (tribalist) reasons for doing so; I think that challenging them to think harder about the concept, and dialectically encouraging them to favor their better instincts over their worse, may be worthwhile.

It may also be strategically useful as part of an argumentative and political strategy towards getting what we ultimately want: but that’s because I specifically think that encouraging an attitude of insolence towards professional politicians, enacting specific limits on their official powers in favor of greater popular control, and generally fostering more suspicion towards elites and more trust in ordinary people, is likely to get us closer to liberty than following the contrary strategies and hoping to educate the elites. (Because, roughly, most of the dangers to liberty right now are posed by arrogant self-appointed elites, and systematically undermining their claims to special authority and dignity is one of the best ways to deal with them.) Now, that’s a substantive, partly empirical claim about the predicament we’re in and likely to be in for the next several years, and I realize that I haven’t given my argument for it. But I do hope that it clears up a bit where I’m coming from.

Randall McElroy: From “the people ruling themselves” we could favorably read “each man/woman ruling him/herself,” but this idea is something of a fantasy.

I’m not sure what you mean. That this doesn’t currently exist, or that it’s fantastic to think that it could? Of course it doesn’t currently exist (the least invasive states in the world are mostly elective oligarchies). But I think it’s hardly fantasy to think that it could; as a libertarian, it’s the political system that I aim at fully and completely realizing. What about you?

That said, while I happen to think that libertarianism, and indeed anarchism, are implicit in democratic values, that’s not the point I was making.

Randall McElroy: The unavoidably common interpretation of democracy is “the whole body of people ruling the whole body,” and this can only really be done as it’s done now, by picking some people democratically who make decisions undemocratically.

What you’re suggesting, then, is that democracy is for all intents and purposes impossible, not that democracy is expressed through elective oligarchy. Elective oligarchies are closer to democratic values than appointed ones, and some methods of electing them closer to democratic values than others, but as long as they hold exclusive or supreme legislative authority you just haven’t got a democracy at all, but rather something else.

That said, I have no idea where you’re getting the idea that elective oligarchy is the closest approach to democracy possible. There have been lots of examples of more directly democratic political systems than the U.S. style of oligarchy (classical era Athens, contemporary Switzerland). Since actuality entails possibility, I conclude that there really are ways that democratic governance can be done other than picking rulers to make the decisions for you.

This also doesn’t touch on the second issue, viz. that democracy is not a purely procedural notion, but that substantive political equality between government officials and citizens is a necessary component of democracy. If that’s so, then knocking down laws that violate that substantive equality, no matter how those laws were enacted, and no matter how they were knocked down, has to be considered a promotion of democracy, not an undermining of it.

Roy W. Wright: Freedom in America died decades ago.

“Decades ago” millions of people in the United States lived under conditions of government-enforced apartheid.

For freedom to have “died,” it first had to be alive. And when was that?

Brandon: My point is that there’s nothing democratic about special interest groups lobbying unelected judges to overturn laws passed by democratically elected legislatures.

This argument presupposes two things: (1) that how “democratic” a constitution is depends purely on the procedural question of who passes the law, and not on any substantive questions about what spheres of sovereignty and authority the laws that are made give to individual ordinary people; and (2) that having laws passed by a select legislature is a democratic procedure.

But why accept either claim? “Democracy” means the people ruling themselves, not the people choosing who rules. (The Greeks, who knew something about democracy, had a word for a system on which the people got together every so often to pick a ruler for the polis. But they didn’t call it “democracy;” they called it “tyranny.”) There’s a good argument to be made that laws produced by elective oligarchies deserve no special respect as any more “democratic” than the reasoned rulings of judges; and there’s another good argument to be made that democracy simply does not exist, anyway, to the degree that laws (however they were made) compromise the substantive political equality between ordinary people and government officials (by, for example, trashing civil liberties and treating people as if they are permitted to live their lives only at the pleasure of the Authorities).

I actualy object to any nation but our own operating our ports.

That’s interesting. I object to any nation including “our own” operating “our” ports.

Why the exception on your part?

Brandon Berg: In fact, I think Scott did just this, as he said that he was not endorsing laws against suicide.

Again, this by itself does not prove that Scott regarded his claim as merely positive and not normative. All that it proves is that he’s open to regarding whatever value (whether some or none) efficiency might have as trumped by the value that something else has. (Normatively, being wealthy is better than being poor. That’s part of what “wealth” and “poverty” mean. But there are plenty of cases in which it may better to realize some other value, at the cost of being less wealthy, than it would be to maximize wealth. That doesn’t mean that “being wealthy” is a strictly non-normative category. It just means that it’s an overridable norm.)

David: Efficiency is not a normative term. In most usage it is actually a quantitative measurement, a car with greater efficiency gets better miles per gallon than a less efficient car.

This is obviously not true. Your ability to quantitatively calculate efficiency, as the term is ordinarily used, depends on you first identifying what counts as a benefit and what counts as a cost. An increase in miles per gallon, for example, only counts as an increase in efficiency because, in this case (but not in all) getting more of the dependent variable (miles traveled) for the same or less of the independent variable (gasoline burned) counts (prima facie) as a good feature for the car to have. Which is a normative judgment. (Which in turn depends on your identifying the dependent variable as a benefit, i.e., a good thing for the car to produce, and the independent variable as a cost, i.e., a bad thing for the car to demand, or something which is bad in itself and valuable only for its consequences. These are, again, normative judgments.)

There are in fact plenty of cases where efficiency involves getting less for the same or less for more (e.g. less exhaust for the same amount of gasoline, less waste heat for more revolutions of the turbine). The only thing that all of the cases of efficiency have in common with each other and not with cases of inefficiency is not any kind of quantitative positive relation, but rather the normative relation of increasing things good to have and decreasing things bad to have. The ordinary use of the term “efficiency” simply has no cash value denominated in purely quantitative terms.

Brandon Berg: If we suppose that we have a general idea of what people like and how much they like it, we can say that a particular arrangement will or will not be Kaldor-Hicks efficient. That’s a positive statement, not a normative one. Yes, we take preferences into account (possibly inaccurately). But we simply consider these as positive facts.

David: Better off and worse off are to the economist just a tally of what each individual under study thinks (or more appropriately reveals) of his situation. Yes, each individual must make a normative claim, but the economist makes no such claim, he just tallies those claims.

Fine. So here’s a conventional textbook definition of Pareto efficiency. (Since Kaldor-Hicks efficiency is defined in terms of Pareto efficiency, we’ll leave that as a further exercise.)

(PE) A situation is Pareto efficient if and only if there are no available changes that would make at least one person better off and make nobody worse off.

Your suggestion is that we make Pareto efficiency non-normative by making “better off” and “worse off” refer to positive facts to the effect that the preferences that the people in question happen to have are satisfied or frustrated. So the more explicit definition is something more like:

(PE′) A situation is Pareto efficient if and only if there are no available changes such that (1) there is at least one person for whom the change would satisfy at least one currently unsatisfied preference, and (2) there is no one for whom the change would frustrate at least one currently satisfied preference.

Is this an accurate way of spelling out what you mean when you claim that economic efficiency, as Scott was using the term, is non-normative?

David, I’m well aware of the technical definitions of “efficiency” in economics and of the party line that given these technical definitions, economic claims about efficiency are strictly non-normative. But I’m disputing that party line, and what I’m asking for is an elaboration of those definitions that doesn’t fall back on normative terms. (As for Samuelson, I think there is simply philosophical confusion, both by him and by his colleagues, about what he is doing. He might very well think that his claims about economic efficiency are strictly non-normative claims; but that’s hardly demonstrated by his endorsement of policies he knows to be economically inefficient on other grounds. That only demonstrates that he thinks that there are other norms that trump whatever normative weight “economic efficiency” may or may not carry.)

For example, Pareto efficiency is standardly defined as a situation in which no further Pareto improvements are available, and a Pareto improvement is defined as a change that makes at least one person better off and nobody worse off. But “better off” and “worse off” are themselves normative terms. Schuele specifies that he means to refer to Kaldor-Hicks efficiency. But Kaldor-Hicks efficiency is standardly defined by direct reference to Pareto efficiency. Scott didn’t use the standard definition for K-H efficiency, but instead glossed it in terms of “wealth,” but “wealth” is itself a normative term. (Having a large pile of something only counts as being wealthy if the thing you’ve piled up is a good thing to have lots of.)

So the challenge is: explain to me what Schuele meant, or plausibly could have meant, by “economically efficient” without falling back on normative language. If you are using Kaldor-Hicks efficiency as standardly defined, or as glossed by Scott, you will have to explain how you are using the terms “better off,” “worse off,” “wealth,” or whatever in such a way that they are not in fact normative, in spite of appearances.

Schuele claimed that laws against suicide might be “economically efficient.” In ordinary language, “efficient” is a normative term, not a purely positive one; “efficiency” is a virtue and “inefficiency” a vice in any method that can be so described.

Of course, you could claim that the “economically” qualifier indicates a term of art, not the ordinary language use. Fine, but the technical definitions of both Pareto efficiency and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency typically appeal directly to normative categories such as “better off,” “worse off,” “wealth,” etc.

Exercise for the writer: give me a definition of “economic efficiency” that both (1) makes it a positive rather than a normative category, and (2) justifies the normal use of the term in economic analysis and advocacy. (Until you have done so, your claim that Kennedy is confusing positive and normative claims seems unfounded.)

Me: (Or, to put it another way: if you aren’t offering a class analysis of the transit strike, what level of analysis are you offering? Individual?)

Wilde: Yes. Individuals, in general, act for their own self-interest.

Which individuals did you have in mind? The only person discussed in this post who is picked out as an individual, as far as I can tell, is Megan McArdle. The analysis you offer seems to pick everyone else out on the basis of the interests presumedly shared by the members of five groups of people, differentiated from one another by socioeconomic factors: the MTA management, the TWU Local 100, poor commuters who use MTA busses and trains, well-off commuters who use MTA busses and trains, and folks who would be willing to accept scab work from the MTA management if it were offered. That seems like echt-class analysis. If it doesn’t seem that way to you, I wonder what you think class analysis does look like.

Schuele suggested that the debate here has at least as much to do with miscommunication as with substantive disagreement. So, let’s number off claims for convenience:

[1] The group created is a product of individual interests. [2] Different competing groups are often of the same socioeconomic status, background, income level, and professions, often bidding on the same govt special privilege. [3] The distinctions between different groups are small. [4] Memberships between different competing groups can change easily as it becomes more rewarding for individuals to seek new allies. [5] New groups can be created by members of already existing groups. … [6] Economic action occurs at the level of the individual, not the group, not the class.

Which of claims (1)-(6) do you think make for a disagreement between you and someone who thinks class analysis is a fruitful way to understand the transit strike (and significant patches of socio-economic life elsewhere)? Further, if there’s more than one claim here that you take to cut against class analysis if true, do those separate claims cut it against it independently of each other, or only in conjunction with one another?

Masten: Isn’t violating the terms of existing agreements (no collective strike) wrong?

The MTA’s employees didn’t “agree” to the Taylor Law. It was imposed on them by an interventionist state government with the power but not the authority to ban peaceful coordinated strikes.