Bottom-up

Twenty years ago today, the first East Berliners poured across the wall that had imprisoned them for 28 years. Matt Yglesias points to a great Fred Kaplan story on the origins of the wall. Because West Berlin was located deep inside East Germany, it became a magnet for people wanting to escape communist tyranny during the 1950s. The constant flood of people became an embarrassing political problem—a daily reminder of how spectacularly the East German economic and political systems were failing to serve their people. So after trying and failing to persuade Eisenhower to give him control over West Berlin, Khrushchev settled on a second-best solution: building a wall that would cut West Berlin off from the surrounding East German territory. For the next 28 years, the wall stood as a symbol of the failures of the Soviet economic system.

But the Berlin wall wasn’t just a symbol of communism’s failure; it was also a very tangible restriction on the freedom of individual East Berliners. Before the wall fell, East Germans had to content themselves with the opportunities available inside the Soviet bloc. After November 9, 1989, East German citizens suddenly enjoyed a much broader universe of opportunities. They could visit relatives in West Germany, travel easily to the rest of Western Europe, and even take jobs outside the Soviet bloc. The Berliners who tore down the wall so enthusiastically were not just celebrating the collapse of a repressive regime, they were also celebrating their newfound freedom to come and go as they please.

It’s striking how much conservative attitudes toward freedom of movement have shifted over the last 20 years. Conservatives used to cheer those who risked their lives and defied the authorities in search of freedom and opportunity. East Berliners who snuck across the wall could count on a hero’s welcome from American conservatives. And indeed, conservatives still have this attitude toward Cubans fleeing the Castro regime.

So it’s jarring that less than 20 years after one Republican president gave a stirring speech about the barbarity of erecting a wall to trap millions of people in a country they wanted to leave, another Republican president signed legislation to do just that. Conservatives, of course, bristle at analogies between East Germany’s wall and our own, but they seem unable to explain how they actually differ. Certainly Rich Lowry’s effort comes up short. He suggests that the Berlin Wall was “an instrument of repression” while the US-Mexico wall is “a way for a nation of laws to see that those laws are obeyed.” But this is no distinction at all. After all, the East German government was trying to compel obedience to its laws just as we’re trying to compel obedience to ours. The key difference, is whether the laws are repressive. I’ll grant that East German laws are more repressive than our own, but it seems like a difference of degree rather than kind. American law makes it essentially impossible for a low-skilled worker to emigrate or take a job here legally. The Mexican government obviously isn’t as repressive as the East German one was, but if the US-Mexico wall is completed, it’s hard to see how it will look different to the average Mexican than the Berlin wall did to the average East German.

This from Jonah Goldberg has to be the best description of election post-mortems I’ve read:

This happens after every election. The partisans and pundits race for the election results like kids charging the disgorged contents of a piñata, claiming convenient facts like candy and shouting, “Mine!” It’s always an unseemly process.

Unfortunately, Goldberg can’t help himself. After writing this, he immediately dives in for his share of the Smarties and Kit Kats.

I’ve argued before that a lot of top-down thinking is driven by a tendency to anthropomorphize complex systems or processes. If a system is hard to understand in its full complexity, people deal with it by thinking about it as if it’s a big person. In any essay he wrote last year, Paul Graham essentially argues that the management of large companies amounts to turning the style of thought I’ve been criticizing into an organizing principle:

[Small groups in large organizations] are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I’ve never heard anyone mention explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It’s really a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person’s worth of freedom between them.

In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree.

Anyone who’s worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.

How bad these problems are depends a lot on what your large organization is trying to do. If the organization is trying to do something routine, then limiting individual freedom might not matter too much. If you’re running an automobile assembly line, for example, you don’t necessarily want individual workers doing a ton of improvising, so a structure that constrains employee freedom might not be such a big deal. (Although even there you want your employees proactively looking for problems that might stop the assembly line) On the other hand, this kind of thing is absolutely deadly in a creative industry like software. The job of a computer programmer is to write software that’s never been written before (software that already exists can be copied, after all) so the process of software development can never be made routine like the steps of an assembly line. So limiting a programmer’s freedom is going to have a big, negative impact on his productivity.

Google’s management seems to understand this problem, and they’ve apparently adopted some interesting strategies for dealing with it. One is 20 percent time, the practice of allowing each programmer to spend one day a week working on a project that isn’t decided by the Google hierarchy—this leaves some room for bottom-up creativity within the company. Another approach Google has pursued is to make the hierarchy as flat as possible. Reportedly, Google gives each manager an absurd number of direct employees—on the order of 50—with the specific goal of making it impossible for bosses to micro-manage their employees.

Nevertheless, Google isn’t immune from the forces Graham is describing. I have friends who interned at Google at various points between 2004 and the present. From what they tell me, the character of the place has changed dramatically. As the firm grew by an order of magnitude, it was simply inevitable that the freedom experienced by individual employees would suffer. And it’s probably inevitable for Google to complete its transition into just another big company—following in the footsteps of Yahoo!, Netscape, and Microsoft before them. (Interestingly, Apple might be an exception; Steve Jobs has always run Apple like a dictatorship, so Apple employees may not have had any freedom to lose as the company grew.)

The practical consequence of growing companies is that increasing bureaucracy has a stifling and homogenizing effect. In a small company, an individual’s outstanding effort can make a big difference on the overall performance of the company, and senior management is likely to notice the contribution and reward it. In a large company, employees not only don’t have the freedom to do things that make a big difference for the company’s bottom line, but even if they did it’s unlikely they’d get the credit. As a consequence, the most talented programmers almost inevitably get a raw deal at large companies, because they’re neither as productive as they could be, nor are they fully rewarded for the level productivity they do achieve.

My first few posts were devoted to the proposition that bottom-up systems work better than people think. I argued that people systematically underestimate bottom-up systems like evolution, wikipedia, free software, the blogosphere, and the market process. Obviously, the other side of this coin is that people over-estimate the efficacy of top-down systems. I’ve hinted at this conclusion in my posts about cell phone “app stores,” but it’s a general problem that extends far beyond the iTunes store: Large bureaucracies are wasteful. Indeed, I think hardly anyone appreciates just how inefficient they really are.

At some level, everyone knows that large bureaucracies are inefficient. We’ve all dealt with the DMV or our cable or insurance companies. We know that large, bureaucratic organizations tend to be slow-moving and unresponsive to customers. Many of us also have friends who work for the government or large companies, and we’ve heard stories of the kind of waste that goes on the inside of these organizations. But while I’ve always known in the abstract how inefficient large companies were, it’s only recently that I appreciated how large this effect is. And the writer who most influenced my thinking on the subject is Paul Graham.

Graham is an interesting guy. During the mid-1990s, he founded one of the first web startups, a company called Viaweb that helped people make online stores. Before the end of the decade, while he was still in his 30s, he sold Viaweb to Yahoo! and walked away with a large enough fortune to finance a comfortable retirement. Since then, he’s branched out into a variety of eclectic pursuits. The two that are relevant for our purposes are: he started writing essays, and he founded a company called Y Combinator.

Silicon Valley is widely known as the leading center of innovation in America and maybe the world. Indeed, it’s a cliche (one I’ve employed myself) to suggest that we’d be better off if the rest of America worked more like Silicon Valley. But of course like any large community, the Valley isn’t monolithic. There’s a lot of innovation going on there, but there’s also a lot of variation. Some parts of the Valley are a lot more innovative than other parts.

Graham has written a number of essays highlighting just how much variation there is in the efficiency of Silicon Valley firms, and just how important size is to this variation. Two kinds of Silicon Valley entities are particular targets of Graham’s ire: large companies and venture capital firms. Graham has an interesting vantage point because his firm, Y Combinator, funds extremely early-stage startups. I think people outside the technology industry tend to use the term “venture capitalist” as a catch-all term for people who fund startups, but it actually has a more specific meaning. Venture capitalists occupy the high end of the startup-funding spectrum. They tend to be investing other peoples’ money, and they prefer to do relatively large deals. Google, for example, raised $25 million from a venture capital firm in 1999. Graham’s firm is at the extreme other end: he finds 20-somethings who often haven’t even started a company and writes them their first checks, typically on the order of $20,000. In between YC and the VCs are “angel investors.” These tend to be successful entrepreneurs investing their own money, and they often make much smaller bets than VCs. Andy Bechtolsheim was an angel investor who famously wrote the Larry Page and Sergei Brin a check for $100,000 when they were just starting Google in 1998.

Graham’s hostility to VCs flows from two factors: because they’re investing other peoples’ money, they’re extremely risk-averse, which creates a variety of problems. They tend to be unduly impressed with long resumes, since investing in someone with credentials is easier to justify if the investment fails. They’re prone to herd behavior, because, again, investing in the same way as their competitors gives them cover if their investments go sour. And they have a tendency to drag negotiations out as long as possible, in hopes of waiting until you either succeed or fail before committing their money.

The other problem with VCs is that, because their profitability tends to be proportional to the size of their fund, they push startups to take a lot more money than they need. Having too much money might not sound like a problem, but getting too much seed money too early can actually be deadly for a startup. First, once a firm has money, investors are going to expect it to “put the money to work,” which typically means hiring a bunch of people who may or may not be essential to the company’s success. And second, it dramatically raises the bar for the company’s success. Selling a company for $20 million is a great success if the founders started out with $100,000 of their own money. It’s not so great if the firm recently closed a $10 million venture capital round. So taking VC money means investors don’t have the option of cashing out quickly, they’re often forced to shoot for that billion-dollar IPO whether they want to or not.

In short, founders find angel investors easier to work with than VCs for two reasons: they’re investing their own money and they’re willing to write smaller checks. The moral of the story is that even at this small scale—companies with a handful of employees, investors putting in a few million dollars—firms experience dramatic diseconomies of scale. The larger the investment, and the greater the distance between entrepreneur and investor, the less efficiently the marginal dollar will be put to use. As we’ll see in my next post, things get even worse with big, publicly-traded companies.

Pseudonymous blogger (and software developer) “Cog” shares my distaste for software patents:

One thing that I find extremely frustrating about many legal scholars and economists’ approach to patents it that they make two false assumptions. The first assumption is that transaction costs are acceptable, or can be made so with some modest reforms. The second assumption is that patent litigation is reasonably “precise”; i.e., if you don’t infringe on something then you’ll be able to build useful technology and bring it to market relatively unhindered. As my friend’s story shows, both of these assumptions are laughably false. I mean, just black-is-white, up-is-down, slavery-is-freedom, we-have-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia false.

The end result is that our patent system encourages “land grab” behavior which could practically serve as the dictionary definition of rent-seeking. The closest analogy is a conquistador planting a flag on a random outcropping of rock at the tip of some peninsula, and then saying “I claim all this land for Spain”, and then the entire Western hemisphere allegedly becomes the property of the Spanish crown. This is a theory of property that’s light-years away from any Lockean notion of mixing your labor with the land or any Smithian notion of promoting economic efficiency. And yet it’s the state of the law for software patents. Your business plan can literally be to build a half-assed implementation of some straightforward idea (or, in the case of Intellectual Ventures, don’t build it at all), file a patent, and subsequently sue the pants off anybody who comes anywhere near the turf you’ve claimed. And if they do come near your turf, regardless of how much of their own sweat and blood they put into their independent invention, the legal system’s going go off under them like a land mine.

It is hard to think of a more effective mechanism for discouraging innovation in software. I mean, I suppose you could plant a plastic explosive rigged to a random number generator under the seats of every software developer, and that would be slightly worse.

This is spot-on.

One of the perennial tropes of the network neutrality debate has been the tendency of the pro-regulation side to paint it as a David-and-Goliath struggle between big, evil corporations and the little guy. Way back in 2006, James Gattuso pointed out how silly this is: in fact, the push for network neutrality is backed by some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley. My Cato colleague Julian Sanchez points out a particularly lazy example of this kind of argument that happens to target Cato:

Via some outfit called VoIP News, I’m intrigued to learn that my insidious paymasters at Cato number among the 15 greatest enemies of net neutrality. Scary! Turns out Cato is a “hired voice of reason” which, along with CEI “seems to draw its funding from a smattering of every major corporation ever to fund lobbyists.” Damning stuff! And these guys are Totally Serious Journalists, so they did some kind of due diligence and fact checking, rather than just pulling this stuff out of their asses, right?

<crickets>

Well, hey, no, I mean, I’m sure Cato is totally shady about its funding sources—how could they possibly check this stuff?

What’s that? Annual report? Freely available online, you say? Well, and so we get tons of our budget from… Huh? One percent from corporations? None from telecoms in 2008?

Now, obviously serious reporters wouldn’t just utterly fail grade-school level fact checking. Clearly, some devious ISP must have blocked them from reaching this easily accessible information! Further demonstrating the need for Net Neutrality!

Shoddy reporting aside, the article does actually highlight an important point: the people who built the Internet are deeply split, with eminent computer scientists including Bob Kahn (co-inventor of TCP/IP with Vint Cerf) and Dave Farber (another networking pioneer) on the anti-regulation side. And based on conversations I’ve had here at Princeton, Kahn and Farber are far from the only computer scientists who are skeptical that the FCC is up to the job of regulating the Internet.

In her vacuuous appearance on Rachel Maddow last week, Xeni Jardin cited Vint Cerf’s support of regulation and urged viewers to “side with the geeks who actually built the Internet.” She did not, of course, mention that Kahn and Farber, who fit that description as well as Cerf does, are on the other side. “The geeks” are as split on this issue as everyone else.

Update: More from Tim Carney.

My wife is a first year medical resident, so I read this article by my friend Kevin O’Reilly with interest. Until I started dating a med student, I didn’t realize how absurdly overworked medical residents (recently-graduated doctors going through mandatory apprenticeship) are. In 2003, the medical profession instituted rules reducing residents’ hours to a maximum of 80 hours per week. And rumor has it that some hospitals (although thankfully not my wife’s) pressure their residents to work significantly more than 80 hours per week and then lie on their timesheets to cover it up.

Kevin interviews some folks who argue that the long hours are necessary because the alternative is an increase in the number of handoffs. That is, if hospitals had (say) three 8-hour shifts instead of two 12-hour shifts, that would mean that each patient has three different doctors per day instead of two, and the odds of miscommunication will increase accordingly. This argument makes a certain amount of sense to me, and I think it helps explain the idea of 12-hour shifts. But it doesn’t explain the 24-hour weekend shifts my wife works about every other weekend. If two handoffs a day is too much, then residents should be working 24-hour shifts during the week too and get more days off. Contrariwise, if two handoffs a day doesn’t endanger the patient during the week, why force doctors to work 24-hour shifts during the weekend? More generally, what’s the justification for forcing doctors who’ve just finished five long weekday shifts to work weekends as well?

Some of the people Kevin talked to also say the research on sleep and safety is inconclusive, but this just doesn’t seem like the kind of question that requires a lot of empirical research. My productivity declines sharply if I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep the previous night, or if I try to work longer than 12 hours in a stretch. I don’t think I’ve ever worked sucessful for 24 hour straight. So I think it’s completely obvious that a resident who’s nearing the end of a 24-hour shift, and who’s worked every day for two weeks straight, is going to be less alert and think less clearly than a resident who’s well rested. It would be nice to have empirical evidence showing this, but if the evidence is inconclusive I think we can still be pretty clear that the effect exists.

The reality, I suspect, is that hospitals simply aren’t able or willing to shell out the money for the additional doctors they’d need to hire in order to give their residents sane schedules. Which, frankly, should make patients angry. I certainly don’t want life-or-death decision about my care made by some girl who’s fighting exhaustion.

Thanks to Slashdot, my last post generated a ton of discussion. My favorite comment comes my friend and erstwhile co-blogger Cord Blomquist. I think it’s worth quoting the bulk of it:

I think the reason that most of the folks are against the free software movement is because they’re only familiar with the movement is through “movement types” like the folks you cite above. These folks can be pretty poor ambassadors for libertarians because of the rhetoric they use, like you mentioned.

Sadly, libertarian writers stop there. I was guilty of this in the past and it’s why I didn’t see the truth in a lot of your writing. However, in working with the WordPress and Drupal communities over the past three years (and to some degress the larger LAMP-stack community) I have come to understand why the free software movement works, and very little about it has to do with ideology or dotCommunism.

In my experience, many developers give away their software for entirely self-interested reasons. Making your code open make you well known, well-respected by your peers, and therefore worth much more in the marketplace. In addition, established web development firms participate in open source development not solely because of some motivation to make the world a better place (though this may be a partial motivation), but because any software platform they might attempt to make on their own will simply be worse than something made and maintained by a community of tens of thousands.

On the consumer side of things, I can’t see why anyone would choose a closed source option in a software category where a sufficiently large community of open source developers exist–this explains by about 65% of the Net is running Apache. For the consumer, open source not only means cheaper (free is as cheap as it gets), it also almost invariably means better quality software because of the benefits of having so many developers look at the same lines of code, and more versatile software because those same thousands are adapting these open platforms to fit all manner of esoteric applications.

So, if libertarians are uncomfortable with the rhetoric of the self-appointed spokesman for the open/free software movement, they need only take a look at the folks actually producing and consuming open/free software. These folks are not pursuing some Marxist ideology, but rather acting in their rational self interest in a free market. Looks pretty libertarian to me.

Quite so. I think part of the problem here is that non-programmers only see the tip of a very large iceberg. The average member of the free software community spends only a tiny fraction of his time thinking about the politics of free software. They spend the bulk of their time creating, using, and helping others use free software. Like any other large community, there’s a broad diversity of political views. Some people like Stallman and company, while others see him as an out-of-touch ideological zealot. But this doesn’t matter very much for working programmers, sysadmins, and the like because for most of them the primary reason to participate in the free software community is because it helps them do their jobs. The ideology is a secondary consideration, if they buy into it at all.

The problem is that if you don’t have first-hand experience with the free software community, then the debate between free software and proprietary software is going to seem like a wholly academic one. And that means you’re left to judge the merits of the two sides based entirely on their rhetorical and ideological appeal. And given that many of the free software movement’s spokespeople are hostile to free markets, the result is that a lot of non-geek libertarians wind up being hostile to the concept of free software even as most geeks with actual hands-on experience with free software are more favorable to the concept.

Part of the problem is that Moglen and Stallman don’t do a good job of distinguishing the values of the free software community from their own broader political views. A lot of what Moglen has to say about free software is broadly supported within the free software world, but he has a tendency to weave these valid points together with Marxist ideology that’s only tangentially related to the values of the free software community.

The way libertarians ought to respond to this is not to throw up our hands and conclude that the free software movement is the enemy. Rather, we need to do a better job of articulating the values of the free software movement in terms that are congenial to libertarians. There are a significant number of libertarian-leaning geeks in the free software movement—I’m sure they’d be grateful to see someone explaining how free software works without a lot of superfluous Marxist baggage.

And frankly, I don’t think it’s hard to explain free software in libertarian-friendly terms. After all, we’re talking about a private-sector community that’s producing immensely valuable public goods without a dime of taxpayer support. How can libertarians not get excited about that?

Kerry’s article about thick liberalism has generated a ton of intersting discussion. Here’s Ilya Somin, Kerry, and Ilya again. Here’s Will. I still think Kerry and Will are right and Kerry’s critics are wrong, and I won’t re-hash the various excellent points they’ve made. Instead, I’d like to respond to one reader, “Vogateer,” who took issue with the following rather caustic passage of last week’s post: “Unfortunately, when you adopt a political philosophy that fits on a postcard, it leaves a vacuum that is filled by whatever inchoate political prejudices you held before you picked up that copy of Atlas Shrugged at the age of 19.”

“Vogateer” objects, reasonably enough, that this isn’t likely to persuade devotees of the Rand/Rothbard approach to libertarian philosophy. Persuading them wasn’t really the purpose of the post, but he’s right that I owe those folks a more substantive critique. So here it is. I’ll focus mostly on Rand because I’m more familiar with her work.

I think Rand was a better novelist than political philosopher. Her early novels actually do a reasonably good job of sketching out a “thick” worldview—a “sense of life,” as she put it—that I found inspiring when I read The Fountainhead in high school. Although the novel ends up with the protagonist blowing up an (empty) government housing project, it isn’t a political tract. Rather, it’s a novel about artistic integrity and the primacy of individual conscience over decision-making by committee.

It seems that by the time Rand began working on Atlas Shrugged, she was starting to see herself as a political philosopher first and a novelist second. She increasingly tried to translate the implicit “sense of life” of her novels into an explicit system of philosophical ideas, and unfortunately, the result was rather one-dimensional. Rand’s basic approach to political philosophy is a top-down, deductive one: start with some general propositions like “A is A” and then logically derive from these principles an entire philosophical system: rational selfishness, capitalism, and so forth.

In her haste to boil each question down to a single, pithy aphorism, Rand repeatedly ignored the nuances and complexities in the real world that produce political disagreements in the first place. The result is that many of her conclusions were driven by her own idiosyncratic preferences. Hence her hostility to (for example) homosexuality, pornography, and female presidents.

Beyond those individual foibles, I think there was a deeper problem with Rand’s approach to political philosophy. We can see this in the debate over what’s commonly referred to as “intellectual property.” Rand’s best known (and as far as I know, only) essay on the subject (in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal) runs barely 5 pages. She writes that “patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind,” and that “patents are the heart and core of property rights.”

In contrast, the modern followers of Murray Rothbard, who start with a virtually identical formulation of the libertarian non-aggression principle, reach the diametrically opposite conclusion: that copyrights and patents are not legitimate property rights but illegitimate government monopolies, and accordingly should be abolished.

The result is an impasse that has bedeviled the libertarian movement for decades. Because libertarians are used to analyzing all policy questions by reference to the non-aggression principle, we have difficulty adjudicating disputes where there are two diametrically opposed and equally plausible interpretations of the principle: If copyright is property, then libertarian principle demands that they be strictly enforced. If copyright is not property, then libertarian principle demands that they be abolished. Debates between the two sides tends to involve of a lot of question-begging, table-thumping, and arguments over semantics.

This is a case where a richer conception of liberty becomes useful. The debate over copyright is really a dispute between two different visions of culture: on the one hand, a top-down vision in which culture is produced by a small number of producers and consumed by a large number of consumers, and on the other a bottom-up vision in which ordinary people have the opportunity to be both producers and consumers. If you subscribe to the former vision, then you’re going to want copyright laws that centralize control over culture in the hands of Hollywood and Redmond, so that they have enough “incentives” to continue producing new content. In contrast, if you see competition and bottom-up innovation as central to the production of culture, then you’re going to be less enthusiastic about laws like the DMCA that give incumbents the power to lock competitors out of the market.

The key thing to note here is that these aren’t disputes that can be settled entirely by reference to political philosophy. The strongest arguments for and against a law like the DMCA don’t turn primarily on whether copyright “really is” a property right. Rather, they focus on how different legal regimes will shape the markets they regulate. In particular, the strongest argument against the DMCA is that it undermines certain kinds of freedom that I, for one, regard as important: the freedom to do as I please with my lawfully-purchased computer and the freedom of third-party software vendors to provide me with software to meaningfully exercise that freedom.

But to form intelligent opinions on a law like the DMCA, you actually have to know something about the world it’s regulating. You have to know something about the software industry to understand how legal restrictions on interoperability are likely to change the structure of the market. And these are not considerations you’re going to find in any work of political philosophy. To understand these things, you need to be engaged in a debate that’s internal to the software industry and not primarily concerned with political philosophy.

The converse approach is illustrated by Stephen Kinsella’s response to my post about the Lakely study. Not once in that post did I mention “intellectual property.” Yet Kinsella not only interprets my post as being about “IP,” he even accuses me of inconsistency for being a pro-IP person and “criticizing libertarians for being pro-IP.” For him, the free software debate is really a debate about “IP” policy. And he has no patience for “thick” conceptions of liberty:

Thickness is actually problematic since it just muddies the waters, conflating issues pertaining to the permissibility of interpersonal violence with other interpersonal norms and institutions. The thickness theorizers add nothing of substance to our understanding of libertarian principle; instead, they pointlessly link the libertarian opposition to aggression to non-rigorous, malleable leftist gremlins like “hierarchy” and “bossism” and “pushing people around.”

“Interpersonal norms and institutions” are important! Richard Stallman’s arguments for free software focus as much on norms and institutions as they do on public policy—and that’s precisely what makes them so interesting. Kinsella seems to believe that the only theories of liberty that matter are those that place the state at their center. This is, in Kerry’s phrase, “state worship,” and it’s as unseemly in libertarians as it is in our ideological opponents.

James Lakely, a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, recently pointed me to a new study he’s written on the network neutrality debate. (See also his op-ed summarizing the argument.) Lakely is clearly a smart guy, and his paper is backed up by a significant amount of research. However, the basic argument of his paper—that the network neutrality movement has “unwittingly bought into” the “radical agenda” of the free software movement—strikes me as pretty misguided.

Lakely quotes extensively from the work of free software intellectuals like Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen. To his credit, he gives a relatively even-handed account of what free software advocates believe, quoting them in their own words and acknowledging some important nuances. The problem is that this very fair-mindedness undermines his argument, because the quotes he selects reveal not a collectivist ideology, but an individualist, bottom-up one. From Moglen’s unfortunately (and, I suspect, half-ironically) named “The dotCommunist Manifesto,” for example, Lakely quotes a passage in which Moglen declares himself “committed to the struggle for free speech, free knowledge, and free technology.” Which sounds pretty good for me. Lakely also quotes Students for Free Culture, a campus activist organization that to my knowledge has never taken a position on network neutrality regulation. He quotes the following passage, with what I assume is disapproval:

The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person — and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.

I’ve re-read that passage several times, and I’m still baffled about why any libertarian or supporter of the free market would object to it. The free market, after all, is a “bottom-up, participatory structure” for the economy—why wouldn’t we want “society and culture” organized in the same fashion? And what possible objection could there be to expanding access to “the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning?” Aren’t we all opposed to “injustice and oppression?”

I’m playing dumb a little bit. Stallman, Moglen, Benkler, Wu, Lessig, et all are not libertarians, and they have a tendency to rhetorical excess that rubs free-market types the wrong way. Moglen in particular likes to salt his speeches with Marxist jargon that almost seems tailor-made to alienate libertarians. So fair enough: Eben Moglen is not the free software movement’s best ambassador to the libertarian movement.

But it’s important that we not exalt form over substance. The libertarian quarrel with socialism isn’t with their egalitarianism, but with their willingness to impose that egalitarianism by force of law. Libertarians argue that free markets and robust civil society are good for the poor precisely because they are “bottom-up, participatory structures” that give every individual the opportunity to make the most of their own lives.

The free software movement is textbook example of the libertarian thesis: it’s a private, voluntary community producing public goods without a dime of taxpayer support. Some leaders of the free software movement don’t realize they’re walking libertarian case studies, and some have an unfortunate tendency to employ left-wing rhetoric to describe what they’re doing. But if you look at the substance of their views, and even more if you look at their actions, it’s hard to find anything for libertarians to object to.

So Lakely winds up attacking a movement full of actual and potential allies because some of its members support a proposed government regulation Lakely (and I) oppose. And to be fair, Lakely is far from alone. A number of libertarian and free-market intellectuals and organization have gone out of their way to antagonize the free software movement.I think this illustrates the danger of the “thin” conception of liberty espoused by Seavey, McCarthy, and company. A libertarian whose conception of liberty is confined to limited government is going to be left rudderless when confronted with a pro-liberty movement whose concerns are orthogonal to the size of government. And this is not only stupid politically, it’s also a huge mistake on the merits because ultimately classical liberalism is about liberty, not just limited government.