I’ve never really understood the uproar over steroid¹ use in baseball. Unlike some other sports baseball lacked any actual rule banning steroids or performance enhancing drugs before 2004. True there was a policy (without any penalties) generally banning any baseball player from using or possessing any illegal drug or controlled substance but it’s also a MLB policy now that players can’t drink in their clubhouse. Surely you don’t feel that someone who snuck a beer into the clubhouse after a game would be a cheater do you? What about the players who bummed a valium for a plane flight? Sleep helps you play so it’s giving you an advantage on the field. Remember in the baseball culture of that time the use of steroids wasn’t considered a big deal. Besides, the substances used by the more sophisticated users very well might not have been scheduled, and thus not illegal², at the time.

Taking a broader perspective on the attitude we take to cheating in baseball it’s simply absurd to try and hang your the outrage at steroid use on the notion that it’s cheating. When a pitcher is caught scuffing the ball or applying spit it’s not a big issue the way it would be if they were found to be using steroids. Of course some would argue that steroid use by a player undermines the validity of their records by making it impossible to compare them to the past greats and thus damages the game. Why anyone would think that violating a policy that everyone understood wasn’t a genuine rule of the game should undermine the validity of your record but actually cheating during the game doesn’t count for that much totally baffles me but it doesn’t matter as the whole notion that tis nonsensical. As people have throughly documented past players have unfairly benefited from evils like segregation and rule changes to such a degree that the notion of comparing players from one era to another simply by examining the numbers doesn’t make any sense.

Finally, when pushed on these two arguments the people making a fuss about about steroids usage retreat to the argument that these players are role models and setting a bad example for children. Even if so where is the outrage over players who spend the night carousing, who leave their wives or don’t save enough money? Children see baseball players publicly flaunt all kinds of bad behavior all the time but they only hear about the steroid use because moralizing fans and prosecutors insisting on digging it up. Moreover, while these players certainly take some risk they aren’t desperate body builders, even with the steroids they live a healthier lifestyle than most public figures. In my view we should simply take the use of performance enhancing drugs as just another evolution in the long series of changes to the game.

So if the revelations about baseball players past steroid use hasn’t upset me what has? Government prosecutors threatening to prosecute a man’s wife and mother in law for tax violations just to pressure him into spilling the beans on Barry Bonds.** As I’ve said previously I think it should be illegal (frankly I would add it to the constitution) to threaten someone’s family to secure their testimonty. Even if the practice itself doesn’t seem repugnant to you if the defense can’t (openly) pay witnesses to testify for fear it would bias their testimony why should the prosecution be able to threaten their family with jail time? But even if you accept the practice is sometimes nencessery is the Barry Bonds case really that important?

I can’t believe that the government is threatening to screw over a man’s family just so he will help them prove Barry Bonds lied. That really is a new low.

What’s truly amazing about the Phelps bong incident is that people manage to express shock and outrage at his behavior with a straight face. Especially given the fact that they couldn’t have really found it that unlikely that someone in Phelps’ situation would smoke some pot. I mean some of the things they say would be too over the top for an onion story:

He should have known better this time, and at this point, you wonder if Phelps has a problem. He has shown up in plenty of pictures on the Web, and you never know how credible they are. But they become more and more realistic with each verified mistake. He promises never again. To me, he has promised that already wearing red, white and blue. Maybe that Olympic ideal seems hokey to some, but he has packaged it and made the most of it.

I particularly liked the attempt in this article to reach out to the pot sympathetic crowd by suggesting that even if it was ok for a random guy to smoke pot somehow it wasn’t for Phelps. Presumably because he was a role model which would have the harmful effect of….I know, letting random guys know it’s ok to smoke pot. Hmm.

Does she not realize how many middle- and high-school kids look up to Michael Phelps? That he’s on the front of Wheaties boxes right now? That we all warn our kids about the dangers of drug use? Most parents find that photo sad and disappointing and will use it as a Teachable Moment for teenagers. What Michael Phelps did was a shame, but adults’ defending—and even encouraging—his drug use are far more shameful.

This one just demonstrates the reasons I tend not to convince many people. I just don’t do the whole underhanded shift from, they disagree with me about what is dangerous, to, they must be recklessly encouraging behavior they know is bad. More on this later.

However, this whole situation raises a puzzling issue. If people realize that pot use is actually pretty common, indeed pretty common even in the sort of person they would see as being on the ‘right track’¹, why does opposition to pot remain so strong? I mean one might think that if many of your friends, major political figures you know, famous scientists and Olympian record holders all smoked up why would they think legalizing pot would be a big deal?

The explanation is that we don’t always, or even mostly, go from evidence to conclusion as we pretend it does. Often there is some reason we would like to accept the conclusion so we manufacture a story to tell ourselves about how we are justified in that belief. For instance we all realize that “My parents were catholic” isn’t a valid justification for accepting the doctrine of original sin or salvation by faith and works but yet somehow people who are born to catholic parents are very likely to be catholic and many of them would give you a very different explanation of why they believe in Catholicism rather than Islam. Something very similar goes on when it comes to moral issues in politics.

Most people in our society grow up hearing the message that even occasional pot use in college is some kind of shameful dirty behavior, the sort of thing that people might whisper about many years later. Unlike getting totally smashed on cheap vodka at college parties where, despite it’s danger, people are usually happy to publicly laugh about after graduation most people still don’t want their grandma² knowing they smoked up or even that they are okay with people getting stoned. Therefore when the subject comes up around the family table people have a strong incentive not to voice support for loosening pot laws. Indeed, if you have actually gotten stoned the conversation likely makes you anxious about being found out and the last thing you want to do is to give them cause to suspect you think smoking pot isn’t a big deal. Thus there is a strong pressure to adopt some kind of rationalization which lets you avoid thinking of yourself as a hypocrite without requiring you tell grandma that her worries about pot are overblown. Of course when you get to the age where you are having kids yourself an older sister or a prudish new friend take grandma’s place.

This is where your baby brother (alternatively your child) steps into the equation. You recognize that pot can become a harmful habit for some people. Sure so can WoW but if you buy your baby brother WoW for Christmas no one will view you as foolish and irresponsible for encouraging MMORPG playing. We want other people to think we are responsible and mature so we make sure to make grave sounding statements about the risks of pot, especially if grandma is in the room. Even in private we tend to feel guilty about telling a younger brother it’s ok to go smoke up where we wouldn’t have the slightest qualm about taking him out to get smashed when he turns 21. The harms we do by failing to be sufficiently cautionary are very concrete and those done by going overboard are diffuse and abstract so we are motivated to talk up warnings and dangers.

There are a whole host of ills to be laid at the feet of our CYA approach to giving advice but in the case of drugs it augments the granny factor and hands us a ready made excuse for our hypocrisy. Well sure, the reasoning goes, my friends and I can handle pot fine but people my little brother’s age/son’s age shouldn’t be able to get it. Or if you got stoned at that age you instead substitute a concern about the increased strength of today’s weed or it’s increasing association with hard drugs. Of course in actuality making drugs illegal tends to make them easier for youth to access (drug dealers rarely card) and stronger weed is actually more healthy weed but we aren’t evaluating an argument we are searching for a narrative that makes us the mature and responsible party and avoids a disapproving lecture/look from grandma without forcing us to think we are hypocrites. Once ‘grandma’ becomes on older friend and our little brother is replaced with our daughter it takes incredibly strength of character (or a bunch of hippie friends) not to just go along with the flow and accept this narrative.

Frankly, I’m not sure what can be done about this problem. The baby boomers seem to illustrate the fact that the pressure to conform and be thought well of is so strong that even people who smoked up back in the 60s have become the older generation who disapproves of anyone who is foolish enough to suggest to youth that pot smoking isn’t a big deal. I fear it is a stable equilibrium.

It’s not uncommon on the blogs I read to see people objecting to some kind of government action as inconsistent with libertarianism. As a mild example consider this post critiquing the idea of letting bankruptcy judges modify mortgage obligations. More extreme examples are easy to find and usually characterized by strident, but unsupported, declarations that such and such is in principle unacceptable government intervention. Now I happen to agree it would be a mistake to hand bankruptcy judges the general power to renegotiate mortgages¹ but the problem is that referencing libertarianism does nothing to support this argument nor virtually all of the other arguments it is invoked to support. You can no more justify specific governmental interventions by saying you are a libertarian than you could justify federal funding for giving beanie babies to the poor by saying you are a democrat.

Before we can see this we first need to eliminate the spectre of principled libertarianism from the discussion. Many self identified libertarians seem to take the position that the government is absolutely forbidden from interfering in certain vaguely defined kinds of private behaviors no matter what the consequences. However, it’s no accident that, apart from Ayn Rand’s Dexedrine fueled rantings², the deontological restrictions on acceptable government are always left vague or unexplored. Given any supposed inviolable libertarianesque restriction on governmental behavior it’s easy to create a hypothetical where the impact of this principle is so repugnant no one would endorse it. You think the government ought not to ever seize private property solely to distribute the benefits more broadly? What if that property was billions of doses of the only cure for a devastating global plague and the owner was dead seat on destroying them? Would anyone really oppose government seizure of property in that circumstance?

Sure, some people will bite the bullet and endorse deontological moral theories but the rules they endorse don’t resemble the sort of governmental restrictions libertarians have in mind. Given the consistent failure of anyone to articulate a remotely attractive inviolable set of libertarian restrictions on the government we can dismiss any supposed principled libertarian objection to governmental action unless it comes with an attractive articulation of those inviolable restrictions. In other words you can’t just insist that there is some unstated but intuitively compelling rule out there which prevents the government from doing what you find objectionable and expect others to just take it on faith.

Once we accept that in theory severe enough consequences can justify what libertarians would otherwise see as objectionable government interference the whole argumentative structure shifts. The libertarian can no longer say, “that policy would violate personal property it’s unacceptable,” he admits that sometimes the government must do just that. Instead he must argue that the consequentialist benefits of the policy aren’t sufficient to balance the harms to liberty. Indeed, it would be perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to say, “I think that 2 accidental deaths per thousand people is a reasonable price to pay to be free of gun regulations but not 3 per thousand.”³. However, this kind of argument is never made since it saps the appeal to libertarianism of all it’s appeal. Whatever valuations you place on liberty seem arbitrary and the argument is mired in the same kind of consequentalist quibbles that an purely pragmatic objection would face.

Of course a sophisticated libertarian would instead say that libertarianism is a formula for producing good policy outcomes. On this view it’s not that protecting liberty necessarily has some kind of intrinsic value but that when liberty is protected good consequences tend to result. This kind of libertarian tends to emphasize the effectiveness of private property and the market economy in creating wealth and alleviating suffering and try to parlay this into an argument against whatever policy they are currently opposing. That argument might be enough to suggest we should default to a libertarian approach but it isn’t enough to counter specific claims that this policy will lead to beneficial results. After all it’s only in most cases that the libertarian approach is superior but the other side has given specific arguments to the effect that in this case government intervention would be beneficial. If the argument in favor of this specific policy is valid then it should be enacted as one of the few exceptions to the superiority of the libertarian approach. If the argument is shown to be invalid then the reference to libertarianism does no extra work in rejecting the policy. All that being a libertarian does for the author or audience is arm them with the conviction that there is probably a flaw in the arguments for some governmental intervention. It doesn’t resolve them from the responsibility to pinpoint those flaws.

Perhaps the best case that someone could use to bring a general libertarian philosophy to bear on a specific question of policy is to argue that people are irrationally biased toward governmental intervention and against the, usually better, libertarian solution. If the libertarian can convince us that we lack the facilities to rationally evaluate arguments for this policy he can leave us with nothing but the raw general preference for libertarian solutions to guide us. In other words if we are no better evaluating specific policy arguments in our native language than in esperanto we might as well follow the same strategy in both cases and always guess the more libertarian solution is better. Unfortunately, at best this gets us a vague, “well it’s more likely than not that intervention will be bad,” which is far weaker than the conclusion the libertarian in the debate desires. Moreover, it’s simply implausible to believe that we can somehow rationally evaluate the argument that on average the libertarian policy tends to be superior but can’t gain any greater information about the better solution in any specific case. After all if we can’t tell what policies tend to work and which don’t how did we ever conclude that the libertarian policies were preferable in most instances in the first place?

Ultimately one should be a (sophisticated) libertarian only if in most cases the arguments for the libertarian style solution are compelling. One justifies being a libertarian by reference to many specific arguments for the superiority of the libertarian solution. You can’t justify rejecting an argument for a specific government intervention because you are a libertarian.

Kellogg is jettisoning Phelps because he was photographed smoking pot. I think those of us who disagree with the deciscion should boycott Kellogg in response.