All posts by Fernando Teson

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Afghanistan and sovereignty

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The US administration has justified the withdrawal from Afghanistan by saying that the United States should not fight a civil war in another country. That war should be fought, they think, by the people themselves, not by a foreign power. Both Democrats and Republicans share this view, as apparently does the general public. Critics of the withdrawal object to the way the withdrawal was implemented, not to the withdrawal itself. They blast the failure of the government to evacuate Americans and others before withdrawal. But, all seem to agree, withdrawing is the right decision. The underlying idea seems to be that Afghanistan is a sovereign country, and that once the Al Qaeda terrorist threat was neutralized, the United States had no business remaining there. Afghan political problems should be solved by Afghans.

I think this is the wrong way to look at this tragedy. I will state my dissent in the starkest possible form: Afghanistan has no business being a sovereign state. If the only possible outcome of the political process is the rule of the Taliban, then the country is not a legitimate state, because the Taliban, one of the worst regimes of recent times, is not entitled to rule. I hope I don’t need to document what we can expect of Taliban rule. The Taliban will kill, torture, and terrorize everyone, women in particular. Saying that these atrocities are an incident of sovereignty or self-determination is too grotesque to be taken seriously. This is true even if the Taliban allows all Americans and others to safely evacuate, and even if Afghanistan (improbably) does not allow anti-Western terrorists to operate in its territory. For the focus is not us but them, the Afghans, who will be killed, tortured, and terrorized by these monsters.

What solution then? If the so-called international community is serious about human rights and human security, then it should send an international force, defeat the Taliban, and set up an international administration to rule the country in accordance with minimal international standards, as long as necessary, forever if need be.  The mistake of the US intervention is not that the United States was disrespectful of Afghan sovereignty. The mistake is that the United States was too respectful of Afghan sovereignty.

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The Minimum wage and symbolic behavior

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President Biden wants to raise the minimum wage (MW) to $15. Many politicians, labor unions, and others support this policy. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, however, predicted that raising the MW will cost 1.4 million jobs.

Economists already knew this, of course. By a simple application of the law and supply and demand we can predict that raising the MW will create unemployment: if employers are forced to raise their salaries they will hire less workers.

To be sure, the literature is not unanimous. A well-known paper by Card and Krueger used empirical data to question the conventional wisdom that the MW reduces employment. However, their findings have been repeatedly challenged (see especially here). I cannot adjudicate the issue here, but an intellectually honest examination (such as the one conducted by the CBO) must acknowledge that, given the extant specialized literature, there is at least a serious probability that raising the MW will cause unemployment.

Yet, in my conversations with supporters of the MW I have found a stiff resistance to even consider the objection. Some deny that the MW causes unemployment, often citing the Card & Krueger paper. This position is implausible if the MW supporter refuses to consider the evidence and arguments against Card & Krueger, especially given that the weight of expert opinion is on the other side. An honest observer should not cherry-pick the evidence and at the very least remain agnostic or cautious in support of the MW.

But caution is not what we see. Setting aside the evidence, some say that the MW is required for moral reasons. This is an interesting position, because it seeks to block empirical considerations in the evaluation of the MW. This is odd, however. If the MW has bad consequences, what could possibly be the non-empirical reasons in its favor? Maybe this one: support for MW expresses support for the poor, here represented by the lowest-wage earners. But if the MW causes unemployment, that means that by supporting the MW one fails to support the poor, since the unemployed are generally poorer than the MW earners.

Maybe the MW supporter can argue as follows:
(1) No one knows for sure if the MW creates unemployment.
(2) Supporting the MW expresses solidarity with the poor.
(3) Expressing solidarity with the poor is noble.
(4) Therefore, I am justified in supporting the MW, since in doing so I perform a noble action that does not have obvious bad consequences.

The two first premises are questionable. Premise (1) misrepresents the status quaestionis, as I indicated earlier. Economists have studied the issue, and the consensus is that there is at least a serious question that the MW will reduce employment. Premise (2) is dubious, because the expressive value of MW support is entirely parasitic on the mistaken belief that raising the MW helps wage earners without producing any bad consequences. This is a violation of Hazlitt’s injunction that in order to evaluate a policy, we must consider not just its effects on the group that benefits, but also its effects on other social groups. A policy must be evaluated by both its seen and unseen effects. Since (1) and (2) are false, (4) is false.

If the MW supporter instead claims that those already employed are morally deserving beneficiaries of the raise, then he must not only justify why them, and not others, deserve this benefit, but, as important, openly acknowledge that the policy will hurt many others. MW supporters never do this. They just deny or ignore these bad consequences.

I happen to believe that the best explanation of why many people support the MW despite the evidence is that they are grandstanding. They signal their compassion by taking advantage of the ignorance of the public about the functioning of labor markets. This is an instance of discourse failure: the public assertion of a falsehood where the speaker has truth-insensitive reasons for saying what she says.

But even taking the MW supporter at her word, that there are non-empirical, or moral, reasons for such support, the position doesn’t hold. Symbolism may have a place in certain contexts. Think, for example, of a public expression of solidarity with victims of genocide. Even if such act does not save the victims, the symbolic expression of support may be an appropriate or commendable act.

But symbolism has no place in the realm of economic policy, where outcomes control. If people support the MW in the name of helping workers, and it turns out that the MW hurts more workers than those it helps, then that should end the debate.

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Violent Protest and Lesser evil

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Recently I argued that the deliberate destruction of the property of innocent persons by otherwise justified protesters is condemned by the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), which requires that such collateral harm be merely foreseen, and not directly intended.

But someone may reply that the DDE is wrong and that whether intent is direct or oblique doesn’t really matter. She may propose instead the Doctrine of the Lesser Evil (DLE). According to DLE, we are sometimes justified in harming persons directly in order to achieve a worthier cause. A classical example is a person starving at a mountain. He is permitted to trespass into someone else’s cabin, eat their food, and so on, in order to survive. Surely everyone accepts this. Similarly, protesters who burn the neighbors’ buildings as a way to end racial injustice are justified, given the disparity of values at stake.

But the case of violent protest is disanalogous to the case of the starving person at the mountain. In the latter, breaking into the cabin and eating the food is surviving. There is no causal relationship between the harmful act and the worthy end. They are identical. In contrast, in the case of violent protest the causal relationship between the harmful act (burning buildings) and the worthy goal (end racial injustice) is (to put it mildly) tenuous. It is improbable that burning buildings will end racial injustice.

The upshot is that in order to dispense with the intent requirement of the DDE, the agent’s probability of success must be high. The DDE, perhaps, condemns some actions that the DLE allows. But even under the DLE it is unlikely that this intentional harm to third parties can be justified.

(Many thanks to Alejandro Chehtman of Di Tella University, Buenos Aires, for flagging the issue.)