The Tamerlane Principle

Got back a bit late today and didn’t have time to finish my post on how sanctions are affecting Russia, so that’s been bumped to tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought I’d re-up a 2011 post from my old blog, which I quoted last week in my post about the war. It’s called “The Tamerlane Principle”, and it explains why I think an economically interventionist state is necessary for the preservation of human liberty.

We’re all familiar with the idea that a strong national defense is an essential requirement for freedom — if people don’t band together for mutual defense against conquerors, they’ll quickly find their liberties revoked by the first tyrant who can scrape together an army. So when calling for less government intervention in the economy, libertarians often include a carve-out for national defense.

Fine and good. But I argue here that government intervention in the economy needs to go far beyond maintenance of an army in order to safeguard liberty. A modern military is not just a bunch of guys with rifles — it’s a highly complex, specialized force deeply dependent on advanced technology, high-throughput manufacturing, efficient administration, a literate and educated recruitment pool, and many other features of a modern rich industrialized economy. Those things in turn depend crucially on state-provided public goods such as infrastructure, education, bureaucracy, basic research, and potentially even industrial policy. If we are to have the power to safeguard our individual liberties, we need a strong and efficient state to shape our society into one capable of defending itself.

Of course, Vladimir Putin is now giving us a vivid and grisly reminder that modern Tamerlanes do in fact exist, and that it takes strong states to resist these conquerors. Thus, when setting economic policy in the 2020s, we would all do well to keep the Tamerlane Principle in our minds. Anyway, here’s the original 2011 post:

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Πηγή: noahpinion.substack.com