First of all, why is it okay to mix science and religion (with atheists eagerly do in debunking religious claims) but not okay to mix science and politics/economics? Why is it okay for liberal atheists to stick it to religious believers and twist the knife slowly, but when it comes to getting your own (political/economic) beliefs challenged, that’s off limits — NOMA (nonoverlapping magisterial) for science and politics? I don’t see how they are different in principle. Skeptic is a science magazine, not an “atheist” magazine; nevertheless, we routinely deal with religious claims and no one ever complains about that. The closest we have come to political/economic issues is environmentalism (Vol. 9, No. 2 — sold out), overpopulation (Vol. 5, No. 1), and global warming Vol. 14, No. 1). For all three we published several articles; in Vol. 14, No. 1, for example, we published articles both skeptical of global warming and accepting of global warming. So I don’t see what would be wrong with publishing articles pro, con, and neutral on political and economic claims.

One person wrote me a private email that said he thought of me as the next Carl Sagan, but now that I’ve gone to the dark side (turning Right, although I’m as critical of the Right as I am the Left), because Carl was “apolitical.” Carl Sagan was many things, but apolitical was not one of them. Carl was a Liberal and proudly wore his politics on his sleeve, such as when he marched in protest at nuclear sites or testified before Congress about the dangers of nuclear winter. I admire him for having the courage of his convictions, which intimately blended his science and (Left) politics. If you think Sagan was apolitical it is because you happen to agree with his politics and so those ideas seem simply correct, not political. If you don’t share his politics (I share about half of them), then it’s obvious that Sagan was not apolitical.

The liberal bias in the skeptical community was identified by many people in the comments section of my blog, for example by “DR,” “James,” and “Devil’s Advocate”:

… Sadly, there is a lot of hatred toward libertarianism at JREF [he means TAM]. I can be an atheist, believe gay marriage is ok, think nothing of smoking pot, and I won’t get half as much grief from a conservative that I do from an American liberal who reels and squirms when I say that the welfare state is immoral or that free trade and voluntary transactions in capitalism promote fair and just outcomes. It’s like the only reason why I have rationalized this set of morality is because I’m a supremely evil person and must be wrong… —DR

… I’m disappointed, but not surprised by the large group of liberal skeptics. I’ve talked to too many Democrat-card-carrying skeptics that spout the same unoriginal, canned rhetoric and continual spewing hatred of Republicans. For a group that supposedly supports tolerance, they’re anything but tolerant …
—James

I’ve three times over twenty years joined local skeptic groups and all three times there was a presumption that if I was a skeptic, then of course I’m also liberal in my politics. Two times I tried to be what I am but was marginalized, treated like a Goldwater (or Reagan, or Bush) mole. The third time I tried to avoid political discussion, but it was not possible, so, unwilling to lie, I left. My refusal to come over to pure liberalism clearly wasn’t going to be tolerated. All I wanted to do was examine UFO claims and crop circles, but… —Devil’s Advocate

Another critic named John D. Draeger makes a good point that I wish to acknowledge: “He [me] does NOT believe that political persuasions and different economic models for how societies should be run are moral value judgements…. Social services can be paid for in different ways, and in a democratic society it’s up to the majority to define how that is done. Social services can be paid for in different ways, and in a democratic society it’s up to the majority to define how that is done.” That’s true, in a democracy the majority rules how to divvy up public funds for social services, and that tends to be more of a value judgment than a science. But as someone else wrote just below that, quite cleverly I think…

First of all, democratic societies can still be evil, as the famous saying goes: “democracy is two wolves and one lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” And then in another famous quote (attributed to several), “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. Thus our founding fathers gave us a republic … if we can keep it.

Even this is a value judgment, I agree, but surely we can apply some forms of social science to inform our value judgments. For example, we may as a society make the value judgment that it would be good if every child received a basic K–12 education. I agree with this value judgment, and would add to it the value judgment that it would be equally important for every child to have a computer and Internet access because that is the future of education. So we share that value judgment. However, the next question is a pragmatic one: who is going to pay for this education (and computers/Internet)? Parents? Churches? NGOs? Charities? Government? If the latter — the value judgment we have made — then do parents get to choose among the various government schools of where to send their children? (No.) Do parents who choose to send their children to private schools have to also pay for government schools? (Yes.) Is that fair? You make that value judgment. I don’t think that it is fair. To be consistent, if you are pro-choice on abortion you should also be pro-choice on education. The deeper value judgment here is being pro-choice about everything. Choice = freedom.

Some correspondents hated the political diagram because it seems to elevate libertarianism above the traditional left-right spectrum. Okay, then you come up with something other than the left-right linear spectrum to visualize where someone would fall on that line who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You draw it and I’ll publish it in a future blog.

Some people hate the word “libertarian.” I’m not crazy about it either, but haven’t thought of a better label. Labels are useful because they enable people to take cognitive shortcuts, but they also lead to shortcuts to nuanced thinking about what someone believes. “Oh, you’re one of those…” full stop. We all do this, of course, but I call myself a libertarian for the same reason I call myself a feminist, an atheist, and a pro-choicer — because it is the accepted language and we have to communicate ideas with language. But I much prefer to be assessed on specific issues.

Several of you said that I am a victim of one of my own central tenets of baloney detection: the confirmation bias, where we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore the disconfirmatory evidence. Yes, I will admit, I do this. Everyone does, and we must guard against it, especially when it comes to religion, politics, and economics. To combat this problem, I read the conservative Wall Street Journal and the liberal Los Angeles Times. I listen to such conservative talk radio hosts as Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Praeger as well as the very liberal Bill Maher. I have read Karl Marx’s books as deeply and carefully as I have read Adam Smith’s books. I have read a host of books from liberal and conservative and libertarian authors on the current economic meltdown. And although I have a few libertarian and conservative friends, because I work in the sciences and in publishing, the vast majority of my friends, acquaintances, staff, co-workers, and colleagues are liberals who I can assure you are never shy about letting me know where they think I’ve gone off the political or economic rails.

Finally, let me add that one of the appealing things to me about the libertarian worldview is that it is optimistic, uplifting, and most importantly (to me) anti-elitist. I’m in favor of doing whatever we can to allow the little guy to succeed and to break up power blocs that prevent the average Joe or Jane from reaching their full potential. The Constitutional divisions of power in our Democracy — emulated by many others around the world — are a huge improvement from centuries past that allowed or enabled some to succeed at the expense of others. That was a zero-sum world. Over the past 200 years the spread of democracy and capitalism has done more toward achieving a Nonzero world than anything else — more people in more places more of the time have more power and liberty and wealth than any time in the previous four millennium. Therefore, the more we can spread democracy and capitalism the better off more of us will be more of the time.

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Since 99 percent our evolutionary history was spent as hunter-gatherers living in small bands of a few dozen to a few hundred people, we evolved a psychology not always well equipped to reason our way around the modern world. What may seem like irrational behavior today may have actually been rational a hundred thousand years ago. Without an evolutionary perspective, the assumptions of Homo economicus — that “Economic Man” is rational, self-maximizing, and efficient in making choices — make no sense. Take economic profit versus psychological fairness as an example.

Behavioral economists employ an experimental procedure called the Ultimatum Game. It goes something like this. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you are both richer by that amount. How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner is a rational self-interested money-maximizer he isn’t going to turn down a free ten bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that deviate much beyond a $70–$30 split are usually rejected.

Why? Because they aren’t fair. Says who? Says the moral emotion of “reciprocal altruism,” which evolved over the Paleolithic eons to demand fairness on the part of our potential exchange partners. “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” only works if I know you will respond with something approaching parity. The moral sense of fairness is hardwired into our brains and is an emotion shared by most people and primates tested for it. Thousands of experimental trials with subjects from Western countries have consistently revealed a sense of injustice at low-ball offers. Further, we now have a sizable body of data from peoples in non-Western cultures around the world, including those living close to how our Paleolithic ancestors lived, and although their responses vary more than modern peoples living in market economies do, they still show a strong aversion to unfairness.

The deeper evolution of this can be seen in the behavior of our primate cousins. In studies with both chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys, the Emory University primatologists Frans deWaal and Sarah Brosnan found that when two individuals work together on a task for which only one is rewarded with a desired food, if the reward recipient does not share that food with his task partner, the partner will refuse to participate in future tasks and expresses emotions that are clearly meant to convey displeasure at the injustice. In another experiment in which two capuchin monkeys were trained to exchange a granite stone for a cucumber slice, they made the trade 95 percent of the time. But if one monkey received a grape instead — a delicacy capuchins greatly prefer over cucumbers — the other monkey cooperated only 60 percent of the time, sometimes even refusing the cucumber slice altogether. In a third condition in which one monkey received a grape without even having to swap a granite stone for it, the other monkey cooperated only 20 percent of the time, and in several instances became so outraged at the inequity of the outcome that they heaved the cucumber slice back at the human experimenters!

Such results suggest that all primates, including us, evolved a sense of justice, a moral emotion that signals to the individual that an exchange was fair or unfair. Fairness evolved as a stable strategy for maintaining social harmony in our ancestors’ small bands, where cooperation was reinforced and became the rule while freeloading was punished and became the exception. Apparently irrational economic choices today — such as turning down a free $10 with a sense of righteous injustice — were at one time rational when seen through the lens of evolution.

Just as it is a myth that evolution is driven solely by “selfish genes” and that organisms are exclusively greedy, selfish, and competitive, it is a myth that the economy is driven by people who are exclusively greedy, selfish, and competitive. The fact is, we are both selfish and selfless, cooperative and competitive. There exists in both life and economies mutual struggle and mutual aid. In the main, however, the balance in our nature is heavily on the side of good over evil. Markets are moral and modern economies are founded on our virtuous nature. The Gordon Gekko “Greed is Good” model of business is the exception and the Google Guys “Don’t Be Evil” model of business is the rule. If this were not the case market capitalism would have imploded long ago.

In his magnum opus on the power of free markets, Human Action, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted: “The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures but at the same time improved the people’s standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggest that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The results speak for themselves. The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St. Paul’s: Si monumentum requires, circumspice.” If you seek his monument, look around.

Capitalism may not need apologists and propagandists, but it does need a vigorous scientific and rational defense as evidenced by the fact that so many people still distrust free markets. Market solutions to social problems are generally received with skepticism. Businessmen are distrusted, corporations looked at askance, and there is a well-known resentment against those who have most benefited from markets. (As one New Yorker cartoon featuring two people in conversation reads: “I hated Bill Gates before it became so fashionable.”) Why do people distrust free markets?

Part of the answer can be found in our history. Because we lived for so long in small groups of a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred people in hunter-gatherer communities in which everyone was either genetically related or knew one another intimately, most resources were shared, wealth accumulation was almost unheard of, and excessive greed and avarice was punished. Thus, we naturally respond to a free market system in which conspicuous wealth is paraded as a sign of success with envy and anger. Call it evolutionary egalitarianism.

Throughout most of the history of civilization as well, economic inequalities were not the result of natural differences in drive and talent between members of a society equally free to pursue their right to prosperity; instead, a handful of chiefs, kings, nobles, and priests exploited an unfair and rigged social system to achieve gains best described as ill gotten.

People also have a remarkably low tolerance for economic ambiguity. Free markets are chaotic and uncertain, uncontrollable and unpredictable. Most of us have little tolerance for such environments, and we have learned to expect that social institutions such as the government will bring a level of certainty to society. People who cannot afford (or who choose not to purchase) insurance against acts of God typically expect acts of government to save them.

As well, there is well-documented liberal bias in the academy and the media against free markets. A 2005 study by the George Mason University economist Daniel Klein, for example, found that at two of America’s leading institutes of higher learning Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of 10 to 1 at the University of California, Berkeley and by 7.6 to 1 at Stanford University. Measuring political attitudes through voter registrations among faculty in twenty different departments, in the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors), and in some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn’t a single Republican to be found.

In another 2005 study on “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,” Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte discovered that only 15 percent of those teaching at American colleges and universities describe themselves as conservative while 72 percent said they were liberal, and that figure climbed to 80 percent in such departments as English literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies, with only five percent labeling themselves as conservative. In a 2005 publication in the Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Professor John McGinnis reviewed the faculties of the top 21 law schools rated by the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings and found that politically active professors at these top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats — 81 percent contributed “wholly or predominantly” to Democratic campaigns while just 15 percent did the same for Republicans.

In a manner and potency matching academia, the bias in the media is against free market economics. A comprehensive 2005 study conducted by UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri economist Jeffrey Milyo, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, measured media bias by counting the times that a particular media outlet cited various think tanks and policy groups, and then compared this with the number of times that members of Congress cited the same groups. “Our results show a strong liberal bias: all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress.” Not surprisingly, the authors discovered that CBS Evening News and the New York Times “received scores far to the left of center” and that “the most centrist media outlets were PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Newsnight, and ABC’s Good Morning America.” Interestingly, USA Today — that ne plus ultra of pop print media — was closest to political center of all newspapers.

The strongest reason for skepticism of capitalism, however, is a myth commonly found in objections to both the theory of evolution and free market economics, and that is that they are based on the presumption that animals and humans are inherently selfish, and that the economy is like Tennyson’s memorable description of nature: “red in tooth and claw.” After Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer immortalized natural selection in the phrase “survival of the fittest,” one of the most misleading descriptions in the history of science and one that has been embraced by social Darwinists ever since, applying it inappropriately to racial theory, national politics, and economic doctrines. Even Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, reinforced what he called this “gladiatorial” view of life in a series of essays, describing nature “whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.”

If biological evolution in nature, and market capitalism in society, were really founded on and sustained by nothing more than a winner-take-all strategy, life on earth would have been snuffed out hundreds of millions of years ago and market capitalism would have collapsed centuries ago. This is, in fact, why WorldCom and Enron type disasters still make headlines. If they didn’t — if such corporate catastrophes caused by egregious ethical lapses were so common that they were not even worth covering on the nightly news — free market capitalism would implode. Instead it thrives, but just as eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, so too must it be for free markets, since both are inextricably bound together.

The 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat expressed a principle applicable in the 21st century: “Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.”

In my new book, The Mind of the Market, I describe in detail how in the modern world of nation states, economic sanctions are among the first steps taken by one nation against another when political diplomacy fails, as when the United States enforced them on Japan after its invasion of China in the 1930s, and these became a prelude (among other factors) to Japan’s retaliatory bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and our involvement in the greatest war in history. More recently, economic sanctions were imposed by the U.S. and Japan on India following its 1998 nuclear tests, and more recently by the U.S. on Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

Economic sanctions send this message: if you do not change your behavior we will no longer trade with you. And by Bastiat’s Principle, where our goods do not cross your frontiers, our armies will. Not inevitably, of course, but often enough in history that the principle retains its veracity. Economic sanctions are not a necessary or sufficient cause of war, but they are almost always a prelude to war, whether you are a consumer-trader or a hunter-gatherer. Consider the Yanomamö people of the Amazon, sometimes called the “fierce” people. There is good reason for the moniker because warfare has long been a part of Yanomamö life. As the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon discovered, however, the Yanomamö are also sophisticated traders, and the more they trade the less they fight. The reason is that trade creates alliances. One village cannot go to another village and announce that they are worried about being conquered by a third, more powerful village, since this would reveal weakness. Instead, they mask the real motives for alliance through trade and feasting, and as a result not only gain military protection but insure inter-village peace. Most interestingly, even though each Yanomamö group could produce its own goods for survival, in fact they don’t; they set up a division of labor and system of trade. They do this not because they are nascent capitalists, but because they want to form political alliances with other groups, and trade is an effective means of so doing. The end result is that when goods cross Yanomamö frontiers, Yanomamö armies do not.

The cooperation that goes into making trade successful accentuates amity and attenuates enmity between strangers and can even be seen at work in brain scans. Scientists at Emory University had 36 subjects play an exchange game while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan. They found that the areas of the brains of cooperators that lit up were the same areas activated in response to such stimuli as desserts, money, cocaine, attractive faces, and other basic pleasures. Specifically, there were two broad areas dense in neurons that responded, both rich in dopamine (a neurochemical related to addictive behaviors): the anteroventral striatum in the middle of the brain (the so-called “pleasure center”), and the orbitofrontal cortex just above the eyes, related to impulse control and the processing of rewards. Tellingly, the cooperative subjects reported increased feelings of trust toward and camaraderie with their game partners.

How does trust translate to trade? At the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, Paul Zak has demonstrated the relationship between trust, trade, and economic prosperity. He shows, for example, how trust is directly related to neurological chemicals such as oxytocin, a hormone synthesized in the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood by the pituitary. In women, oxytocin stimulates birth contractions, lactation, and maternal bonding with a nursing infant. In both women and men, it increases during sex and surges at orgasm, playing a role in pair bonding, an evolutionary adaptation for the long-term care of helpless infants. In exchange games, the more subjects are behaving in trusting ways, the more money they exchange and the higher the levels of oxytocin that are released by the brain. To find out if cooperating and trust lead to the release of oxytocin or if increased levels of oxytocin lead to more cooperation and trust, Zak infused oxytocin into subjects’ brains through a nose spray that is quickly absorbed by the body and discovered that it causes them to act more cooperatively.

Although there may be legitimate political reasons for imposing trade embargoes on nations behaving badly, there are economic consequences that lead directly to a breakdown of trust. By contrast, free trade makes people more trusting and trustworthy, which makes them more inclined to trade, which increases trust … creating a self-enforcing cycle of trust, trade, freedom, and prosperity.

I attended one of these seminars in 1981, when a close friend told me about Andrew Galambos, a retired aerospace engineer and physicist teaching private courses through the Free Enterprise Institute (hundreds of such organizations come and go throughout Mr. Doherty’s history), under an umbrella field he called “Volitional Science.” The introductory course was V-50. This was Econ 101 on freemarket steroids, an invigoratingly muscular black-and-white world where Adam Smith is good, Karl Marx is bad; individualism is good, collectivism bad; free economies are good, mixed economies bad.

Galambos’s course was popular in Orange County, Calif. (labeled by our neighbors in L.A. County as the “Orange Curtain”), and the time was right with President Reagan in office and conservatives on the ascendant. Where Rand advocated for limited government, Galambos proffered a theory in which everything in society would be privatized until government simply falls into disuse and disappears. Galambos identified three types of property: primordial (one’s life), primary (one’s thoughts and ideas), and secondary (derivatives of primordial and primary property, such as the utilization of land and material goods). To Galambos, capitalism is “that societal structure whose mechanism is capable of protecting all forms of private property completely.” To realize a truly free society, then, we have merely “to discover the proper means of creating a capitalist society.” In this free society, we are all capitalists.

Galambos’s story is not unusual in the history of this oft-fringy movement. He had a massive ego that propelled him to a successful career as a private lecturer, but led him to such ego-inflating pronouncements as his classification of all sciences into physical, biological, and his own “volitional sciences.” His towering intellect took him to great heights of interdisciplinary creativity, but often left him and his students tangled up in contradictions, as when we all had to sign a contract promising that we would not disclose his ideas to anyone, while we were also inveigled to solicit others to enroll. (“You’ve got to take this great course.” “What’s it about?” “I can’t tell you.”) And he had a remarkable ability to lecture for hours without notes in a colloquial style, but when two hours stretched into three, and three hours dragged into four, his audiences were never left wanting for more.

Most problematic, however, was any hope of translating theory into practice, which is where the rubber meets the road for any economic or political principle. Property definitions are all well and good, but what happens when we cannot agree on property rights infringements? The answer was inevitably something like this: “In a truly free society all such disputes will be peacefully resolved through private arbitration.” Sounds good in theory, but I would like more data from the real world. And, also typical of the movement, Galambos never published his long-promised book in his lifetime. Finally, in 1999, his estate issued Volume 1 of Sic Itur ad Astra (The Way to the Stars), a 942-page, $125 tome published by the Universal Scientific Publications Company, Inc. Galambos’s dream was to be a space entrepreneur and fly customers to the moon. According to his logic, in order to realize this dream he believed that society in its entirety had to be privatized first. Too bad Galambos did not live long enough to witness the space entrepreneur and libertarian Burt Rutan succeed in being the first to build a private rocket that reached space. It is a lesson libertarians should take to heart — we don’t need to do everything at once, and freedom is achieved one step at a time.

Another disturbing theme running throughout the libertarian movement, so well recounted by Mr. Doherty, is the sense that we are absolutely right. Absolute certainty generates absolute intolerance. One would think, for example, that Randian Objectivists would embrace other libertarians. But no, like the Baptists and Anabaptists, who warred over whether baptism should be implemented at birth or in adulthood, some of Rand’s biggest battles were fought not with socialists but with fellow libertarians. For example, libertarians disagree about foreign policy and the role of troops overseas, with some arguing that what other nations do is none of our business, while other libertarians hold that the protection of domestic property sometimes requires foreign intervention in a preemptive manner. Most commonly, libertarians rarely agree on the best strategy to bring about a free market society — through direct political activism within the system or by nonparticipation in hopes that the system will fall into disuse.

Barbara Branden, a close friend of Rand’s, recalled a dinner catastrophe that resulted from the first meeting between Rand, the libertarian economist Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises, the greatest intellectual defender of freemarket economics of the 20th century. “The evening was a disaster. It was the first time Ayn had discussed moral philosophy in depth with either of the two men. ‘My impression,’ she was to say, ‘was that von Mises did not care to consider moral issues, and Henry was seriously committed to altruism … We argued quite violently. At one point von Mises lost his patience and screamed at me.’” Economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, one of the godfathers of libertarianism, recalled an incident at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, at which was gathered a veritable Who’s Who of free market economists (including himself, Hayek, Hazlitt, Mises, Fritz Machlup, George Stigler, and Frank Knight). “One afternoon, the discussion was on the distribution of income, taxes, progressive taxes, and so on. In the middle of that discussion von Mises got up and said ‘You’re all a bunch of socialists,’ and stomped out of the room.” Such moral absolutism leads to moral absurdities, and the libertarian movement has been plagued with the problem for the entirety of its history. Defining a movement with bullet points that require a commitment to the entire list before membership is conferred more often than not leads to lower membership rolls, and libertarians are more guilty than most at excommunicating those who deviate even slightly from the canon.

Ironically, I believe that the libertarian dream of free minds and free markets will come about not through the traditional channels of libertarian books, magazines, and seminars, or even through political action (the Libertarian Party is alive but organizing its members is like herding cats), but through the marketplace itself — the Wikification and Googlefication of the economy has turned every man and woman into a capitalist. EBay is the biggest retail outlet on the planet, and anyone can participate — you don’t need a state license or a government permit. Through the Internet, anyone can communicate and trade with anyone else, thereby bypassing traditional channels of state control over commerce. With the open access to knowledge that the Internet provides, it is only a matter of time before the government control of peoples’ lives becomes obsolete. At that point, we will have achieved something close to the libertarian dream.

This article was originally published as “We Are All Capitalists Now” in the New York Sun.

In Rob Reiner’s 1992 film A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson’s character — the battle-hardened Marine Colonel Nathan R. Jessup — is being cross-examined by Tom Cruise’s naive rookie Navy lawyer Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, defending two Marines accused of killing a fellow soldier. He thinks Jessup ordered a “code red,” an off-the-books command to rough up a lazy Marine trainee in need of discipline, and that matters got tragically out of hand. Kaffee wants answers to specific questions about the incident. Jessup wants to lecture him on the meaning of freedom and the need to defend it: “Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.”

The simple observation that we live in a world with walls — and have for the past 6,000 years of recorded history — implies that those walls are needed. The constitutions of states cannot completely alter the constitution of humanity. In my recently published book, The Science of Good and Evil, I present a theory on the evolutionary origins of morality in which I argue that humans evolved to be relatively moral and cooperative within groups and relatively immoral and competitive between groups. Natural selection created within-group amity and between-group enmity. The result is that we are, by nature, tribalistic; love thy neighbor has traditionally meant thy fellow in-group members. The long-term solution to many of our global problems, then, lies in expanding the circle of who we include as fellow in-group members.

Studies by anthropologists show that one of the prime triggers of between-group violence is competition for scarce resources. Once the carrying capacity of a group’s environment is exceeded, the demand for resources will exceed the supply, leading to between-group competition and war. Thus, one way to attenuate between-group violence is to increase the supply of resources to meet the demands of those in need of them. The nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat expressed it thusly: “Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.”

A case study can be found in the Yanomamö people of the Amazon, the so-called “fierce” people. There is good reason for the moniker because warfare has long been a part of Yanomamö life. As the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon discovered, however, the Yanomamö are also sophisticated traders, and the more they trade the less they fight. The reason is that trade creates alliances.

If, as it is said, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” one of the primary means of protecting one’s group is to form alliances with other groups. Trade between groups is a powerful social adhesive. One village cannot go to another village and announce that they are worried about being conquered by a third, more powerful village, since this would reveal weakness. Instead, they mask the real motives for alliance through trade and feasting, and as a result not only gain military protection but insure inter-village peace. Most interestingly, even though each Yanomamö group could produce its own goods for survival, in fact they don’t; they set up a division of labor and system of trade. They do this not because they are nascent capitalists, but because they want to form political alliances with other groups, and trade is an effective means of so doing. The end result is that when goods cross Yanomamö frontiers, Yanomamö armies do not.

The point is this: trade evolved long before the state as a natural means of avoiding war. There is now archaeological evidence, for example, that over the past 200,000 years stone tools and other artifacts such as seashells, flint, mammoth ivory, and beads, were the objects of trade among our hominid ancestors, because they are often found hundreds of miles from where they were manufactured.
The psychology of trade probably has as much to do with forming alliances between individuals and groups as it does increasing the supply of resources, but the end result is the same: the cooperation that goes into making trade successful accentuates amity and attenuates enmity, leading to greater happiness and liberty for more people, in more places, more of the time.

Data from the neurosciences supports this thesis — cooperation leads to stimulation of the pleasure centers in the brain. Scientists at Emory University had 36 subjects play an exchange game while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan. They found that the areas of the brains of cooperators that lit up were the same areas activated in response to such stimuli as desserts, money, cocaine, attractive faces, and other basic pleasures. Specifically, there were two broad areas dense in neurons that responded, both rich in dopamine (a neurochemical related to addictive behaviors): the anteroventral striatum in the middle of the brain (the so-called “pleasure center,” for which rats will endlessly press a bar to have it stimulated, even foregoing food), and the orbitofrontal cortex just above the eyes, related to impulse control and the processing of rewards. Tellingly, the cooperative subjects reported increased feelings of trust toward and camaraderie with their game partners.

How does trust translate to trade? At the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, Paul Zak has demonstrated the relationship between oxytocin, trust, and economic prosperity. He argues that economists have shown how trust is among the most powerful factors affecting economic growth, and that since trust is directly related to neurological chemicals such as oxytocin, it is vital for national prosperity that the country maximize social interactions among its members, as well as members of other countries. Free trade is one of the most effective means of socializing, as is education, increased civil liberties, freedom of the press, freedom of association (most notably by increasing telephones and roads), and even a cleaner environment (people in countries with polluted environments show higher levels of estrogen antagonists, thereby lowering their levels of oxytocin and thus their feelings of trust).

Impoverished countries are poor, in part, because trust in the legal structures to protect business and personal investments are so low. Zak has even computed that “a 15 percent increase in the proportion of people in a country who think others are trustworthy raises income per person by 1 percent per year for every year thereafter.” For example, increasing levels of trust in the U.S. from its present 36 percent to 51 percent, would raise the average income for every man, woman, and child in the country by $400 per year, or $30,000 lifetime. It pays to trust.

Although extrapolating directly from neurochemistry to national economies is surely oversimplifying matters, what all this research tells us is that on one level we cooperate for the same reason we copulate — because it feels good. On a deeper evolutionary level, the reason cooperating feels good is because it is good for us, individually and as a species. Thomas Jefferson realized this in 1814: “These good acts give pleasure, but how it happens that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.”

How does trust and trade attenuate war and violence? In every case study of societies that made the transition from war to peace, there is a direct causal relationship between population size, ecological carrying capacity, and the availability and exchange of resources. The primary engine driving the shift in these ecological relationships is trade. When populations grow beyond the carrying capacity of their environments, they are forced into competition, which leads to war, which leads to alliances, which leads to trade, which leads to peace. In other words, the solution to war — that is, to move a society from a warlike existence to a peacelike existence — is not to be found in a particular type of government or religion or ideology or worldview; it is in a particular type of social process called trade. The evolutionary origin of trade may have been political alliances, but one of the unintended consequences is that trade produces a division of labor that generates more goods, for more people, more of the time.

This article was originally published in Toronto Globe and Mail.