Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

16 Roger Kopplhammered out represent “conceptual agreement” to those principles. Holcomberecounts Yeager’s response to Holcombe’s contractarianism: “You don’t reallybelieve that, do you?” Part of the trouble for Yeager is the idea of conceptual agreement,which he takes to mean “no agreement.” For Holcombe, the force of thiscriticism comes from the insight that contractarianism tends to represent coercivegovernment as a matter of agreement. “The contractarian framework suggeststhat, from a normative perspective, we should abide by government’s rules becausethey are something we have (conceptually) agreed to, but in what sense have weagreed to the coercive power of government? The contractarian frameworkaccords government more legitimacy than it deserves.” Yeager has influencedHolcombe’s thinking, but he has not won him over completely. In particular, heworries that Yeager’s position “does not adequately safeguard individual rights.”Holcombe notes that “Economists often argue that individuals are the bestjudges of their own well-being, but Yeager does not accept this as a universal truth.”I believe Yeager is quite right on this point. Holcombe raises a basic issue in liberaltheory that has, I think, been somewhat miscast by those liberal theorists whodeclare the individual best able to judge his own interests. We are sometimes toldthat in commercial society the individual judges his own interests and his own comparativeadvantage. He decides for himself how to live and work. This statementmay seem to suggest that only one person is judging the best use of my time, namelyme. But in commercial society many decentralized actors have a role in judginghow I should spend my time. I am one of them, but so are my family members, myemployer, potential employers, religious leaders, and so on. Important in thisgroup, I think, are employers and potential employers. One of the functions of theentrepreneur is to judge how to use the labor time of others. If the entrepreneur hasa comparative advantage in making such judgments, he will continue to be in aposition to offer workers a guaranteed wage in exchange for his right to direct theirefforts. In some contexts, employers may insist on standards of good character andreputation, thus guiding individuals toward some commonly accepted ethicalstandards. Outside the workplace, the individual has many sources of adviceon how to behave, including religion. He may also seek, however, the practicaladvice of self-help manuals. The Great Original of this species in America is theauto biography of Benjamin Franklin, which includes Franklin’s “Project of Self-Improvement.” The advantage of individual autonomy is not so much that theindividual chooses his own path. Yeager is right to deny that the individual is alwaysthe best judge of his own well-being. The advantage consists in the increased probability,relative to available alternatives such as central control, that the individualwill be guided, in the different aspects of his life, by persons enjoying a comparativeadvantage in providing such guidance.Laurence Moss shares Holcombe’s concern over human rights. Moss addressesthe “eliminationist politics” of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Moss’s main point isthat mass murder may be perfectly efficient in the economic sense, as long as youare among the killers and not a victim. “Without a strong commitment to humanrights norms, which must dominate any economic efficiency argument no matterhow well constructed, the economist turned policy maker is not likely to have much