POLICY Magazine
ROSS PARISH ESSAY: Liberty, Time Preference and Decadence
(1) Rousseau is of the view that luxury corrupts the moral values of society. He states:
To misuse one’s time is a great evil. But other even worse evils come with arts and letters. Luxury is such an evil, born, like them, from the idleness and vanity of men. Luxury rarely comes along without the arts and sciences, and they never develop without it. I know that our philosophy, always fertile in remarkable maxims, maintains, contrary to the experience of all the ages, that luxury creates the splendour of states, but … will philosophy still dare to deny that good customs are essential to the duration of empires and that luxury is diametrically opposed to good customs?
See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) First Discourse, Second Part, paragraph 6.
(2) Such views are often implicit in the postmodernist celebration of ethnic ‘minorities’ and its hostility to Western culture. In particular, Edward Slingerland discusses the Noble Savage myth that permeates the writings of postmodernist philosophers such as Paul Feyerabend and Bruno Latour; see Edward G. Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture (The Cambridge University Press, 2008), 108–109.
(3) This is true mainly of Western philosophers and intellectuals who are almost invariably affluent and urbane. Notable exceptions to this trend are Buddhist monks and other less publicised philosophers who actually practise the privation they preach.
(4) See Rousseau (1750), First Discourse, Second Part.
(5) See footnote 1.
(6) This is true for any good capable of being employed for future satisfaction, which is the case for even perishable goods. For discussion of this issue and time preference generally, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (The Scholar’s Edition) (Ludwig von Mises Institute: Alabama, 1998), 480–487.
(7) When I speak of ‘vices’ in this paper, I am speaking in the ordinary sense of things such as alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc. These things may or may not be damaging to one’s life, depending upon the extent of their use and the context. In moral philosophy, the term ‘vice’ refers to an act or practice that is destructive to values and therefore necessarily bad—the opposite of a virtue. Clearly there can be no rational or non-destructive pursuit of vices in this latter sense.
(8) See Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown Book Group, 1974), 61–62.
(9) Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 6.
(10) For detailed discussion on these factors affecting time preference, see Hoppe, as above, 3–15.
(11) See Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market: Scholar's Edition, (Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004), 241 and 1324. For further discussion on this issue, see Ben O’Neill, ‘Does Capitalism Make Us More Materialistic?’ (Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), http://mises.org/story/2697 (Accessed 13 February 2009).
(12) Hoppe, as above, 6.
(13) See footnote 7.
(14) Irving Kristol, The Lost Soul of the Welfare State (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1997) www.aei.org/publications/pubID.7392/pub_detail.asp (Accessed 16 February 2009).
(15) On the moral hazard associated with assisting the poor, see James Buchanan, ‘The Samaritan’s Dilemma,’ in Edmund S. Phelps (ed.), Altruism, Morality and Economic Theory (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1975). For discussion applied to government redistribution, see Stephen Coate, ‘Altruism, the Samaritan’s Dilemma, and Government Transfer Policy,’ American Economic Review 85 (1995), 46–57; see also Robert A. Moffitt, ‘Incentive effects of the U.S. welfare system: a review,’ Journal of Economic Literature 30 (1992), 1–61.
(16) See Hoppe, as above, 9–15.
(17) See Hoppe, as above, 137–149.
