Paying for Freedom

Coming from the liberal-turned-libertarian(ish) school of thought, I largely agreed with most things Barro had to say throughout the book, though there were certainly contentious claims that raised some eyebrows. For one, Barro's analysis classifying political freedom as a sort of luxury good was a surprising formulation. Barro says, "Rich places consume more democracy because this good is desirable for its own sake and even though the increased political freedom may have a small adverse effect on growth. Basically, rich countries can afford the reduced rate of economic progress" (11). By this logic, it is understandable why Great Britain and its colonies readily adopted democracy: it had imperialistically acquired wealth and could now sit back and spend. Seymour Martin Lipsett (and later Larry Diamond) analyzes all of the factors to democratization, and finds that general economic welfare (greatly associated with education and elements of civil society) is the best indicator of democratization, showing that richer areas can afford to consume more democracy. However, this view is undercut by the understanding that support for economic liberalization, globalization, and free trade are requisite to being a prosperous country in today's economy; in effect, a country would need to be a democracy to be prosperous in the first place.

The recipe for economic success--the enforcement of private property rights, maintenance of free markets, and minimal government spending--has been historically shown to be best promoted by democracies. After all, these conditions do not emerge from societies at random; they require a pre-existing commitment to the principles of liberalism, or at the very least an oligarchic dedication to acquiring wealth. However, Hegelians would note that democratization becomes inevitable under even an oligarchic government, given that the ideological conditions of those societies has already been sufficiently liberalized to guarantee democratization, which one may rightly note, is at least a good. It is suspect that a country with an oligarchic attitude towards wealth creation would suffer the costs of democracy, if it were not a superlative luxury good, or simply necessary to ensure the rule of law: another key tenet of economic liberalization.
Another interesting political idea Barro mentions is the possibility of secession, on a country-wide level. I am inclined to agree with his analysis, but am skeptical of the Pandora's Box of implications the possibility of secession and country reformulation might open. Firstly, how could one establish reasonable limits on secession that would enable legitimate secessions but restrict secessions by 1 dissatisfied household, for example? At what critical mass does an ethnicity deserve to carve its own country out of the country of their residence? What would happen if Arabs in Western Europe tried to do the same thing there? For another thing, how much more difficult would globalized trade be if trade agreements needed constant reorganization and renegotiation? If countries are sovereign (which they supposedly are), there could be no contracts binding a new government, assurances of the rule of law or protection of private property, which would certainly diminish the welfare of those nascent countries' citizens and create human rights crises at the same time. Take the recent example of Palestine's new government leadership, which amounts to much less than a full secession, but is causing significant geopolitical uproar, which is more than enough to distort market forces in a disastrous way. Barro's argument for specialization is convincing, but what about the arbitrariness of new political regimes, especially when it comes to international trade that it will be forced to rely on? Who is to say that brand new governments will or could have learned all the lessons of economic stewardship by the day they seceed? For that matter, what happens to such states when they fail? Do they promote terrorism by failing to consume enough democracy? After all, Barro implies a sort of market for democracy, meaning that some will choose not to consume any at all. Are costs to induce further production increasing? It would seem that costs of democratization should decrease as history continues, since mechanisms of adaptation and the intellectual foundation for such social organization has become more streamlined and widely tested. However, those in charge of making decisions concerning the consumption of democracy (the autorcrats currently in power) may view democracy as a bad and ignore market forces altogether.

Well, that's probably more than we'll have time for anyways, but it's a start.