YET ANOTHER OVER LONG COMMENT MADE INTO A POST.

Jeff writes: Given that religion and government stay firmly separated, I think the degree of religion is irrelevant to the strength or freedom of society.

Jeff, we come so close and then we miss each other.

Let's leave G-d out of it for now. As OJ notes, the people as a whole like both liberty and security, but increasing one means decreasing the other. As the Pew Center poll found, Americans tend to like the balance weighted more towards freedom than any other country.

I am a conservative, and American conservatives tend to come down even more on the side of liberty from government control than the population at large. So my concern is to adopt policies and structure society to maximize the preference for liberty and minimize the demand for security. In so doing, I realize that, if feeling sufficiently threatened, the population as a whole will tip strongly towards a preference for security. People who are unsafe will demand more government action to protect them, which will result in less liberty.

This dynamic has been demonstrated in New York City over the last twenty years. There was great liberty and little security. A demand for greater security built up. Liberty was reduced and security increased. Now, security has been reestabished, but liberty is still being restricted.

The right policy will, therefore, minimize the threat to security while minimizing the restrictions on liberty. It is my judgment that a more religious society will be freer of government restriction than a less religious society because the popular demand that government act will be less.

Let's look at this in terms of what the economists call transaction costs, which are the costs of conducting transactions seperate from the cost of the underlying asset. If you buy a house, the transaction costs are the lawyers' fees, the title search, the title insurance, the other closing fees, the real estate agent's commission, etc. Now, some of these costs are associated with the cost of obtaining or dessiminating information. One service a real estate agent provides is to bring sellers and buyers together. Those costs are being reduced by the IT revolution.

The other major source of transaction costs is trust or, more properly, the lack of trust. If you and the seller were willing to simply shake hands without any verification process, the total cost of the transaction would be substantially less. So any societal structure that increases trust will benefit all member of society by reducing transaction costs. (Also, note that because of the presence of repeat players in the system -- notably, mortgage companies -- we're not so much interested in the trustworthiness of any given buyer and seller pair, but in the general experience of buyers and sellers taken as a whole.)

Thus, if it were unheard of for sellers and buyers to mislead each other even in the absence of a general and intrusive regulatory scheme, all buyers and sellers would be better off.

How do we approach this utopia? By having a widespread acceptance of agreed moral norms, with serious social consequences for those who breach those norms. Religion -- whether "True" or not -- is the only mechanism that has ever been able to establish and maintain such norms. Religion seperate from the state, and I agree with you entirely that's important, will thus maximize liberty by minimizing the call for security.

You might object that this is a false liberty, as people will still be constrained by the desire to avoid social opprobrium. There is something to that. But because of the latent demand for security, this constraint is more theoretical than real: if people aren't secure, they will demand that government act and the result will be even greater restrictions on liberty, backed this time by the state's monopoly on violence. My belief -- and this does come directly from my reading of Jewish history -- is that the greatest threat comes from an activist state backed by a population demanding security. Comparing that threat to modern American Christianity (as close-minded and bigoted as the most extreme members of the community can reportedly be, although I have almost no personal experience of this) is to compare, more or less literally, the Nazis to the Amish. Posted by David Cohen at June 6, 2003 9:49 AM