Turkish Police Raid Gay Bars and Arrest Activists

The raid assumes it knows why Turkey’s birth rate is falling, and that the answer is a bar in Beyoglu, or a private apartment where activists were arrested on Sunday. It does not know this. No one does, in the sense required to act on it with police raids. The birth rate is the aggregate outcome of millions of individual decisions - about housing costs, career timing, the price of a flat in Istanbul, the number of children a household believes it can educate, the felt stability of the future - made by people who possess the relevant information about their own lives and transmit almost none of it upward in any form a ministry can read. President Erdogan’s government has substituted a single hypothesis, convenient because it names a small and already unpopular group, for a signal it cannot actually observe.

This is the general error of central planning wearing a different costume. The planner cannot set the right price for steel because the knowledge of relative scarcity is distributed across every buyer and seller who has been tested by profit and loss; he cannot set the right family policy by decree for the same reason, except that here the distributed knowledge concerns something even less legible than prices - the private calculus of intimacy, ambition, and fear that determines whether two people decide to raise a child. Arresting dozens of people connected to LGBTQ organizing does not make that calculus more favorable to childbearing. It cannot, because the causal link the authorities assert was never demonstrated; it was declared, and declaration is not information.

Consider the ratchet. A raid on gay bars does not resolve the demographic anxiety that motivated it, because the anxiety was never actually about gay bars. So the state will need a second intervention to address the persistence of the same falling birth rate, and a third, each one licensed by the failure of the last, each one requiring greater intrusion into precisely the private domain - courtship, cohabitation, household formation - where distributed knowledge is thickest and centralized knowledge is thinnest. The LGBTQ activist arrested in her own home on a Sunday is not a side effect of this policy. She is the demonstration that the policy has no mechanism except coercion, because it has no genuine information about its own stated goal.

Is there a general-rule alternative - one that does not require the state to diagnose the private motives of its citizens? Yes: the rule that the law does not enter the home to police who is in it, on any pretext, family-values or otherwise. That is not liberal indulgence. It is the only policy consistent with admitting, honestly, that the government does not know what it claims to know.