You’re trying to argue that the answer “yes” should be acceptable, and this stance is incompatible with an unknown breakpoint at which unemployment will increase.
OK, I get what you’re saying. Thanks for the response.
And yet you said:
So, first you say that statement is true, and then, when i point out that it is actually false, you say “Exactly.” You make no sense whatsoever.
It gets complicated because some of the statements are supposed to be true and some are *supposed *to be false. Consider the recent one:
“Raising minimum wage raises unemployment.”
Minimum wage laws are a decidedly liberal position, and raising them is generally part of a liberal economic policy.
But, the most typical conservative rebuttal will be, “if you raise minimum wage, it will cause unemployment.”
The issue here is how to respond in an informed and honest manner. The statement is simplistic, stupid, and it might even be considered trolling. Problem is that it’s kind of true. There are scenarios where raising the minimum wage can cause unemployment. It’s a process that has to be applied appropriately, slowly, and gradually.
Essentially, it’s a bait question, designed to elicit a knee-jerk response along the lines of, “that’s deranged, of course it won’t.”
Except, that answer doesn’t fly, because it could raise unemployment, the statement has enough truth to it that it’s not an actual lie.
So when I said that liberals “need that statement to be false” I mean that it’s hard to push an economic policy if the outcome is going to be “higher unemployment.” But it’s also irresponsible to believe that raising minimum wage would never raise unemployment. In order to sell “raising minimum wage” there needs to be both an acknowledgment that unemployment might go up, but also a dismissal.
Liberals thus need a response along the lines of “so what?”
Which is why I find these statements so typical of Fox News and modern day conservativism. Everything they say is almost true, just enough that the uninformed will nod in agreement. But if someone calls them on it, they have an easy rebuttal.
I like this post a lot. But what the left needs to understand is that libertarians and conservatives don’t just approach the free market as a means to an end in terms of economic efficiency, but the natural outcome of what they see as the right moral framework for society. Even if it could be shown that some government intervention would result in more efficient markets, conservatives and libertarians will reflexively oppose it anyway, on moral grounds. They simply don’t believe it is the government’s right to impose its will on free people in this way.
So in the end, we come back to the same old dichotomy. Locke vs Rousseau. Man as a free being who organizes through choice, or man as a social creature born with obligations to society.
If you believe that society is larger than the individual and should exert some control on individual choices, you will naturally land on the side of government intervention. You may have your mind changed by an especially compelling argument on that issue, but you start the debate with a built-in bias. Each camp puts the burden of proof on the other.
That’s not a bad thing. It just means your morals influence the choices you make, in both your personal and your political life. It’s part of a healthy social debate. It’s too bad so many of the participants are so angry at each other, but that’s what happens when the stakes get high.
I agree with this regarding libertarians. Despite disagreeing with many specific libertarian beliefs, i respect their consistency and, in many cases, their fairly solid arguments for a particular notion of what freedom entails. I also have a lot of respect for many writers in the libertarian and classical liberal tradition, from Locke and Smith through to someone like Hayek.
Conservatives? Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Many conservatives are perfectly happy to have the government impose its will on free people when it suits their particular moral agenda. To repeat a well-worn phrase, plenty of conservatives, especially in the United States, want government just small enough to fit in your bedroom.
I would also find your argument more convincing if there weren’t so many free market advocates who reach for the “efficiency” argument first whenever any proposal for government intervention is mooted. I can’t remember when i last heard, in public discourse, a well thought out argument about freedom and the absence of coercion from a free market advocate. All we seem to get, much of the time, is tea party-style assholes who were apparently happy enough with massive deficits and overweening government control under a Republican president, but don’t like it now that someone else controls the purse strings.
Strict philosophical advocacy for free markets and government non-intervention is like advocacy for free speech; it has little meaning if you only support it when the particular position accords with your own preferences.
Look up the term “unintended consequences”. It basically means that even though you think a particular action is intuitively “right” and “moral”, the actual outcome may actually be the opposite of what you intended.
Well aware of what “unintended consequences” means. Doesn’t negate a single bit of what i said. It’s perfectly possible to advocate for liberal economic policies, to be aware of what the drawbacks of such proposals are, and to still believe that the policies are, overall, good policies. No “unintended consequences” about it.
Your blithe confidence about what constitutes “good economic practice” is nothing more than a mask for your own particular ideological position. The fact that you apparently don’t even recognize that fact is symptomatic of the problems i was describing in my post.
This is very true for some libertarians. I respect the hell out of Hayek (or at least, early Road to Serfdom Hayek, before he became old and cranky.) But it’s completely false for some others.
A lot of libertarians–I’m not going to hazard a guess how many, because I simply don’t know–make arguments from efficiency grounds for as long as they think the argument holds. That’s the whole reason that gold-worshipping morons show up on these very boards citing Austrian books that are 60 years old as if reading outdated works has magically turned them into experts. Almost the entire point of Austrian economics, as it’s used today, is to provide horseshit efficiency arguments for people who ultimately don’t care about efficiency. They immediately move the goalposts to moral concerns as soon as the efficiency argument no longer seems to work. I’d have a lot more respect for libertarians in general if more of them argued only one way or the other and then stuck with it. But that’s just not the case for many of them (most of them in my experience, but I’m not going to claim that my experience is any kind of fair sampling).
And to be fair in the other direction, not all libertarians argue from morality. The single best libertarian blogger in my quite biased opinion is Scott Sumner, who always and without fail argues from efficiency. And he does an extremely good job of it. He has forced me to rethink a few very important positions. He is, in fact, the only person I’ve ever come across who has made a compelling argument against fiscal stimulus spending. (Of course, this is because he argues for more monetary stimulus, but it’s still an extremely well-thought out and well-argued position.)
The ultimate point of this, for me, is that morality can’t be argued honestly unless it’s argued openly. People who dress up their arguments in false efficiency clothing, then change mid-course when it suits them, are far too numerous for me to think fondly of libertarianism in general. I’m extremely thankful whenever I find someone like Sumner who makes his arguments consistently, and forces me to reconsider all the implications of my own positions, but people like him are simply too uncommon in my experience for me to take the rest of the group seriously.
I think the basic problem for libertarians is that the vast majority of people don’t share their moral intuitions. They don’t believe that say, taxing rich people more or regulating corporations, is inherently immoral even if it leads to good outcomes. So they are forced to use efficiency arguments in order to make their case. The problem with that is that efficiency arguments based on sound economics don’t necessarily align with libertarian principles. There is a fair bit of evidence that markets often fail to work well and that government intervention can sometimes make things better. Libertarians are reduced to cherrypicking the bits of economics which support their position and ignoring the rest which often makes them look intellectually dishonest or just downright incompetent.
Just to chime in, as a self professed wishy-washy libertarian, I’ll add a couple of observations:
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In my opinion, most hard-core libertarians do not properly recognize externalities. Not only things like environmental damage (which is usually the classic case) but also subtler things like a unproductive populace with declining primary math, reading and writing skills. I believe those things are in the national interest both in terms of economic productivity (and by association) the ability to defend ourselves. You don’t even need to stray from the principles of self-interest in order to be supportive of government efforts in those arenas.
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Most hard-core libertarians pay short shrift to the equation of Impact = P[event] * Severity[event]. If the Severity of a negative event is huge, like being overrun by barbarians, or an asteroid wiping out the earth, you cannot rely on lots of incremental market transactions to course-correct your way to the proper answer.
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Most hard-core libertarians also do not have a full appreciation of, or pay short shrift to, transaction costs associated with something like the interstate highway system, or building the Hoover Dam.
Do you believe they should implement policies that are “good policies” even if they don’t produce the expected results? If it could be proven that raising the minimum wage actually creates more unemployment, would that still be a “good policy”?
That’s certainly the pot calling the kettle black.
My “ideological position” is that economic policies should attempt to produce the greatest benefit for the greatest amount of people.
This is the greatest sentence in the history of the English language. 
You know what, I think this is it.
Read back through the 8 statements, and this time apply the law of unintended consequences.
Each of the statements represent liberal economic philosophy. But each statement also includes a potential negative consequence to that philosophy. Which is why I said, “Liberals NEED the statements to be false.” (in the case of disagreement) And note that it simply states a possible negative consequence, without qualifying HOW possible.
If done wrong, restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.
Expensive and complicated mandatory licensing of professional services *could potentially *increase the prices of those services.
Rent control could lead to housing shortages.
etc
I’ve had to go back and add certain qualifiers to make the statements more complete. But notice the qualifiers represent actions: HOW you apply development restrictions, HOW you license professions, HOW you control rent increases.
All of this seems to lead to the default conservative reaction of, “government is incompetent and could never possible in act such a policy while avoiding the major pitfalls.”
It seems to highlight the split between liberals (government can solve problems) and conservatives (governments cause problems).
Not what i said at all. Not even close.
Maybe. Maybe not.
The point i’ve been trying to make is precisely that we need to look at the conclusions that positive economics can provide us, and then weigh them against the normative pros and cons.
If, for example, eliminating the minimum wage would increase employment, but would actually place more people in a situation where they weren’t earning enough to live, then we might decide that the cost of eliminating the minimum wage is too high, despite the decrease in unemployment.
We might decide that having 10 percent unemployment with a minimum wage of $7 an hour is preferable to having 4 percent unemployment where about 10 percent of the workforce earns $4 an hour and can’t afford to pay their rent anyway. I’m not saying that this would be the right or the wrong decision; i’m merely noting that simply increasing employment has consequences of its own, not all of which are necessarily positive.
Even if this is true, opinions might vary on precisely what this means. Your example above assumes that more employment is, in itself, the “benefit” that we seek, and that simply having more people employed is an end in itself. But other people’s normative preferences might differ. They might argue that people have a right to a certain minimum level of compensation for the work they do, and that the benefit of some extra jobs would be outweighed, if we eliminated the minimum wage, by the increase in the number of employed people whose already-low wages would drop even further.
The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait had this to say:
If it pays more than my current job or any other job I can find.
Maybe this is true for libertarians, but I don’t think it is for conservatives - at least, not for this conservative.
I support free markets because they produce the greatest good for the greatest number, as well as because they maximize freedom. Therefore, as a conservative I support a (minimally) regulated market rather than absolute laissez-faire. But I support the free market based on the accumulated experience of the last three hundred years or so.
One of the best lines I ever heard was Thomas Sowell of the University of Chicago. Someone interviewing him mentioned his “bias in favor of free markets”. Sowell replied, in tones of icy politeness (quoted from memory) -
Nothing wrong with this - I agree.
Regards,
Shodan
The “free market” has the same weakness that Marx’s “workers paradise” has: it has never existed, does not currently exist, and, in all probability, never will. Where does Mr Sowell obtain “information” on something that does not exist? How does one measure the length of unicorns horn?
We approximate. Like we do for everything else we can’t directly measure.
It is very much an open question whether or not our particular style of markets and private ownership is close enough to the unicorn’s horn to get at least some of the benefits. We also kind of don’t know whether we do any better the closer we get to mythical competitive markets. It may well be that we are worse off as we approach perfection, but once perfection kicks in, we are golden. There is a lot we really just don’t know.
I think you would really enjoy a book by Albert O Hirschmann called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It’s short, non-technical, and marvelously written.