tracer: I think they ought to add your question, or some variant, to the opinion polls. Perhaps something like: “if your vote alone decided the winner of the Presidential race, who would you vote for?” It would show whether there was an underserved political market, so to speak, out there.
Sam:
Vote wasting - the problem is, until the election is over, we frequently don’t know who’s going to win. It could well be that way this year. If one of the Big Two had the election locked, regardless of my vote, it might be a different story. But even though I’m left of the Democratic mainstream, I’m quite aware that there’s a vast gap between the policies of Bush and Gore, and to me it’s quite important to make sure Shrub finishes second this year.
(Also, the Greens are too far out for me on a considerable number of points, judging by their website - and then Gore decided to run as a Democrat, rather than as GOP-lite, which is behavior I feel I ought to encourage. But I digress.)
Powerlessness - the way power is present and absent is surely very different from a century or so ago. But fact is, as I pointed out in some detail on the special interests thread, much legislation is passed today that the public has in no way demanded of their legislators, and is often essentially unaware of, simply because the big-bucks boys want it. Even on the high-visibility issues, the money usually wins when up against the vast majority of public sentiment: take the tobacco legislation that had all but passed Congress a few years back, or the patients’ bill of rights, or the airline travelers’ bill of rights, or…you get the drift. It’s still more our country than theirs.
Or take working conditions. Here, in a booming economy, a friend of mine, skilled in high-tech mumbo-jumbo that I barely understand (worked for Lycos and other outfits like that) tried to negotiate a reduced work week when he went back out on the job market late last year. He succeeded - in getting a sixty-hour week. (Companies will leave money on the table elsewhere to hold the line on labor matters. Yessiree. They know that, even now, overall, workers need one employer more than they need any one worker; absent unionization or legislation, they’ve still got the greater share of power.) So don’t even get me started about labor conditions in, say, poultry processing.
Mobility - A great deal of the population is far less mobile than you’d think, even now. I lived in far southwest Virginia for five years, and most of the people down there really were just scraping by, even in 1998 (when I left). If you’re in such circumstances and have kids, you can’t afford to move away from your support network, unless you’re moving to a much better job. And how the hell are you going to find out about that job? I’m not sure that, even now, their sorts of jobs are on the Internet. (That will probably change, and eventually even Appalachian working poor will be Net-literate, but that’s not here yet, trust me.)
But no free-market thinker that I know of has ever calculated the costs to a family of relocating for a job: all the fraying of the network of friendships, church, schools, all the having to start over in a new place…you can only do that so many times in a lifetime. (Military families do it all the time, but when they get to their new posting, they tend to find familiar faces already there. Different story entirely.) To some extent, people are limited in their freedom to move because they’re people. Corporations can move factories around the globe like chess pieces, perhaps; we can’t do that so easily with our lives.
Tort law v. legislation - maybe you haven’t noticed, but there’s a powerful bias in this society against accomplishing an end through the courts that could be achieved instead with legislation. Passing laws is understood as having legitimacy; using the courts instead is usually seen as an end run, legitimate only if the special interests are widely seen to have made Congress impassable. I don’t think that’s going to change here anytime soon.
Insurance companies - a wash, IMO. They’ve acted to make the auto industry safer (aided by the government requirement that we buy insurance), but insuring their profitability is a major addition to the cost of medical care in the USA, and their influence is a major obstacle to reform.
BTW, the auto industry is an instance where, despite fairly high minimum safety standards, many (and eventually almost all) car companies went past those minimums, to make increasingly safer vehicles. I couldn’t tell you whether dual air bags are a requirement now (probably, I suppose), but most car makers put them in well before they were required because car buyers demanded them, and safety sold. (Still does - that’s why housewives are buying monstrous SUVs to drive to the grocery store.)
Unionization - I’m skeptical of how that would work in a libertarian society. Unionization and the ability to strike isn’t a very potent threat unless (a) employment is very close to full, (b) the workers really aren’t very replaceable, or © the employers are restricted from bringing in replacement workers. Since conditions (a) and (b) are fairly infrequent, that leaves ©, and I see that restriction as being antithetical to libertarianism.
Finally, I’d characterize market failures as more than occasional in our society. For instance, one major market failure has totally eluded the press: the demise of the forty-hour work week, which has come about due to the increasing number of workplaces where everybody’s a ‘professional’ who is expected to work until the job’s done. Now that professionals aren’t an elite, they’re just drones that management wants to get the most out of for the least bucks, so the job is increasingly designed to be well beyond a forty-hour-a-week job.
Why this is a market failure is simple: a functioning society expects workers to be many other things besides - parents, participants in civic life, volunteers (at least, conservative politicians expect the wonders of volunteerism to solve a host of problems), and so forth. If the work week expands, there are too few hours left for everything else. And since commuting takes more time, and the complexities of modern life keep on increasing, the demands of work need to decrease, rather than increase, just so we can keep even.
So market failures may be significant and ongoing, rather than rare, low-impact flukes.
