Ah, you don’t get what the libertarian thinks of himself. The true libertarian man thinks he is far smarter than average, and far more clever too. He can smell corporate deception at 100 feet. He can evaluate drugs far better than a panel of government PhDs with decades of combined experience. He can read fifty pages of mortgage fine print at a single bound. He’s more powerful than a marketing campaign. He determines product safety faster than a supersonic fighter. Not only that, if any person does not have these magic powers, they are either shirking or inferior, and deserve what they get. Who cares if you failed algebra or if you think that your kidneys are in your feet. Trust yourself, not some government bureaucrat crippled by the effete trait of actually knowing something about the subject! And our libertarian heroes also have more time to study the issues than our lazy government friends, who spend 40 hours a week on one thing. Nothing can be that complicated, right?
It is pretty much the same mindset that let people convince themselves that Sarah Palin was qualified to be president.
That must be why Paulson asked for $700 billion bucks with a three page proposal. It only goes to show what happens when you have an administration who believes this stuff, and hires people to prove themselves correct.
It’s called “not owning a laboratory”. Or knowing how to use one if I had one. And not wanting to have to test every scrap of food I eat seperately.
And I trust the government because it has a pretty good record - far, far, FAR better than the record of companies before the government stepped in on food safety.
Actually, no you don’t. You rely on the vigilance of the government on this subject, regardless of your opinions of them.
People in the private market have a balanced set of incentives to act, and the information on what action is needed, provided by prices representing the supply and demand intersection of every product people could want.
Private companies have an incentive to save money, because it’s their money. Yet they have an incentive to build quality products, because that’s what the market demandss. How much quality? The market will tell them that too. Make it too lousy, and no one will buy it unless you lower the price. Profit is maximized where the ‘sweet spot’ between quality and price is found. It’s close to an optimal solution.
Consumers have an incentive to pay as little as possible, but if they want quality the market forces them to pay for it. They settle on the goods which represent the best marginal increase in utility for them. Again, close to an optimal choice. And no one is in a better position to know what I want or need than I am. So while I may not make the best choice possible, I will certainly make choices that I perceive best for me better than any third party can.
Note that individuals can make stupid choices, but the aggregate result of millions of people making those choices tends to converge on the pareto-optimal result. This is assuming the market is functioning and all information is available to each party in the transactions.
Government employees have a very different set of incentives. The FDA regulator has little incentive to save money, because he’s not spending his money. And he is pushed by the skewed incentives into risk aversion. No FDA regulator was ever fired or pilloried by the public because he refused to pass a drug that might save millions, because no one will ever know. But if he lets one drug through that kills thousands, it will ruin his life. So, the logical result is risk aversion - forcing companies to spend more money on safety and testing than the market would otherwise choose.
Or as Milton Friedman once put it - in terms of likelihood of getting value for a dollar, these are the three possible methods:
Spending my money on things for myself. This is best, because I have an incentive to spend as little as possible and get the best I can. This forces me into rational decision-making.
Spending my money on someone else. I’m likely to be a little less diligent this time. I still have a big incentive to save money, but as far as value, well, Aunt Edna might have to settle for the crappy dishes for Christmas, because I don’t really care if they break in a year. My choice may also be inefficient because I may not really know what Aunt Edna would truly like for the $10 I’m spending on her. I lack information.
Spending other people’s money on other people. This is the mode the government operates in. Wasteful with money, because it’s not their money. They know even less about what my Aunt Edna really wants than I do. So transactions undertaken by the government on our behalf, with our money, are bound to be wasteful.
The other reason government is inefficient, even though the people in it may all be wonderful humans with hearts of gold, is because government lacks information. It’s lacks HUGE amounts of information. For example, when the government raises my taxes, it has no idea what I had planned to do with that tax money, so it has no way to really assess the economic loss my taxes cause. Thus the myth of government ‘job creation’, where the jobs destroyed through taxation are hidden, but the created jobs are visible.
Government also lacks information about what people want and need. The market gives us that information in the form of prices. Prices are the feedback loop and information bus of the economy. The government acts without this mechanism.
In fact, a modern market economy bears a good resemblance to a massively-parallel supercomputer with every actor in the economy being a processor. Prices are the information bus used to tell the processors what to do. The software on top of it all is self-organizing. It’s all an example of spontaneous order, just like the ecosystems that have resulted from evolution. There’s no central planner, no grand guiding vision - just rules, feedback systems, and individuals who can adapt.
Advocates of central planning think that this beautiful complex machine can be replaced by a few hundred suits in Washington and some bureaucrats imposing solutions from the top down by fiat, without having any special training in the myriad specialties they seek to control, and without having the proper incentives to act rationally, and without the information actors working with the market get on every decision they make.
This is the kind of “governments are from Mars, corporations are from Venus” mentality that skews Libertarianism. The reality is that employees are employees. Government employees don’t own the Department of Motor Vehicles. And private employees don’t own Microsoft. Private employees have no more incentive towards the best interest of their business than government employees do.
It’s the owners that care. They’re the ones paying the salaries and deriving the benefits of the business. So they’re the ones who make sure the business is run right and employees do their jobs.
So the difference between a government employee and a private employee is that the government employee is ultimately working for me (I pay his salary and I hire and fire his boss) and the private employee is working for somebody else. And my employee is going to do a better job for me than somebody’s else’s employee is.
The Bush administration doesn’t believe in this stuff. They’re socially conservative, they’re wasting billions of taxpayers’ dollars in Iraq, and as you noted they were the driving force behind the bailout. How does any of that say “libertarian” to you?
But I will continue to insist you are wasting your breath, focusing on the technical arguments of making rational choices in an attempt to speak to people who don’t want to make rational choices.
Take a look again at the last few pages of posts. And especially the language in the last 15 posts or so. The posts that responded to my post #230. Post #241 is a terrific example, made by this Voyager fellow.
In it, he attacks my so-called claim of superiority for claiming to be able to decipher a complicated mortgage contract. Even though I never made such a claim, anywhere, on this board. He uses that as a strawman.
But read between the lines of his post. His language is very revealing.
What he is saying of course, is that HE doesn’t want to have to make that decision on a mortgage contract. He is terrified by the prospect of it. He doesn’t trust his own judgement. He doesn’t want to face the potential consequences of his own bad decision, if negative consequences were to occur. So as a defense mechanism, he deflects the conversation away from a discussion of his own responsibility and starts attacking others.
Occasionally others will use a similar psychological defense mechanism of The Moral High Ground argument. Regulation isn’t necessary for them, of course. Or for you and me. We’re smart people and we could probably do without it.
It’s for The Little People. Yeah, that’s it. The Little People. Who’s going to look out for them?
But this is simply a variation on the same theme. The Moral High Ground is usually a tool to deflect the conversation away from their own discomfort with making these decisions for themselves.
Want some harder proof of my thesis? Wait just a few more paragraphs. I’ll sum up again with what I think is a stronger argument near the bottom.
In the meantime, take a second look at the canned-meat example above. In it, a fellow chose to disempower himself in the aisles of the supermarket by placing an artificial constraint on his choices. He was faced with the option of picking canned meat, from a monopoly provider, who’s reputation was unsavory.
Now he could have empowered himself. It was entirely within his control. He could have said ‘Screw it, I’m getting my protein somewhere else’. He could have made different choices with confidence, addressed the risk that faced him, and gone home. There were many, many ways to go about this.
But instead, he chose to disempower himself. He walked right into it. He created an artificial constraint for his product choices; by concocting a ‘right’ to canned meat, that ‘forced’ him to buy the questionable product and put himself at risk. Why would somebody do something like that?
Because now he’s a victim. The ‘right to canned meat’ that he concocted comes ready-made with a villian…the meat-packing company. He chose to disempower himself because it comes with instant victimhood, tag-teamed with an unscrupulous villian. Just like the mortgage example above in #241.
He doesn’t WANT to empower himself and make his own choices. He doesn’t WANT to grab the oars and row his boat to the island of safety. That requires taking consequences for his decision. He WANTS to be a victim. Because being a victim relieves him of the burden of responsibility. That burden is too much for him to handle.
These people love victimhood. They wallow in it. They pour it on their cereal in the morning. They mix it with club soda and have it on the rocks, with a twist of lime. They can’t go 24 hours without engaging in a good, hearty session of victimization.
Sam, look again at the responses to yours and my posts over the past few pages. You and I talk about rational choices - about weighing risk vs. reward, about how the market works, about how organizations make decisions.
They come back with responses about ‘evil’. About how somebody, somewhere is trying to ‘screw them over’. About unscrupulous lawn mower companies plotting to let blades fly free and kill people. About child labor and slavery and roasting grandmothers alive.
There are boogeyman around every corner. Villians lurk in every shadow. If a villian isn’t there, they concoct one. Why? Because then they become victims again. If there wasn’t anybody lurking in the shadow it would just be them, standing out there under the streetlight, to face the consequences of their own decisions in the big, bad world. And that is too terrifying and painful for them to face. They need a villian chasing after them, forcing them into the arms of a savior.
OK, on to my closing argument here. Look again at the libertarian philosophy you and I have offered. We can use the FDA as an example.
Option 1. By the products as you do today, certified by the same, exact agency as you use today (the FDA). Nothing changes. You are free to continue doing whatever it is you do today.
Option 2. But leave open the possibility that you might want to do something different; such as buy a different product, certified in a different way.
That’s all there is to it. That’s all the libertarian philosophy says about the FDA. You would think 100% of the population could get on board with that, wouldn’t you? It’s so simple. It maximizes freedom. It doesn’t take any choices away. Anyone who loves the FDA can always pick Option 1.
But these people can’t even handle THAT. They can’t even handle the most basic, weak-form structure of choice…which is just to leave themselves another option in case they want it. An option they don’t even have to exercise.
They don’t WANT a choice. They don’t WANT options. Because even the most basic form of choice outlined above requires them to take a stand and stick their neck out in the most trivial, feeble sense of personal accountability.
That eliminates all potential possibility for victimization. And their subconscious recoils in horror at the thought that they might have to face the consequences of their own judgement. So they go off on all sorts of wild tangents and attacks, constructing ridiculous strawmen and arguments against freedom and libertarianism.
We scratch our heads because their arguments don’t seem rational. But we’re not talking about rationality here.
I think a lot of America is wired this way. Hell, Oprah has made a billion dollars off it, hasn’t she? She gets recovering alcoholics, or overweight people, or repentant criminals to plop on her couch and talk about how they have been victimized all their life. Then she gives them a big hug and tells them to love themselves more. It’s not their fault.
That’s the mindset that trades liberty for security. And gets neither.
OK let us follow this through, practically how would this work? Let us say a new drug comes out on the market would the drug company have to get it checked by both the FDA and the private company? Would the FDA and the private company be forced into charging equal amounts at all? Please give me a brief example.
In your opinion on matters of science, like medicine, is it better to have one independent body that evaluates medicinal claims or many competing bodies? If it is many competing bodies what exactly do you think the market adds to the business of regulating medicine?
I see your point but it doesn’t answer the more pertinent question which is why do they want to do all these dull tasks themselves? If I had to check every food item, every medicine, every bridge and so on myself that would take up a lot of time that I would rather spend with my family. Working for a living takes up too much time as it is.
Martu - I think the answer is “they really don’t.” It sounds fine to say that each thinking man or woman whould be the final judge of what is good for them and use their intellectual curiosity to determine that. But in reality, even the smartest of us only has limited and specialized knowledge. There are few Renaissance people around, especially those who have wide technical expertise in many areas that touch our lives.
There was a website called “government is good” where the guy took you through an average day for an average person and showed just hoe many decisions we do not have to make because government has already taken care of those things. The libertarian knows they enjoy the benefits of society, knows they enjoy the benefits of regulation, knows they enjoy the benefits of protection even though they may intellectually take a position against it.
If you take places where there are fairly few restraints on what people do, I think you see that your reasoning is flawed: food.
The individuals making stupid choices led to an aggregate result of millions of people making stupid choices, leading to an aggregate result of the fattest country on the planet.
We can’t blame government regulation for it. We can’t blame lack of available information for it. We can’t blame, in most situations, a lack of competition or availability for it.
What we can say is that people make bad food choices every day. They spend too much to eat too much to get too fat to get too few nutrients.
Now, I don’t want it any other way. But I think food/eating is an excellent example of just how stupid the aggregate can be.
It doesn’t follow that this is a non-optimal result, assuming that “optimal” is being defined realistically (i.e. as the best available choice in the real world rather than some abstract Platonic ideal). Better obesity (from aggregate individual choices) than famine (the repeatedly demonstrated result of centralized planning of food distribution).
If that were true in any meaningful sense, public policy would be much closer to libertarian ideals than it is. For example, pot smokers don’t choose to hire people to roust them and put them in jail (unless the stuff causes masochism along with all the other mental dysfunctions described by the famous documentary Reefer Madness ), and yet it happens every day.
Of course, laws are a reflection of public opinion - not always but in many cases - and in the case of pot, the majority are not users or advocates for it.
We have a system where the will of the majority is supposedly reflected through our elected representatives who pass laws that we want. It does not always work to perfection, but that is the idea.
People in several states including my own have voted to allow marijuana for medical use in controlled situations. However, I see precious little momentum to legalize marijuana for all including everyday recreational usage.
Personally, I’m done with this thread. Many of us here have pointed out real world problems that arise when there is a libertarian-style lack of government regulation. Rather than addressing any of those points, the other side continues to rant about how people just want the government to do everything for them or how great the free market is. At this point we are just arguing past one another, I see no point in continuing. If someone wants to actually argue about why government coercion is so much worse than coercion due to lack of choice, or how the problems that actually happened in the real world when we had minimal regulation would somehow not happen this time around, then I will continue. But otherwise, I’m out.
Are you sure government is 100% blame free in this? The government subsidizes the meat & dairy industry (and various other commodities in the food chain) … which distorts the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac and makes it cheaper than healthier food.
Maybe you’re right and consumers are 100% guilty in your example. I haven’t researched every possible matrix of government tinkering with food prices and consumers’ behavior in response to market distortions.
Sure, better obesity than famine. But better healthy weights than obesity.
I don’t remotely suggest that we should change anything at the government level about food. But I don’t think we can honestly say that people, in aggregate, are consistently smart about all of their choices. There are too many areas in which that simply isn’t true. People are lousy at risk assessment and, I’d say, lousy at price shopping when the items being compared are at all dissimilar.
My point is that individual choice is like Churchill’s description of democracy – not good, but not as bad as the other alternatives. That’s not surprising, really – decisions made by political mechanisms are influenced by the same human flaws as decisions made individually, with additional complications arising from institutional dysfunction and power-greed.
), and yet it happens every day.