Re: Libertarian cartoons

In article
<d7c08f61-8eb9-4380-996e-11fc29698a8b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
plausible prose man <Georgefhaley@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 7, 3:18 am, ZnU <z...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Which markets reward, but politics don't. Look, people don't get
smarter with other people's money than they are with their own, and
indeed, research shows the difference is quite substantial. S

Most large private firms, of course, are managed by people who don't own
most of the stock,

Most people have no real personal stake in so much of what government
does, which means they're likely to vote irrationally. When you throw
in the actively self-involved rent seeking, well, you have places like
Sweden, France, and the UK in perpetual states of recession, farm
subsidies, trade barriers, the EEOC, NASA, minimum wage, mandatory
overtime, OSHA, all sorts of counter-productive nonsense.

I'd really like to see the definition of "recession" you're using above.

In any case, inefficiency, or programs that *you personally don't like*,
do absolutely nothing to suggest that people aren't being represented.
But see below.

while the stock is often held by institutional investors that
typically hop in and out of various stocks and generally have very
little incentive to care about the long-term performance of any
particular company.

And yet, you don't notice Wal-mart selling porn. Why is that, do you
think? You should also probably study, for instance, Brian Caplan's
"Myth of the Rational Voter," not that you'll willingly accept most of
it.

Look, I don't claim that elected governments represent people perfectly.
Almost nobody would. And I would be the last person to claim voters were
fully rational. But there is *some* meaningful representation. One can't
reasonably look at the most recent election and conclude that voters
responded entirely irrationally to the events of the last eight years or
that the system was not influenced by their response in substantial and
meaningful ways.

What you have to explain is how all of these irrational people suddenly
become hyper-rational as soon as they enter the market....

It would, essentially, require that people and corporations
voluntarily take external costs into account when making decisions,

I will accept there are problems with externalities, however, markets
have nearly as many incentives to solve them as they do to create
them, while the reverse is probably true with government.

The very definition of an externality means that the mechanisms markets
use to achieve efficient outcomes will not function properly with
respect to eliminating it.

That makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense. Take pollution. Party A buys power from Party B.
Party C lives downwind from Party B's coal plant, and objects
strenuously to Party B increasing production.

The pure market solution for this problem is for Party C to offer to pay
Party B to not pollute. But this sort of thing doesn't really work; if
you can make money by getting paid to not do things that harm others,
the most successful businesses are going to be those that do absolutely
nothing, and collect lots of money for all the harm they aren't
inflicting on people. This is not a very efficient outcome.

The standard libertarian solution to this problem is the courts, but
this is simply an admission that the market can't deal with this sort of
externality. And in practice most libertarians would never support the
kind of property rights regime which would actually allow things like
this to be effectively dealt with by the courts on an entirely
property-rights oriented basis.

Here's the problem:

Here's the problem: you think your naive intuitions and flipping
through an old Samuelson and a little NPR and Time magazine mean
you know very much about the subject.

Right.

Thank you.

I'm defending the only system that has ever produced decent results
as an organizational mechanism for large technologically
sophisticated societies.

Eh, not really; there have been many technologically sophisticated
societies since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and has been
shown elsewhere, there's a pretty good correlation between economic
freedom and general levels of wealth and standards of living.

You're talking up a system that has never been tried in such a
context, and that doesn't seem to have anything resembling
plausible mechanisms for dealing with most of the collective action
problems that government deals with.

That's simply not true, and that you think so indicates you really
need to do a lot more research and thinking before holding forth on
this subject.

Please point to a modern libertarian utopia.

[snip]

  Why would the first system work and the second one fail, or vice
versa?

That doesn't work well on a small scale because there are a very large
number of books out there and people have a wide variety of tastes.

And...?


Now, if you had some sort of system where a community could collectively
own, say, 15M books, spread over a few dozen locations, and anyone in
the community could stop by and check one of them out for free, that
might be useful.

Libraries suck.

I see you don't have much of an argument to offer.

 Public goods have a pretty strict definition. This definition would
exclude, for instance, education.

Government should provide education primarily because socialized
education funding is necessary to create something like equality of
opportunity,

 I'm not at all sure why you think that.

Please explain the mechanism by which equality of opportunity will exist
with respect to primary education in libertopia.

Everyone's free to buy all the education they feel will benefit them.

This is ludicrous. Most education occurs prior to people becoming
financially independent. What exactly do you imagine will happen here?
8 year olds whose parents' financial situations require them to send
their kids to work rather than school will... do what? Become
financially successful though the amazing work ethic they demonstrate in
the chicken-plucking plant, and pay for their own schooling?

You might almost have an argument with respect higher education, because
by that time people can take out loans in their own names to pay for
schooling or have received enough education that they could possibly
find jobs that could help pay for it. But as I noted in another post, a
purely market-based approach to higher education is extremely unlikely
to produce more optimal outcomes, because people are quite likely to
systematically underinvest in their own educations.

[snip]

How much does food cost? If your other choice is "not starving,"
you'd be amazed at what you're willing to eat. I might also note,
coming out of a remarkably long period of a remarkably low minimum
wage, well, one problem we just don't have in the US is malnutrition.

You've basically answered your own question. Calories are pretty cheap.
A healthy diet is somewhat less so.

No, a healthy diet, apart from being a somewhat subjective term, is
somewhat less enjoyable than twinkies and stuff. Some people like to
stuff yummy food in their mouth, and why, indeed, not?

Unhealthy food generally has a lower per-calorie cost. Inexpensive
prepared food also tends to be quite unhealthy, and is eaten heavily by
the working poor because physically exhausting jobs make cooking dinner
when you get home substantially less appealing.

Wait, wait...it causes more harm than good to be able to hire
people who are willing to work at certain jobs for what those
jobs pay, a figure that's determined in largest part by the
marginal product of that person's labor? I think not.

Yes.

No. Really, think about what you just said.

Because people, particularly unskilled workers with no real
leverage, are willing to work for a wage that can't provide them
with a decent minimal standard of living,

The Mexicans streaming across the border seem to think otherwise.

The Mexicans streaming across the border are largely not living at a
standard that would be described as a "decent minimal standard" by most
Americans. They're living 12 to an apartment, and they would have no
access to health care or education for their children if not for
government services.

You're essentially saying that it is wrong for Americans to have a
standard that high, whereas people who aren't nutty libertarians tend to
believe the precise opposite.

especially if they're in competition
with people like the still-living-at-home high school student, who
doesn't have to actually earn enough money to feed himself because his
parents do that.

I think, ceteris parebus, the former is more likely to be the better
sort of employee, so they're not really in competition.

"Better sort of employee" doesn't matter a great deal with respect to
many low-end jobs.

The sort of completely unregulated labor market you
describe would result in people living in essentially third-world
conditions,

Well, so then why don't we mandage minimum wage be, say, 200k per
year? If that's not a good idea, then why is less than that workable?

I've been arguing for a wage sufficient to maintain a decent minimal
standard of living; that's well below $200K in the United States today.

within the borders of developed countries.

See, kiddo, you're demonstrating why governments can't solve these
problems. You have no incentive to learn what's wrong with your idea,
and it sure makes you feel good at no cost to vote on your cheap,
empty ideas.

Government *is* solving these problems. Not fully, but the poor in the
developed world are vastly better off as a direct result of the
government services they have access to.

creates numerous externalities.

 Cite?

If a worker isn't making enough money to afford basic living
expenses (food, housing, medical care), then either someone
somewhere is picking up the slack and providing those goods
without monetary compensation, or the worker is being damaged
by the lack of such goods and is able to contribute less of his
labor to society.

So, then he has some incentive to improve his valuable human capital,
and thus likely will. I mean, if that won't get him to do so, then
probably nothing will.

You assume that people's situations necessarily allow for this.

[snip]

The employer is essentially receiving subsidized labor,

So? As opposed to society recieving subsidized indolence?

As opposed to unsubsidized labor; wages that actually reflect the cost
of creating and maintaining the human capital being consumed.

[snip]

--
"The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over-exacting to
anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it
must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll." -- John Maynard Keynes
.

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