I mean no offence Steve, but this is exactly the sort of comment that led to the "Aggrieved Libertarians" article. Abolition of the welfare state simply isn't up for debate so why spend so much time arguing about it? Can we discuss the libertarian policy that are actually at the margins of modern policy debates? No one has all the answers to
I'm a non-minarchist libertarian who is willing to support a welfare state (though I'm keen on restructuring it quite a lot). I'm also OK with government intervention in the case of market failure, so long as that intervention is well-conceived and implemented with reasonable care. I say this to point out that we're probably not that far apart in our views. But I don't spend my time arguing with other libertarians about welfare because there's no point.
I'm less familiar with Japan's model, but I see them as being fairly corporatist as well. Corporatism is basically where the major economics powers in a country (government,major industries, major unions etc.) run the economy by consensus. Now that's the pure version, but that should give you the general idea.
An economic model that focused around empowering favoured corporations or economic groups is really more of a mercantilist idea, though I use the "neo" prefix because modern incarnations of mercantilism tend not to be as colonialist as the version Adam Smith railed against. For all their belligerence, the neocons aren't trying to recreate an 18th Century empire.
I know I'm being nit-picky but the Republicans aren't corporatists. Corporatism is the name for France's economic model. The Republicans are really more neomercantilists.
I see you and I hit the same point. I'm always suspicious of a premise that requires a discontinuity of that magnitude. How can helping someone a little be worse than not helping them?
I see where you're coming from RTod, but here's my problem with your logic.
This factory Mr K (no relation) is running provides additional options to these option-deprived people. That makes them better off, how much better off depends on the alternatives these people have, but unless Mr K is threatening them or tricking them, he can't be doing them any harm on net.
If Mr K is helping them on balance then for his actions to be morally blameworthy you must believe one of two things:
1) Everyone has a moral obligation to help these workers to a greater extent than Mr K is. This would mean that people who aren't helping 3rd world workers at all, such as businesses that make a point of only hiring 1st world workers or people who could spare money for charities that help 3rd world workers but spend it on less worthy causes, are even more morally blameworthy than Mr K is. This seems inconsistent with the degree of criticism these groups receive.
2) People have a moral obligation to either not help at all, or help by at least some given amount. Any help offered below this threshold is worse than nothing. This strikes me as a very strange proposition.
Is there some other means of reconciling the logic here that I'm missing?
Competition policy isn't my speciality, but since you asked so nicely ;)
For me the be all and end all of antitrust is barriers to entry. Even a monopolist is harmless if another firm can easily enter. So for me, the thing that antitrust should focus on should be how the behaviour of firms can limit the ability of entrants. We have a case in New Zealand at the moment about the rates our mobile phone networks charge each there to connect calls from one network to another. The Commerce Commission just ruled that the rates Telecom and Vodafone charge are unreasonably high and they are making it very expensive for new companies to enter the market. So there's one arguably legitimate role for government intervention.
The trick with designing an antitrust regime is to account for the limitations of the government's ability to identify which cases are legitimately unfair competition, since any company would like to have the government squash it's competitors. To try and squash some of the worst abuses, I would impose three new restrictions on antitrust enforcement:
1) Get rid of predatory pricing / dumping as a cause for intervention. I'm sure there are theoretical cases where these could be a problem, but I've never heard of a case where an alleged case of predatory pricing was anything more than sour grapes from an incumbent firm that was being out-competed.
2) For the government to get involved in M&A there needs to be evidence that there are significant barriers to entry. If there aren't then firm concentration doesn't matter.
3) Regulators need to be flexible in defining the boundaries of a market. In the real world what counts as being the one market isn't a black and white issue. Regulators should examine the substitutes available and also how close a substitute they are for the goods produced by the merging firms. Hopefully that will get around some of the "Microsoft is a monopoly" BS.
Beyond antitrust policy, governments should examine how their other policies can harm competition. State-granted monopolies and occupational licensure are only the most obvious examples of policy that lessens competition. Tariffs and import restrictions block (or at least hinder) foreign competition, as do "need-based" restrictions on getting licenses to start specific businesses. For that matter compliance costs of any sort tend not to scale linearly with firm size (i.e a firm of size x typically pays more than half the compliance costs of a firm of size 2x), and therefore tends to increase the optimum size of a firm.
Still, libertarian arguments have already prevailed in many important areas of life. Our institutions in these areas have already been reformed to reflect the idea that individuals should decide for themselves, and that coercion should be banished.
To give a more recent example, consider the retreat of Socialism. The word may be thrown around a lot these days as an epithet, but actual socialism no longer has a seat at the table in most of the world. Up until 1997 the British labour Party's manifesto included worker control of the means of production. The fact that the left in most Western countries is now corporatist* not socialist is a step in the right direction.
* NB I'm using corporatist in its technical sense here, not to mean "pro-corporation" as it is more commonly used. Basically by corporatist I mean the French economic model.
The FCC prohibits certain things from being broadcast, and punishes non-compliers. How is that not censorship? In fact the head of the Broadcasting Standards Authority (the New Zealand agency that fulfils the same role) is known as The Chief Censor.
What would you consider a Harvard-eyebrow-raising position to take? I'm not a minarchist so you won't get abolishing the welfare state from me, and since I'm not American, It's hard to work out what might be considered controversial. For instance, my support of free trade isn't controversial here, but my support of nuclear power and genetically modified food is.
I do support severely restructuring Social Security and implementing Singapore-Style health care reforms, and I can't imagine either of your major parties supporting those. But then, I can't imagine either of them supporting free trade either.
I think to an extent the problem is that people like to think in terms of broad strokes when it comes to politics: Big Government vs. Small Government, or adherence to some specific ideological model.
I'm a policy wonk by trade, so I prefer to get into the details. Even if some form of libertarianism can't be implemented wholesale (and I'm not ready to concede that for all forms of libertarianism), libertarians may still be able to contribute on specific policies.
One of the things that bugs me about critiques of libertarianism is that it tends to focus at the minarchist end (privatising roads, abolishing welfare), rather than at the current policy margins (free trade, school vouchers, ending the war on drugs).
Regardless of the merits of minarchism, there's no feasible way to jump to it from a modern Western state in one jump. So why argue over a non-option? Why not argue about libertarian-aligned policies that could be implemented feasibly under current governance structures?
When we try to interfere with the natural order of things, we’ll end up with a group of boys who won’t know how to make war against the boys who aren’t repressed by women.
It things like that that lead me to think that while there are theoretical merits to having anti-trust law, in practice I'm not so sure it's a good idea.
Though the policy wonk in me wonders if there isn't a better way to do it. If I were in a position to reform anti-trust law I'd re-arrange it to focus on contestability rather than concentration. It really doesn't matter how many or few firms are in the market, so long as it's relatively easy for new firms are able to enter.
So where does the distinction lie? As a first pass at it, one might suggest that economics focuses on market activities, while politics focuses on non-market activities. That is, if I am selling a used car, and you are shopping for a used car, and we strike a deal, that is a market exchange and is within the field of economists and not political scientists.
But that first pass will invoke the ire of economists.
Honestly, I can't raise a lot of ire here. For an economist to accuse a political scientist of scope creep would require a truly heroic degree of hypocrisy, and I'm just not up to it right now. What can I say? It's nearly Christmas and I'm tired.
At this point I'm starting to lean toward the idea that the social sciences should be differentiated not by their subject matter, but rather by their core premises and methodologies. This is counter-intuitive at first glance, but it probably maps the actual disciplines better than a subject matter classification.
That "nightmare scenario" is how Singapore runs it's healthcare system. Quite successfully, by all accounts.
And the public heath effects of vaccines are a classic positive externality of consumption. The way you deal with that is by subsidising vaccines, not by turning health insurance into some bizarre psuedo-welfare system. The function of insurance is to remove risk, by protecting you from adverse events that would ruin you. You shouldn't be insuring against high-probability events. If someone can't afford the expected cost of their future healthcare insurance can't help them, they need welfare. Either give them welfare or don't, but don't try to turn insurance into something it can't be or you end up with a very screwed up healthcare system.
The government suffering fiscal collapse doesn't mean the whole country will collapse. The New Zealand government hit the fiscal wall in 1984; there were some hard times, but the country didn't collapse.
One thing that strikes me as interesting is the fact that prevalent divorce SHOULD make people rather cavalier about marriage, shouldn’t it? But it seems to me that most of the people in my cohort agonized about finding a proper mate, the budgeting, the timing, etc. back when marriage was forever, people used to pick someone reasonably attractive from their high school class and… presto… Ward and June Cleaver. Or something.
I think there's a confounding factor at work. Back when marriage was for life, it was scandalous for a couple to live together without marrying. It used to be that if you loved someone enough to make a life together you had to marry. Now you only need to marry if you want a deeper level of commitment than that. In fact, the biggest benefits of marriage come if you're planning to have children.
On “The Art of Letting Go”
I mean no offence Steve, but this is exactly the sort of comment that led to the "Aggrieved Libertarians" article. Abolition of the welfare state simply isn't up for debate so why spend so much time arguing about it? Can we discuss the libertarian policy that are actually at the margins of modern policy debates? No one has all the answers to
I'm a non-minarchist libertarian who is willing to support a welfare state (though I'm keen on restructuring it quite a lot). I'm also OK with government intervention in the case of market failure, so long as that intervention is well-conceived and implemented with reasonable care. I say this to point out that we're probably not that far apart in our views. But I don't spend my time arguing with other libertarians about welfare because there's no point.
"
I'm less familiar with Japan's model, but I see them as being fairly corporatist as well. Corporatism is basically where the major economics powers in a country (government,major industries, major unions etc.) run the economy by consensus. Now that's the pure version, but that should give you the general idea.
An economic model that focused around empowering favoured corporations or economic groups is really more of a mercantilist idea, though I use the "neo" prefix because modern incarnations of mercantilism tend not to be as colonialist as the version Adam Smith railed against. For all their belligerence, the neocons aren't trying to recreate an 18th Century empire.
"
I know I'm being nit-picky but the Republicans aren't corporatists. Corporatism is the name for France's economic model. The Republicans are really more neomercantilists.
On ““Hey, won’t you play another somebody done somebody wrong song””
I see you and I hit the same point. I'm always suspicious of a premise that requires a discontinuity of that magnitude. How can helping someone a little be worse than not helping them?
"
I see where you're coming from RTod, but here's my problem with your logic.
This factory Mr K (no relation) is running provides additional options to these option-deprived people. That makes them better off, how much better off depends on the alternatives these people have, but unless Mr K is threatening them or tricking them, he can't be doing them any harm on net.
If Mr K is helping them on balance then for his actions to be morally blameworthy you must believe one of two things:
1) Everyone has a moral obligation to help these workers to a greater extent than Mr K is. This would mean that people who aren't helping 3rd world workers at all, such as businesses that make a point of only hiring 1st world workers or people who could spare money for charities that help 3rd world workers but spend it on less worthy causes, are even more morally blameworthy than Mr K is. This seems inconsistent with the degree of criticism these groups receive.
2) People have a moral obligation to either not help at all, or help by at least some given amount. Any help offered below this threshold is worse than nothing. This strikes me as a very strange proposition.
Is there some other means of reconciling the logic here that I'm missing?
On “The Art of Letting Go”
Good point Jason, we are as vulnerable to becoming the Basptist to some corporation's Bootlegger as anyone else.
On “Antitrust/Media Consolidation: A Liberaltarian’s Manifesto”
Competition policy isn't my speciality, but since you asked so nicely ;)
For me the be all and end all of antitrust is barriers to entry. Even a monopolist is harmless if another firm can easily enter. So for me, the thing that antitrust should focus on should be how the behaviour of firms can limit the ability of entrants. We have a case in New Zealand at the moment about the rates our mobile phone networks charge each there to connect calls from one network to another. The Commerce Commission just ruled that the rates Telecom and Vodafone charge are unreasonably high and they are making it very expensive for new companies to enter the market. So there's one arguably legitimate role for government intervention.
The trick with designing an antitrust regime is to account for the limitations of the government's ability to identify which cases are legitimately unfair competition, since any company would like to have the government squash it's competitors. To try and squash some of the worst abuses, I would impose three new restrictions on antitrust enforcement:
1) Get rid of predatory pricing / dumping as a cause for intervention. I'm sure there are theoretical cases where these could be a problem, but I've never heard of a case where an alleged case of predatory pricing was anything more than sour grapes from an incumbent firm that was being out-competed.
2) For the government to get involved in M&A there needs to be evidence that there are significant barriers to entry. If there aren't then firm concentration doesn't matter.
3) Regulators need to be flexible in defining the boundaries of a market. In the real world what counts as being the one market isn't a black and white issue. Regulators should examine the substitutes available and also how close a substitute they are for the goods produced by the merging firms. Hopefully that will get around some of the "Microsoft is a monopoly" BS.
Beyond antitrust policy, governments should examine how their other policies can harm competition. State-granted monopolies and occupational licensure are only the most obvious examples of policy that lessens competition. Tariffs and import restrictions block (or at least hinder) foreign competition, as do "need-based" restrictions on getting licenses to start specific businesses. For that matter compliance costs of any sort tend not to scale linearly with firm size (i.e a firm of size x typically pays more than half the compliance costs of a firm of size 2x), and therefore tends to increase the optimum size of a firm.
On “Aggrieved libertarians”
Difficult when I'm not an American citizen (or resident, for that matter), surely you're not advocating [gasp] voter fraud ;)
On “The Art of Letting Go”
To give a more recent example, consider the retreat of Socialism. The word may be thrown around a lot these days as an epithet, but actual socialism no longer has a seat at the table in most of the world. Up until 1997 the British labour Party's manifesto included worker control of the means of production. The fact that the left in most Western countries is now corporatist* not socialist is a step in the right direction.
* NB I'm using corporatist in its technical sense here, not to mean "pro-corporation" as it is more commonly used. Basically by corporatist I mean the French economic model.
On “Antitrust/Media Consolidation: A Liberaltarian’s Manifesto”
The FCC prohibits certain things from being broadcast, and punishes non-compliers. How is that not censorship? In fact the head of the Broadcasting Standards Authority (the New Zealand agency that fulfils the same role) is known as The Chief Censor.
On “Aggrieved libertarians”
What would you consider a Harvard-eyebrow-raising position to take? I'm not a minarchist so you won't get abolishing the welfare state from me, and since I'm not American, It's hard to work out what might be considered controversial. For instance, my support of free trade isn't controversial here, but my support of nuclear power and genetically modified food is.
I do support severely restructuring Social Security and implementing Singapore-Style health care reforms, and I can't imagine either of your major parties supporting those. But then, I can't imagine either of them supporting free trade either.
"
Well I support free trade, school vouchers and the abolition of the minimum wage.
That good enough for you Tom?
On “Caricatures of libertarianism again”
Yes, it's also annoying when libertarians do it.
"
I think to an extent the problem is that people like to think in terms of broad strokes when it comes to politics: Big Government vs. Small Government, or adherence to some specific ideological model.
I'm a policy wonk by trade, so I prefer to get into the details. Even if some form of libertarianism can't be implemented wholesale (and I'm not ready to concede that for all forms of libertarianism), libertarians may still be able to contribute on specific policies.
"
One of the things that bugs me about critiques of libertarianism is that it tends to focus at the minarchist end (privatising roads, abolishing welfare), rather than at the current policy margins (free trade, school vouchers, ending the war on drugs).
Regardless of the merits of minarchism, there's no feasible way to jump to it from a modern Western state in one jump. So why argue over a non-option? Why not argue about libertarian-aligned policies that could be implemented feasibly under current governance structures?
On “Occasional Notes: The Most Genderful Time of the Year”
Not to mention the original inhabitants of Romania. But then I guess the Romans had better toys too.
"
But Jaybird, that's what ICBMs are for.
On “DOJ Saves Film Animation from Monopoly, Ghost of Walt Disney Laughs”
It things like that that lead me to think that while there are theoretical merits to having anti-trust law, in practice I'm not so sure it's a good idea.
Though the policy wonk in me wonders if there isn't a better way to do it. If I were in a position to reform anti-trust law I'd re-arrange it to focus on contestability rather than concentration. It really doesn't matter how many or few firms are in the market, so long as it's relatively easy for new firms are able to enter.
On “Marriage as Another Country”
That or too few people are capable of conceiving of a lifestyle that's materially different from theirs.
Mind you, those explanations aren't mutually exclusive.
On “What Is Politics?”
Honestly, I can't raise a lot of ire here. For an economist to accuse a political scientist of scope creep would require a truly heroic degree of hypocrisy, and I'm just not up to it right now. What can I say? It's nearly Christmas and I'm tired.
At this point I'm starting to lean toward the idea that the social sciences should be differentiated not by their subject matter, but rather by their core premises and methodologies. This is counter-intuitive at first glance, but it probably maps the actual disciplines better than a subject matter classification.
On “Economic Commands are Different from Political Commands or Taxes”
That "nightmare scenario" is how Singapore runs it's healthcare system. Quite successfully, by all accounts.
And the public heath effects of vaccines are a classic positive externality of consumption. The way you deal with that is by subsidising vaccines, not by turning health insurance into some bizarre psuedo-welfare system. The function of insurance is to remove risk, by protecting you from adverse events that would ruin you. You shouldn't be insuring against high-probability events. If someone can't afford the expected cost of their future healthcare insurance can't help them, they need welfare. Either give them welfare or don't, but don't try to turn insurance into something it can't be or you end up with a very screwed up healthcare system.
"
The government suffering fiscal collapse doesn't mean the whole country will collapse. The New Zealand government hit the fiscal wall in 1984; there were some hard times, but the country didn't collapse.
"
I think you're over-inferring from very weak evidence. It is far more likely that prices rose due to confounding factors.
On “I suppose the political is personal too”
I think there's a confounding factor at work. Back when marriage was for life, it was scandalous for a couple to live together without marrying. It used to be that if you loved someone enough to make a life together you had to marry. Now you only need to marry if you want a deeper level of commitment than that. In fact, the biggest benefits of marriage come if you're planning to have children.
On “What Can’t Congress Do Now?”
Death by snoo snoo!
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.