“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”

? Frédéric Bastiat

DavidTC: Taking away someone’s job *does not benefit that person* in any sort of sense. You keep trying to *imagine* circumstances where it does, but the actual fact is, we are talking about *averages* here.

Sure, agreed that the *average* person doesn't benefit. But you're trying to claim that they're simply dead right there. That they never move on with their lives, that they never get another job, that if they do get a job it's at the expense of someone else. That the damage is put-a-fork-in-them every-single-one-of-them is a 100% loss to society. In reality losing a job isn't a death sentence.

Which raises the question, how much does the *average* person suffer, which brings us back to my claim that the recovery ratio is 3, so the average person gets two thirds of their income back. Of course that's mean, some get more, some get less.

DavidTC: But that’s *total economic activity*, not ‘money to create jobs with’.

Fine. We'll do this a different way.

GDP of the US: 16.7 Trillion.
Number of Jobs: 151,097,000
GDP/Job: $110,525

Note this is a *serious* overstatement. This is mean, we want median, the Financial sector (etc) is going to be a serious distortion, so the amount of economic activity to justify a job will be a lot less. If we want to adjust for that... I'm not sure. The mean household income is 50% greater than the median which is suggestive but not conclusive. If we go with that then it's $70-75k. So take a third off of my "jobs created" figure.

DavidTC: I don’t actually *care* about relative efficiency, which has been this gigantic lie used to explain free trade.

A conspiracy involving 10s of thousands of economists and hundreds of governments? Why for?

DavidTC: Yes, it does exist, but it is almost completely moot with *factory work*.

Weirdly I've had their conversation where people have claimed it only works with factory work.

DavidTC: Factories, being enclosed buildings where things that are shipped in are turned into other things, *do not have relative efficiencies* based on location. ... or adding inefficiencies like safety regulations we’ve mandated *by law*.)

Factories located next to their customer have reduced shipping costs, in our just-in-time economy shipping and so forth becomes a big deal. Factory location also brings into play things like legal/governmental stability, electrical stability, availability of labor, and availability of other inputs.

Small Business estimates the cost of compliance to be $10k-$15k per worker (link below claiming $35k in manufacturing). Lots of industries have massive bureaucracies which mostly deal with other massive bureaucracies. Note this is both a problem and it's mostly invisible. The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of senior management.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/report-cost-of-federal-regulation-reached-1-88-trillion-in-2014/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/30/ben-carson/cnbc-debate-ben-carson-cites-high-cost-regulations/

Dark Matter: On a side note, there’s a lot of really counter-intuitive stuff in all this and it takes a semester or two for most people to get their head into it.
DavidTC: How long does it take for most people to actually learn what ‘efficiency’ is?

You were staring at an efficiency increase and you totally missed it. In our textbook example, the output of the larger economy increased. The efficiency of the entire economy went up, even though it happened via trading with a partner who was actually less efficient than they were.

Most of the benefits from FT come from opening up your own economy, i.e. imports, not exports.

DavidTC: Erm, it’s hypothetically possible to read it that way, but there’s as there’s no actual way that one factory could reduce the *average* cost of American’s clothing by any noticable amount, which was the *other* side side of my hypothetical, I don’t know how you can read it that way in good faith.

I assumed you were making up all these numbers as you go and didn't understand how big a 1% increase in household income was.

DavidTC: Economics says that, if people not having their current job would have helped them in any sort of average, then they would have, tada, quit their job. If there was something better for them to be doing, *they would already be doing it*.

Would you move across the country if someone offered you 5% more? If the answer is yes, then picture yourself married with children in high school. Getting fired and having no job is a huge shake up, and moving away from family/friends/church/school becomes a lot more reasonable in that context.

DavidTC: 99.99% of people working in an apperal factory are working there because they see that option as *the best option currently on the table* for them…and they’re almost certainly correct.

It's probably more accurate to say working there is the least risky option, at least in the short term. Hopping to a new job entails risks, many of them impossible to evaluate. Of course *staying* also entails risks but most people don't think that way, if the business has been stable the last few years then it will be stable forever... and the new job might be even worse.

DavidTC: We are discussing your claim that $X dollars in the economy resulted in $X/50,000 jobs paying $50,000.

Hardly. As I explained before, median personal income is $30k. Ergo I hand-waved the cost to create a job as $50k (those links I put out claim it's less). Ergo if you add $50k to the economy you're creating one, median job of $30k.

Household income is $50k (ish), and sometimes it's appropriate to use one and sometimes it's appropriate to use the other. That 1% reduction in the cost of clothing was measured in household income.

DavidTC: If one country can produce something *with less resources*, (less time and/or effort) than another country, than *it* should make that, and other countries should make other things, and they should trade. That is all 100% true.

That's intuitive, but no, this is a misunderstanding of how relative efficiency works and it's wrong. Free Trade doesn't depend on one country being more efficient than the other country, it depends on them having different relative efficiencies. It's perfectly acceptable for one country to be worse at everything, as long as the ratios are different.

Example:
Two Countries, A & B. Both Countries have 10 units of production. There are two products X and Y.
Each product trade for the other at equal value, both countries need a minimum of 3 units of each product.

If both of them have the same relative production ratios, then there is no point in trading.
Country A can use one unit of production to create one unit of Product X or one unit of Product Y.
Country B can use one unit of production to create two units of Product X or two units of Product Y.

Country A will produce 3 units of X and 3 of Y (and 4 of XorY).
Country B will produce 3 units of X and 3 of Y (and 14 of XorY).

Trade serves no purpose here. Total production of both countries will be 30 no matter what the product mix is.

Example 2:
Country A can use one unit of production to create one unit of Product X or one unit of Product Y.
Country B can use one unit of production to create two units of Product X or three units of Product Y.

Production is maximized if "A" only produces "X" and "B" only produces "Y" (even though Country "A" sucks at everything).

A produces 10 units of X.
B produces 30 units of Y.

They trade 5 units so it ends up being
A has 5X and 5Y
B has 5X and 25Y.

On a side note, there's a lot of really counter-intuitive stuff in all this and it takes a semester or two for most people to get their head into it.

DavidTC: ...outsourcing...

As far as I can tell, outsourcing is just another product.

DavidTC: That’s way low.

My point was your made up numbers were massively in favor of trade-being-good and you were underestimating how 'good' things were by multiple orders of magnitude. You were claiming that closing *one* factory (not 200) clearly wasn't worth the cost even if it gave 1% of household income to everyone in America.

DavidTC: First, while *those* displaced workers might find jobs, that, obviously displaces *other* workers.

Ah, no. Serious problem, the amount of work in the economy isn't fixed. The number of jobs isn't fixed. Starting one small business or making a new product doesn't auto-magically eliminate another. If you notice your neighborhood doesn't have a lawn mowing service and you start one, then not only are you creating jobs but the people paying you may actually be making more money if they're working more hours because of the time you've freed up for them. This is especially true for Free Trade (FT) because (for the simplest text book version) you'd have one country which used to produce X+Y shift to X while their trading partner does the reverse.

This means potentially the loss to our economy is "zero". In practice it will be more but just multiplying the number of people who lost their jobs by their income is a VAST overstatement. Some people who lose their jobs from FT will be damaged, others will actually be helped, in practice you divide the total lost by a factor to reflect how many people got jobs (or how good those jobs are). I don't remember what that ratio actually is but I'll handwave a "3", for every 6 people fired, 3 completely recover, 2 get half the income they used to, and one is just screwed.

Secondly, the cost of clothing has not actually halved. The cost a few, specific, really cheap things has halved. The extremely poor can now wear new clothing instead of secondhand.

First, yes, this example does help the poor a lot more than the rich. Second, looking at this time frame is misleading because this is the tail end of long term trends. Looking at before trade started, imho, gives a better picture. The percentage of household income devoted to clothing went from 10% in 1960 (when we made everything) to 3.5% today (link for 10%, your own source agrees with 3.5% http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/05/24/madeinamerica/ ). This means an increase in household income of 6.5%, not 1%, but there's an element of cherry picking to this and I don't feel like looking up all the other numbers which I assume would also change so I won't.

DavidTC: The 2009 Stimulus bears this out…

Our example represents a Permanent increase to the economy, the Stim was a one off (and the Stim was inefficient for multiple reasons and even $280k was probably not even close to the full cost per job but whatever).

DavidTC: it cost about $280,000 per job created, which sounds right to me.

:Gack: :Choke: :Sputter: You really shouldn't be using "the Stimulus" as a baseline for how job creation is supposed to work. Unemployment actually went up when we did it, it was *that* inefficient. The Stim was enough money to give EVERY unemployed person a check for $60k and let them try to start a small business. Alternatively we could have spent the money on infrastructure (which the gov isn't bad at).

Median per person income is something like $30k. Do you really think the private sector has/gives out $250k in (benefits + compliance costs + overhead)?

At a handwave (see links) the cost to create a job is $50k (compliance, taxes, income, benefits).
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create-a-job-by-encouraging-entrepreneurship/
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2011/10/what_does_it_cost_to_create_a.html

Math time (without changing timelines):

Damage done by FT: $16 B
Benefit: $112 billion
Subtract one from the other and we have $96B. Use your multiplier and that's $192B, or roughly 4 million jobs created.

If we expand timelines then some of the numbers change but we're looking at a much higher benefit (probably not 6.5x better but whatever). Something else to consider is when we're measuring gravity and we get numbers which don't match the scientific consensus then either we get a Nobel or we made a mistake somewhere.

I think it's more like 'defense lawyers'. It's their job to defend their guy, regardless of whatever else is involved.

DavidTC: Let me quote Alan E. Steinweis, history professor:

Let's quote the rebuttal: His [Steinweis] speculation that Jewish disarmament was irrelevant to Holocaust is belied by the intensity of Nazi efforts to disarm their intended victims. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and other 20th century mass murderers did not start their genocides until after they had disarmed whom they planned to exterminate. Murdering an armed person is harder than murdering the defenseless. The immediate victims may end up dead regardless, but they can still kill perpetrators, so that fewer perpetrators are available to murder the next victims. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/16/alan-steinweiss-bad-history/

DavidTC: Or let me point out, in actual history, Jews *did* have guns after they realized what was going on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_uprising

How many guns did they have? "Armed" might mean "one gun per thousand Jews". The only page I found with numbers was the biggest and best (Warsaw). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising

It lasted from : 19 April – 16 May 1943
Number of Germans: 2100 (ish)
Number of Jewish "soldiers" 1000 (600 of those ZOB for which we have gun details).
Number of handguns for the ZOB: 220 (many of which were home made).
Number of rifles for the ZOB: 33 (3 per area, I think there were 11 areas).
Number of machine guns: 1 (total).
Ammo: Not numbered but very, very little. In practice that might mean fewer bullets than Nazis.
Total number of jews in the getto to start with, 400k (ish). So, one gun for every thousand jews is probably optimistic.

They had 250(ish) guns and shut down the local Nazis for 5 weeks? And this is proof that guns don't matter?

DavidTC: the normal Chinese peasant in WWII had no *money* to buy a gun.

Exactly. So once again it's an example of genocide by those with guns against those without. And yes, granted, gun control laws weren't at fault because the economy got there first.

DavidTC: Yes, because guns are extremely useful in fighting against economic policies that create starvation. All those people in the USSR without food should have started shooting local government officials, that would have solved the problems of a direct economy not knowing how to distribute food.

My other examples were "failed states" and "wars". But Soviet agriculture is a story of forced collectivization, i.e. taking the peasants' land at gun point because the state has guns and the peasants do not. The USSR regularly abused it's population in ways that, in the US, would have led to armed revolt, so, of course, the Communists are always big on gun control. If the tens of millions of peasants had possessed guns, then that forced collectivization would have been far more expensive, ditto the occasional 'relocation' of millions of people.

DavidTC: [Comments about the KKK and then] "Tyrants do not come to power because the people are unable to stop them. Tyrants come to power because *the people want them to have power* and are willing throw away the rule of law for that."

Sure. Totally agree and very well put. The problem is, how does gun control do anything useful about the KKK during the bad old South? You seem to have this vision that somehow they're going to let themselves be disarmed (maybe the Sheriff will do it when he's not wearing a hood). My expectation is that it's only their victims who could/would be disarmed.

I wrote that before I googled 'gun control in the old South', what comes up are claims that the KKK was a gun control organization, i.e. forcing gun control on blacks. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/02/gun-control-was-historically-about-represssing-blacks.html

Kind of makes sense, if you're planning on abusing someone, you really don't want them armed. The villains of history loving gun control is something that keeps coming up again and again.

I think we're winding down... in case this is the last post, great talking with you.

Chip Daniels: Well, yes, in the same way that it would be an error to confuse ‘Socialism’ the concept with the implementation in its name.

OK, I'll bite. Define 'Socialism' and how it should be implemented?

Spanish tax dollars at work. And let's include the subtitle: Union to launch legal appeal against dismissals

DavidTC:
@Brandon Berg
So here’s the fun question: If removing minimum wage in the US made clothing affordable, then…would clothing *actually* be affordable if people didn’t make the minimum wage?

Yes, absolutely. My teenagers' minimum wage doesn't have much impact on the family budget, and this is very typical for a minimum wage worker. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents

Further, my teenagers are seriously functional people. If a businessman is choosing between hiring a dysfunctional adult at a too high minimum wage and my teen, then that's an easy choice; Which means no job for the person the min-wage is trying to 'help'.

Still further, when I was first starting out, I accepted a job that paid a lot less than I "deserved" (it was a dying company and all they could afford). The skills I learned there were marketable and I more than made up for it at the next job. Opportunity only knocks at work. I'd much rather dodge the question of 'how much did you make at your last job' than 'what's wrong with you to make you not be working'.

DavidTC:
@Brandon Berg
But let’s actually analyse what happens when a factory moves overseas:
Yes, Americans have cheaper clothing, but they also *make less*, on average. In fact, even if you average *everyone*’s salaries, Americans and people overseas, people make less! (The overseas factory is hardly going to be *more* expensive to operate.) The clothing might change from 2% of 99.99% of people’s salary to 1%, but it also changes from 2% to *infinite* percent of the salary of the laid-off people.

Let's take your numbers at face value because they don't say what you think they do.

How many jobs were destroyed? A thousand? Let's say 20 Thousand (200 factories of 100 people each).
Assuming $50,000 per worker, that's a loss to society of $1 Billion.

Average spent on clothing: $1,700 per household, or 2.8% (google)
Number of Households in the US: 134 million (google)
Total Amount of Savings: 114 Billion (1.7k x 134 million cut in half).

Now, that 114 Billion in extra income to households will go on to create more jobs (so the effect is greater), and a lot of those displaced workers will find other employment (so the effect is a lot less, my job has been destroyed at least 3 times so far).

And the politics of this is terrible. Some of those workers will suffer serious economic injury, and they know it. $850 per household is low enough they may not notice, the millions of jobs created by multiplier effects from that 114 Billion seriously won't know it. Worse (politically) everyone who is fired (in general, not from trade) may get the idea that their job has been eliminated because of trade. Economic forces inside the country have greater impact than trade does, but trade is at least an answer.

It's easy to point to the closed factories and say there was no benefit, that's also completely wrong.

RE: Trinity not being disputed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God#Arguments_against_the_existence_of_God

Chip Daniels:
Tuition-free college... actually happened, and were commonplace prior to “Free Trade”.

We don't have Tuition-free college because it's something like 10x as expensive as it was in 1950.
If it were as cheap as it used to be, current state funding would just handwave everyone in.

So... is Free Trade is why College Tuition has increased by absurd multiples? (Personally I'd say it has a lot to do with these massive bureaucracies Colleges have created, they have to be paid for somehow).

And as long as we're using "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" reasoning (after this, therefore because of this)..
...was Free Trade Responsible for the Moon Launch? The civil rights movement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

Chip Daniels:
@Dark Matter
Asserting that “Free Trade” is somehow an unassailable proven fact like gravity is turning open ended science into a creedal faith.

:Amusement: The Theory of Gravity is Wrong, there are observable phenomenon which it doesn't get right (Spin of the Galaxy, etc). That's why we have 'Dark Matter'. Gravity is, imho, the weakest of all the grand theories (because we know it's wrong), some time in the next 50 years it will (hopefully) get a makeover and Nobel prizes will be handed out.

So yes, I agree, science should never be a 'faith'. However all disagreements with the grand theories are not equally valid, and it's certainly not an excuse to jump out a window (or throw the economy out the window). Notice that Gravity's wiki has a "Anomalies_and_discrepancies" section, also notice that Free Trade's does not.

From a theory standpoint, Free Trade is stronger than Gravity. Unlike with Gravity, none of these disputes have risen to the level of questioning/overturning the main theory, and I don't see mainstream work which suggests anything is coming. I've been hearing complains about how awful trade is for decades, and yet the econ community marches on with their consensus. Good links btw (although the 3rd didn't resolve). A good summation of the rise and fall of the economists whose work you're linking to is here: http://www.cfr.org/trade/dont-cry-free-trade/p14526

This country has serious economic problems, imho most of them stem from statist issues and not from Trade, adopting the trade policies of North Korea imho isn't a good idea. Further it's important to ask "what is the alternative, and is its record better".

Chip Daniels:
@Dark Matter
“Free Trade” is not a single entity at all; The term “Free Trade” refers to not a single principle defined by David Ricardo, but a series of international treaties and agreements like TPP, GATT, NAFTA and so on.

This is confusing 'Free Trade' the concept with the implementation in it's name, and I've already said I'd just tear up the existing agreements and go whole hog.

Chip Daniels:
@Dark Matter
Yet, would you assert that they all constituted Ricardian “Free Trade”?

It's important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these sorts of things. My hope is it, although imperfectly, moves the needle. It helps a lot that the complaints I hear are from people who disagree with the concept of trade and not the econ community.

Chip Daniels:
On my side of the political aisle, we call that “false consciousness”.

“false consciousness”: (especially in Marxist theory) a way of thinking that prevents a person from perceiving the true nature of their social or economic situation. (source: google)

Chip Daniels:
The American people are much better off, they just have a false consciousness, an inability to see how really successful free trade is. If their eyes were open, they would rejoice at the blessings of free trade being bestowed upon them.

Unfortunately, the true 'opening of their eyes' would involve taking 2nd(?) year econ and multiple hours of studying math and graphs. IMHO it's not *hard* (:cough: although I like math and graphs) but it takes a while.

Chip Daniels:
Seriously, this is just the “cheap I-phones and tee shirts” argument.

If you have a way to disprove free-trade-being-silly-good-for-the-economy, then I've got a Nobel Prize for you. I'm quite serious, you'd be undoing hundreds of years of economic study involving hundreds of countries and millions of examples.

And Stillwater pointed out I didn't source my original statement regarding free trade being the scientific consensus, so here is a link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade#Opinion_of_economists

Hey, I spent at least 10 seconds researching that! :)

Chip Daniels: Uh, how long is that run going to take, exactly?

For the country? Probably very quickly.

For you personally? That could be 'never'.

That's the nasty political problem. Say Walmart starts buying clothing from China and textiles in the US disappear overnight. The country, as a whole, is not only better off but much better off because there are far more consumers than there are textile workers. Multiplier effects suggest putting extra money in every household results in extra spending which creates more jobs than are lost. However those new jobs don't know they're due to Chinese textiles.

But you a textile worker know exactly who you are, that you lost your job, and that it's not coming back. Worse, your replacement job may be worse than what you did, so this may suck for you for life. You'll vote based on this, the 100 people who benefited will not.

Having said that, Free Trade tends to be a scapegoat for other problems which have painful political solutions. The gov gets in the way of employment doing things people want, explaining that is a problem, so blame something else.

Stillwater:
...you find not only that job replacement doesn’t equal job loss for outsourcing nations...

Source? This sounds more like politics than economics.

Stillwater:
...but you also find job loss due to automation.

Automation is not related to free trade, they're different issues. The local McDonalds might become automated (see link) but it won't move to India. http://newsexaminer.net/food/mcdonalds-to-open-restaurant-run-by-robots/ Weirdly McDonalds is trying to do what the protestors want and make McDonalds jobs really good jobs and not minimum wage.

I would be a lot more impressed with claims this technology must destroy jobs if I hadn't heard it multiple times before. Every new technology is supposed to destroy jobs, but they also create jobs, we just don't know what they'll be called yet.

(Warning: Rant ahead, partly because I used to own a small business)

Having said that, I agree, we have issues with job creation, and skill mismatch between the unemployed and what industry wants. Something to point out is small business is *supposed* to be the engine of job creation, but needing a team of lawyers and accountants to create a job because of gov demands hits small business a lot harder than large.

The nasty part about efforts to prevent job destruction is they tend to prevent job creation, and job creation is MUCH more important than destruction. The typical job lasts 2 to 4 years (link below). That implies anything which hurts creation is seriously going to hurt employment without helping retention.

We want job creation to be the first thing a company tries, not the last (this means the creation of a job should be risk free from the company's point of view). We don't want job creation to be a 'privilege'. We don't want to destroy 'bad' jobs because that leaves more people fighting for 'good' ones and we want employers to be fighting for employees. My teenages don't deserve a 'living' wage, I'd like them to have a really terrible minimum wage job for the experience and motivation (for me that was McDonalds).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2012/08/14/job-hopping-is-the-new-normal-for-millennials-three-ways-to-prevent-a-human-resource-nightmare/#5c8183dd5508

Dark Matter: free trade being a good thing is to economics what the Theory of Gravity is to Physics.

Opinion of economists[edit]
The literature analysing the economics of free trade is extremely rich with extensive work having been done on the theoretical and empirical effects. Though it creates winners and losers, the broad consensus among economists is that free trade is a large and unambiguous net gain for society.[6][7] In a 2006 survey of American economists (83 responders), "87.5% agree that the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade" and "90.1% disagree with the suggestion that the U.S. should restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries."[8]
Quoting Harvard economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw, "Few propositions command as much consensus among professional economists as that open world trade increases economic growth and raises living standards."[9] In a survey of leading economists, none disagreed with the notion that "freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade#Opinion_of_economists

dexter: convince me that China has no trade barriers to our goods.

The weird part about trade barriers and other forms of protectionism is it primarily hurts the country that's using them. Not the country which is subject to them. As wiki puts it: Protectionism is frequently criticized by economists as harming the people it is meant to help. ...Protectionism results in deadweight loss; this loss to overall welfare gives no-one any benefit... the benefits of free trade outweigh the losses by as much as 100 to 1.[17]

dexter: Please explain to me why sending about thirty billion a month to a totalitarian regime with no worker’s rights and an environmental policy that allows carcinogenic particles to get so thick that visibility is down to a few blocks is a good thing.

It's clearly better for our economy than not trading (see above quote and link). As for them, let's reverse that statement. Can you claim they'd be better off without jobs? Can you claim they'd (or we'd) be better off if they followed North Korea's trade policies? North Korea's other policies?

China exists. We very much want them getting rich (and making us rich) via trade as opposed to the alternatives.

[Chairman] Mao’s exact words were: “I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left. I’m not afraid of anyone.” http://claudearpi.blogspot.com/2013/03/mao-and-atom-bomb.html

Looking over wiki on the history of this... he's more or less right. Dishwashers took quite a while to gain acceptance.

But I'd guess it was more that washing clothes by hand was so nasty a job than because dishwashing was 'relaxing'. The price point seems like it'd be really different.

LeeEsq:
Many believers in free trade see it as an intuitively obvious good thing.

"Buy American, keep the jobs here" makes a ton of intuitive sense even if it's simply wrong from a math standpoint, and hearing that Econ classes have fancy graphs is going to be less than persuasive.

It's not until you get to the personal examples where it makes intuitive sense. A surgeon should NOT be mowing his own lawn to "keep the job in his family", society (including him) benefit by him doing more surgeries and paying someone else to mow that lawn for him. The net benefit to society includes the creation of jobs by letting everyone do what they have specialized in (see also the theory of comparative advantage).

LeeEsq:
I think the real big blind spot with many libertarians is how the perceive government and the state. A lot of them see government and the state as so inherently evil that they don’t see to quite understand why many people, especially persecuted disadvantaged groups, aren’t more interested in smashing the state and joining the free market paradise. They really seem to struggle with why many people are wary of the market and trust government more.

The gov has had a really good 50 year run, and the costs of its existence are seriously well buried. And then there are those gov promises... you'll get free stuff and someone else will pay for it.

LeeEsq:
Its not perfect but many people see that their vote in elections, ability to protest, and other democratic actions give them more leverage over government than their consumer power does over businesses. Trying to get a business to change a labor practice you find unethical like child labor or blood diamonds by consumer action alone is not easy. Many other consumers either don’t care or the market makes it more profitable to continue a variety of exploitative practices even in the face of decently sized consumer protest.

Business is less good at hiding the costs of compiling with a consumer protest, and most consumer protests are FAR less ethical and informed than your examples. Genetically Modified Food being one of many.

Chip Daniels: This is why I dislike blanket advocacy for “free trade” because what it actually means is “I favor the current structure of international trade regulations and the outcome they are producing”.

Na, if I could simply eliminate all regulations and restrictions I would. I've had enough classes in this and went deep enough into the underlying math (admittedly years ago) that I understand mostly these regulations are for political optics and prevent us from hurting ourself.

Trade barriers mostly hurt the country which creates them. "Dumping" mostly hurts the country which is 'dumping' and benefits the country which is being 'victimized'. A lot of 'free trades' problems are political, the person being hurt by trade knows darn well who he is but the benefits are diffused widely. Proving that the benefits are a lot greater than the costs are non-trivially difficult and emotion normally trumps math.

Michael Cain:
Which state you choose as an analogue is important.Or more accurately, states...

My (unresearched) feeling is that all of those states (or collection of states) have crazy high levels of their GDP tied into trade with other states. I go down to the local food store and very little can be local, probably all of it is out of state. My expectation is the rest of the store is similar.

Similarly when I talk to people very few of them have lived their entire life in this state.

Similarly the federal gov would be non-trivial to replace.

The EU *should* be like this but either it's not or the 'stay' people weren't able to articulate their case.

The amazing thing about the brexit is it's unclear if it's going to be an economic problem (I think it will be but that's just me). Picture one of the 50 states leaving the union, say, Ohio. Forget the politics of it, the economics of it is clearly terrible.

It's been multiple decades, it says a lot of bad things about the EU that it's not clear.

Free trade isn't intuitively obvious as a good thing, especially to the people who are hurt by it, yet free trade being a good thing is to economics what the Theory of Gravity is to Physics.

There are lots of examples of that. If I *want* something to happen then it *must* be a good thing for the government to make it happen. This is how we got Prohibition, the drug war, the massive amount of redistribution of money we have, etc.

Hidden costs can be just that, hidden.

DavidTC:
All you have to do is harass a person until they took a swing at you.

When it comes to gov policy, especially for things like self defense, there are no perfect, cost free, solutions. Which brings us back to my question, "how often is this a problem"? Other than Martin (who got shot for more than taking a swing), I can't think of any. I.e. if we're interested in reducing deaths, my expectation is this was an extreme exception and really shouldn't be driving police, much less used as an excuse to reduce constitutional rights.

DavidTC:
On the other hand, my wife’s unarmed home town did have 80% of their population murdered (12k out of 15k) by the Nazis.
First, I feel I should point out that the Nazis doing something is the literal *opposite* of the government losing control.

The gov has the responsibility to protect you, that's why we have police. They can fail in that deliberately (Tyranny) or from a loss of control (incompetence, failed state).

DavidTC:
Second, I feel I should point out that ‘Defending yourself from the government’ is something I literally am refusing to accept as any sort of argument. It’s gun-lobby gibberish.

It's math. 12k a year gun homicides (which includes the drug war). So the holocaust balances roughly 1000 years of gun related homicides, and there's no history of any gov remaining stable and good on that time frame. Take the drug war off the table and we're looking at tens of thousands of years of balance, and even that is an understatement because we're assuming gun control could prevent most all those homicides.

If we exclude the Nazis as extreme outliers which won't happen again, then we have the Japanese whose body count may have been higher. If we exclude both of them we have dozens of other examples, leading to a back-of-the-envelope worldwide chance of roughly 2% per decade of something of this scale. This excludes failed states, wars, and Communism's charming habit of making mistakes which starve or otherwise kill millions of their citizens.

If we only want to look at the US, then we have the KKK (which was often run out of the local sheriff's office) and our treatment of the Indians as examples of government abuse.

The really concerning thing when we look worldwide is many/most are only obvious with hindsight. No one in 1920's Germany would have predicted 1940. The implication is we can go from normalcy to nightmare in just a decade or two.

DavidTC:
Here is the sole statement I will make: The Nazis have bombs, and if that city had offered resistance in the form of gunfire, they would have bombed the city flat.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Being "bombed flat" is FAR better than being sent to a death camp, lots of places were bombed flat.

Unless what you really meant was the full weight of the Nazi army would have been brought to bear... but the full weight of the army simply can't be put on every hick town.

DavidTC:
You seem willing to allow the personal use of a gun at all, but that seems unusual.
I do not think you know what the world ‘unusual’ means...

My bad, I spliced together two sentences and got one which was less than clear. You seem to believe that the 2ndAM doesn't give a personal right to a gun, but you also seem willing to live with Heller and see utility for people to have firearms for personal defense. I.e. although you hit the radar as a Gun Control Advocate you also seem sensible, rational, and not an extremist. Problem is as far as I can tell this is unusual for GCA.

DavidTC:
...but if you’re trying to make the argument that the majority of Americans think people shouldn’t be able to defend themselves with guns, you are a) wrong, and b) making *exactly the opposite* argument you want to be making a democracy.

We just had 50 people die in a 'gun free zone', how many were able to 'defend themselves with guns'? And is the political response that we need more rights for Americans, or fewer?

DavidTC:
In practice I’d expect if we let the gov decide how much self defense you’re allowed, the answer will be ‘not a gun’.
Why the hell do you think that?

Chicago gun laws. DC gun laws. The various 'gun free' shooting zones which end up in the news occasionally. Taylor Woolrich's experience http://www.inquisitr.com/1394954/gun-control-rule-at-dartmouth-college-denies-taylor-woolrich-protection-from-stalker-with-rape-kit/

DavidTC:
Every single state in the US has laws allowing self defense. And you realize that the current interpretation of the 2nd, which stated a constitutional right to self defense, happened in *2008*, right? Before that, there’s absolutely no constitutional obligation to have laws allowing self defense. (Technically, there wasn’t after that, either. Just because it works as a constitutional defense in court doesn’t require *laws* allowing it.)

This would give me a lot more confidence if the Supremes had voted 9-0 rather than 'all liberals adamantly opposed' 5-4. If the Court had been 4-5 (one more liberal), would DC have been able to ban handguns outright and require any firearm kept in the home be kept "unloaded, disassembled, or bound by a trigger lock or similar device...this was deemed to be a prohibition on the use of firearms for self-defense in the home." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_Control_Regulations_Act_of_1975

I look at 4 Supreme Court Justices being just fine with DC's laws (or presumably ones going further) and I question what 'self defense' will mean after we get more Supremes that think like them. I also look at all the dead in Orlando and question what their 'right' to self defense meant in practice.

DavidTC:
You keep saying really weird things that are extremely hard to follow.

I'm an Engineer, I get that a lot.

DavidTC:
You mean other than the guy who was shot in the head and his corpse set on fire.
There is no evidence whatsoever that had anything to do with the unrest at all.

They had 20 murders in the last 12 years. If it's not connected it's one heck of a coincidence. http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Ferguson-Missouri.html

Joe Sal:
Dark I must say it’s been good having you around lately.

Thank you.

Joe Sal:
...pretty major errors, I don’t know what constitutional law class a lot of these folks are taking...

Now there you (and others) have me at a disadvantage. My background is math/logic (thus the name) and not law.