I don’t think anyone wants this blog to turn into a wonkfest, but I would like to defend two Balloon Juice catchphrases, one of which some (* cough *) think is an indicator of epistemic closure.
The first is “Free Markets Solve Everything”. I think ED is spot-on with this analysis of the role of redistribution in free market economies, and I also think John is right about the callous nature of some advocates of the free market. But my main gripe about the term “free market” is that it has become an overused, shorthand term, devoid of any real meaning, used mainly to justify corporate rights over individual liberty.
So, for example, a discussion of net neutrality or Internet pricing, which is at its heart a discussion of the regulation of public utilities operating as (at best) part of an oligopoly, gets sidetracked by discussions of “the free market” of Internet services. This is a classic category error — if the ISP market is a “free market’, then I don’t know what “free market” means. ISPs string their wires on or under private and public property that is allocated to them by the government, there aren’t enough ISPs to provide actual competition, and the facts about the service provided are hidden from the purchaser. This is a hell of a lot different from the market for, say, shoes, where purchasers can choose a clearly defined product produced by a variety of companies who don’t owe their very existence to an act of government. Treating the purchase of a service provided by a public utility as if it were a trip to the shoe store is the kind of sloppy reasoning that gets a “Free Markets Solve Everything” tag.
Sloppiness about “free markets” is often accompanied by blinders about threats to those markets. The free market defenders who are often tagged “Glibertarians” here are those who think that the only threat to free markets is excessive (or any) government regulation. My view is that the opposite is often the case — the biggest threat to free markets is regulatory capture by corporations who seek to rig the market to serve the interests of big incumbent players. When I call someone a “glibertarian”, it’s mainly because they’ve used free market rhetoric where it doesn’t belong, or because they don’t understand the necessary role of independent regulators in the maintenance of a free market.
Ron Paul may have many failings, but he at least acknowledges that corporatism exists. McMegan and the Reasonoids seem to have forgotten that, if they ever knew it in the first place. For them, the perjorative “glibertarian” is richly deserved. While I agree that it’s probably tossed around a little too freely, it is firmly rooted in a legitimate critique of some widely-accepted stupidities about the role of government in markets.
Thunderlizard
Well said.
JGabriel
Nice essay. Good analysis.
.
geg6
Perfect. Says it all, exactly as it is.
Napoleon
Very well put.
gnomedad
I totally agree. I like to say that regulations are the infrastructure of markets, not their antithesis. If I get queasy about mockery of “free markets”, it’s because I’ve known lefty folks who seemed to have no concept that any good whatever could come from market forces. I think of these people as “economic creationists”, like those who refuse to believe anything interesting could happen in the natural world except by God’s design.
Keith G
@geg6: Goodness, I hate being derivative, but amen.
Funkhauser
I also think that Glibertarianism was coined for people like Glenn Reynolds, who call themselves libertarians but had no problem with a massive military apparatus spying on its citizens for their safety and blowing up brown people.
See, e.g., http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/2449.html
Some more extensive etymology is probably in order, but I have expense forms to fill out.
El Cid
Well,
It’s used just as much to discuss situations in which corporations are risking the very stability of the nation-state in which they operate and the survival likelihoods of that nation-state’s citizens. A bit more than ‘individual liberty’.
Commodities Futures Modernization Act, anyone? Let’s legalize the construction of trillions of dollars of imaginary worth of fictional investments (upon fantasy combinations of mortgage ‘tranches’) and see what happens!
Or any number of 3rd world countries which were pressured to take insane ‘free market’ approaches to agricultural production which favored a few mass exporters and outside investors but which slashed income and food accessibility for the population, which went on to threaten state stability?
FREEDOM!
Keith G
@Keith G: The reply to geg6 was unintentional. Need coffee.
WereBear
Absolutely!
Letting the biggest players rig the game would be scorned as ridiculous in the field of sport; it works the same way economically.
gnomedad
@Keith G:
Um, “unintentional”? Your cat did it? You sleep-post before you have coffee?
adolphus
BCS anyone?
Scorned perhaps, but a large and growing bank account can heal a college president’s or AD’s hurtest feelings.
middlewest
OK, this is just getting sad. He has no time to address the blatant factual errors and sloppy reasoning that commenters on BJ outlined in detail under his posts, but he has plenty of time to run off to his own blog for some passive-aggressive circle-jerking with his readers there. My days of not taking this guy seriously are certainly coming to a middle.
TomG
Thanks, mistermix, for pointing this out.
There are many libertarian (mostly left-leaning) and anarchist weblogs around which make this quite clear, but sadly, the glibertarians seem to get the most attention. I know this veers close to the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but I do believe that commenters on B-J sometimes seem to have a rather narrow view of “what all libertarians believe” and make fun of the stereotype rather than taking some of the points seriously.
jinxtigr
I haven’t been that much of a heckler, but I wouldn’t have known of this ‘home team blog post’ before this BJ post linking to it.
You know contempt is the big dead giveaway that a relationship isn’t going to work out. I guess I’ll keep an eye out for if E.D. is being contemptuous of our host John Cole too- because being contemptuous of us is apparently not a problem ;P
One crack about Tunch, though, and we kill him and make recipes of him :D
Hugin & Munin
middlewest: see it as running back home to cry into mama’s skirt. Really, what’s the point? He doesn’t engage the serious criticism, he nutpicks the ad-homs, and he fails to understand the importance of naming & framin accurately. Just another lamoid conservative who wants to play wordgames. I can get that from the em-ess-em.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
So I wonder over to your link for the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, and I see two quotes from the same person that are absolutely hilarious:
and
If that person isn’t a spoof, then I take everything nice I have been thinking about EDK back. I do not deal with people who refuse to evaluate evidence and adjust their beliefs based on it.
El Cid
Speaking of
Stalinist 5 year plan gulagsmoderately sized government assistance to the nation’s economy and infrastructure, Time has a good article on the long term effects of the far-sighted investments by ‘the stimulus’ in all kinds of areas, from energy efficiency to genetic research and so forth.ItinerantPedant
mistermix
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I smell a B-J commenter out for a troll.
@Hugin & Munin: I think Erik is a smart guy and a good writer who wants to be challenged. He has the grit to come over here, take a bunch of shit along with some valid criticism, and he keeps coming back. That earns my respect, and it ought to get him some respect from everyone else.
El Cid
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Damn! I was sure Obama promised me a $10K Armada by Christmas!
cleek
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
exactly what i was thinking.
if that SUV bit is not snark, it might be the dumbest comment i’ve ever seen.
Pigs & Spiders
Well said, mistermix. People seem to forget that a government is a player in a free market just as any corporate entity is.
catpal
Well said.
But I still want to know why too many call it a “free market” – but it is full of Govt Subsidized Corporations surviving on $$ Billions of Farm subsidies, Defense No-Bid Contracts, Utility and Cable Monopolies, etc.
Where is this a fully Free Enterprise competitive market? I’m not seeing it here in the US.
Hugin & Munin
mistermix: Either he is mendacious or a fool, you pick.
And what is this, The Atlantic all of a sudden?
Jayackroyd
Regulation is ESSENTIAL to free markets. If markets are not regulated, they will be dominated by cheaters. If you don’t have an FDA, false claims of safety and efficacy will overwhelm true claims. If you don’t have a weights and measures regulator, your food bazaar will be dominated by people who overcharge customers. If you don’t have someone checking the taxi meters or the gas pumps, they will be doctored.
One of the most intensely regulated markets of all is the stock market, as PJ O’Rourke discovered on a visit to Wall Street. Without such regulations, traders will use their asymmetric knowledge (as in all those examples above) to cheat people.
Never mind instances of market failure, as when common resources are overused, or spoiled, because they are not priced in the marketplace at all.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@mistermix: I certainly hope so. I would hate to have to think that someone even Kevin-Bacon related to this site would think either of those things.
Though I will say that EDK’s rant over there was pretty annoying as it is. That had the fairly typical conservative tack of only being able to contemplate the part of the world he can see at that particular moment, the rest of the world be damned.
Napoleon
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
EDK actually wrote that?
cleek
@Napoleon:
that was from a comment on EDK’s piece.
Pigs & Spiders
@Napoleon: To be fair, EDK didn’t write that, one of his commenters did.
Napoleon
@cleek:
@Pigs & Spiders:
Oh, you really can not hold that against him, and yes they just have to be trolls.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Napoleon: Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that EDK wrote that; it was a commenter. It was written like it agreed with EDK’s post on League of Ordinary Gentlemen, and I was making a comment toward the type of discussions they must have over there if those were accepted views. I was definitely hoping it was a spoof.
Jennifer
My biggest problem with the way “free market” gets thrown around is that it isn’t. Free, that is.
In a free market, Coca-Colas manufactured in the US would be sweetened with sugar, like they are in every other country. Thanks to corn supports, they aren’t. In a free market, we could decide whether it was worth paying $.03 more per pound on hamburger that wasn’t cut with what were formerly inedible parts of the beef carcass, the fatty trimmings from the outside which are also the most contaminated with e coli and other pathogens, which are chopped up, mixed into a “slurry” and then treated with ammonia to kill the bacteria before being mixed into your burger. We can’t decide this because the producers aren’t required to tell us we’re eating cat food treated with ammonia. In a free market, producers who test for mad cow disease would be able to label their product as such – they aren’t.
I could write a book on this, and I’m sure someone else already has. There’s nothing “free” about our markets – that’s just shorthand for “do whatever you need to make a buck – we in the government are here to help you keep it a secret.”
Sentient Puddle
I, for one, would be quite alright with that.
I just don’t like it happening in the middle of the night, and now I gotta catch up on everything. Though after the morning meeting. You guys timed this perfectly, didn’t you?
burnspbesq
@El Cid:
“Commodities Futures Modernization Act, anyone? Let’s legalize the construction of trillions of dollars of imaginary worth of fictional investments (upon fantasy combinations of mortgage ‘tranches’) and see what happens!”
Factually incorrect. The CFMA didn’t in any meaningful sense “legalize” anything. All of those things were legal.
What the CFMA did was block one regulatory agency from exercising jurisdiction.
I suppose it’s possible to say that a disastrous outcome is a disastrous outcome, and not get all nit-picky about causation. But when you start with bad facts, bad reasoning often follows.
burnspbesq
@Hugin & Munin:
Vote with your feet if you don’t like it here. Not sure you’ll be missed.
numbskull
@mistermix:
MM, I really enjoyed this mini-essay. You’ve made several great points using a minimum of words. I’m sure I’ll steal from this heavily!
But…
I want you to review my next grant. You have low standards when assessing other people’s work, a quality that I truly appreciate in a reviewer.
How does it take “grit” to cough up some knarly hairball of an FP post, full of error in fact and reasoning, then never address serious counter-arguments or even acknowledge corrective points of fact, go off to play with his like-minded, denser friends, only to come back and reel off another stinker of a post, all the while never actually engaging?
This in no way takes “grit” or “courage” or even much thought. It’s simply continuing learned bad behavior from conservative blogs.
I will give you that he’s a smart guy on a certain level. After all, this whole thing has been a win-win for EDK. He gets more attention in two separate venues for the same dreck.
In the “free market” of ideas at BJ, there’s lots of shoes on offer from several makers, but EDK has shown up trying to sell shit on a shingle. Just because he comes back every market day with his a new cute pile on a slightly shinier shingle is hardly worthy of respect.
Shygetz
What bothers me is how lassiez faire supporters have hijacked the term “free market”, which Adam Smith coined to mean free from government-enforced monopolies, but was highly consistent with government regulation. By conflating lassiez faire economic systems with what I guess one could call classical free markets, the lassiez faire gents are trying to hitch a free ride on Adam Smith and Co.’s coattails; a ride which they clearly don’t deserve. And when it comes to the term “free market”, I’m afraid they’ve won.
The Fool
Everything you say in this post is true but I would also make the following point: libertarianism is a stupid political philosophy. There are many values to be considered and balanced ina political theory: among them are the classic triumvirate: liberty, equality, fraternity, as well as values like justice.
All of these concepts are very complex. But libertarianism is a stupid single-value theory. Its all about liberty and everything else is subordinated to that. Single variable models in the sciences are almost always wrong because they oversimplify. Same with libertarianism. It provides the illusion of reason and rigor when in actuality its like a climate model that looks at cow farts and nothing else.
cleek
the fundamental problem with amateur economists is that even professional economists don’t know WTF they’re talking about. it’s a bullshit “science”, top to bottom.
me
What the fuck is this? The C4C thread was fairly polite and had valid criticism of what he wrote. He couldn’t even be arsed to reply directly in the comments. He shouldn’t bother writing here if all he wants is sycophantry from his commenters.
morzer
@El Cid:
Isn’t that what Philip II of Spain said?
The Republic of Stupidity
Sooooooo…
I follow the link provided over to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, out of curiosity mind you…
And rarely has it taken me so little time to decide I’ll never need to go back THERE again…
Managed ignorance? What the?
The Moar You Know
What the glibertarian version of free markets markets boils down to is that is should be the God-given right of the strong to rape the weak, as often as they like and in any position that gratifies their immediate desire. The economic version of prison rape, if you will.
I am fairly sure that this is not what Adam Smith had in mind, but boy shit howdy, it sure seems to be the definition that every modern “conservative” uses.
morzer
Speaking purely for myself, I prefer a wonkfest to a wankfest. McMegan, are you listening? This will be on the quiz.
Shygetz
@cleek: It’s not bullshit “science”, it’s social science…a subset of sociology. If you approach any social science with the idea that it will give you results like natural science, then you’re just fooling yourself. But, if you approach it with the same caution that you approach other branches of sociology, you can get some valuable insights…just realize that they are insights, not answers to be wholly trusted.
JGabriel
TomG:
Way the hell back in 2000, I took one of those online tests that matched your political positions with the presidential candidates. I got an 80% match with Nader, 75% with Gore, 40% with the Libertarian Du Jour, and 5% with Bush.
So, I’ve long been aware that there can be some common ground with libertarians. More so than Republicans, anyway.
Leonidas, commenter @ The League of Ordinary Gentlemen:
Then again, maybe not. It’s really hard to take seriously people who unironically quote McArdle, aka Jane Galt, as an actual authority.
(*At first I thought this was snark, but apparently someone going by the handle Leonidas has been posting similar, um, observations for years. Unless it’s DougJ, it’s probably not snark.)
.
morzer
@Shygetz:
Part of the problem is that the social sciences, like the humanities, have increasingly tried to look like the hard sciences. Since this mostly involves adopting inappropriate jargon and bad math, while obfuscating on the real issues, cleek has a point. That said, there are economists who are reasonably open about the limits of their discipline, and who object to its politicization.
MobiusKlein
Don’t forget the BP spoiled Gulf of Mexico.
A shining testimony to the limits of the Free Market.
Bob
I hate lazy commenters that right stuff like “good post” or “well said.”
To your post I say, word, brother.
I hate myself.
Redshift
Another facet of the debasement of the term “free markets” are people I tend to refer to as “market worshipers,” because for them it’s an article of faith that markets will always produce the best result, if government just gets out of the way. It’s the same movement conservative results (less regulation is automatically good), but from a childlike faith viewpoint rather than a Humpty-Dumpty definition of “liberty.”
The truly idiotic aspect of this is that they love free markets, but have no idea what they actually are; that is, they have no understanding that market forces favor what is most profitable, not what is good. A classic example were the people at my local health care town hall last summer screaming “let the free market solve it!” (really!) In fact, many of the worst aspects of our health care system were exactly the result of market forces, because insurance companies figured out it was more profitable to deny care than to provide it.
demo woman
@The Moar You Know: You’re right! The same libertarians who say the market will take care of itself spout about lawyers like John Edwards who sued Jacuzzi. There are no rights for the victims only the victors.
WereBear
There is one thing I do share with Libertarian philosophy:
We should be free to pursue what makes us happy.
But somehow they’ve gone all Noble Savage on the concept; they don’t get that some liberties must have constraints so that all people can have some. They act like we should have no laws against murder, because people know murder is wrong! and other conceits of conception.
There is no friggin’ invisible hand! You don’t get to bail on making moral rules and enforcing them!
Truly moral rules are compact and all encompassing. Let’s put some brain cells on that sometime, shall we?
cleek
@Shygetz:
but many people do.
or, more typically, people will use the conclusions of economists who agree with them to lend an air of authority to their own arguments. and given the weakness/softness/youth (however you want to describe it) of economics, you can cherry-pick economists to find support for nearly any argument you want to make. and that’s true even of professionals.
Wiesman
I’m one of the ones who (not too strenuously, but still) defended ED Kain when he first started posting. I enjoyed his posts, and while I agree with others that there were things to criticize about them, I appreciated his insight and thought some of the reaction to him was ridiculously unfair.
When JC correctly chided some, citing evidence of epistemic closure, it prompted a rather long post by someone (I forget who) arguing that epistemic closure is impossible among liberals because, well, because we are awesome, that’s why. I responded to that by calling it a piece of “well-written happy horseshit” and added that, “the first sign of epistemic closure is believing that epistemic closure is impossible.” (Which prompted others to note that the first two rules of epistemic closure is, of course, that “you don’t talk about epistemic closure.” Oh Fight Club, you are the gift that keeps on giving.)
Anyway, having said all that, when I read ED Kain’s post over at OG about all us bad bad commenters here at BJ, what immediately came to my mind was:
I guess this is where we all cry out, “Oh ED Kain! Can you ever forgive us for being mean to you? Please keep posting and save us from our epistemically closed selves!”
Well, um, no.
I mean, I hope he keeps posting (was that post a “goodbye and fuck you”? I dunno, hope not) because I like his writing and I appreciate his point of view.
But can we please dispense with all the emo drama? For fuck’s sake, I get plenty of that IRL.
Michael
“Free Markets” work well with the allocation of truly discretionary goods and services, where demand is elastic.
It doesn’t work so well with necessities (energy, staples) or with goods and services which rely upon government licensing or monopoly. With these items, a firm government hand is necessary.
morzer
@Wiesman:
I think Kain has had a couple of truly awful posts about transportation, specifically cars. He’s also had a few good posts where he tries to explain his views in more constructive fashion, and with more evidence. That said, I did wonder whether his post at LOG was a way of bailing out while proclaiming innocent victimhood. If he is going to post here again, he does need some sort of explanation and, I think, an apology for the way he conducted himself. But perhaps my epistemic closure is flaring up again. It tends to do so when I am short of caffeine.
singfoom
I’ll stop ignoring the free-marketeers when I have a choice of ISP or Cable TV provider in my neighborhood.
I fucking hate Comcast with the power of 1000 burning suns, but they’re the only CableTV/Internet provider in my area that’s not DSL.
They treat me like shit. Consistently. Their service is awful. They cap my bandwidth. If I could switch, I’d do it in a second, but there’s nowhere to go.
How the fuck is that free?
I think when people say “Free Markets” they mean “Markets tilted towards my advantage”
Pigs & Spiders
I need digby. I can has mor digby nau?
Ked
I’ve been slightly more disengaged from BJ than usual lately, so I know I haven’t caught all the nuances of the discussion around here, but…
This post is exactly the thing I like about having EDK front-paging. It draws out (provokes?) the other front pagers into longer, better comments explaining the underlying ethos so many of us here share – skepticism and realism about the way things work. The shorthand that develops here (and aren’t we reaching a point where we should update the lexicon?) is fantastic, but shorthand is ultimately inaccurate and unilluminating, and the site had been slipping due to its overuse.
arguingwithsignposts
@JGabriel and others:
Bwwaahahahaha.
Guy needs a better calculator.
Bob
@Bob: I need coffee, also, write, not “right.” Jebus.
jinxtigr
Actually that’s a really good point, Ked- it’s like a sudden flare-up of clear thinking and dialogue in response to this one guy who’s conflicting with some of the dogmas, but not apparently listening.
Maybe we can have a series of puppet glibertarians. Bring them in, prop them up on a rock or something, get into a rousing debate with each other to hammer out details of what we think, thank them and feed them to Tunch :)
demo woman
Ed has a new blog.
Matt in HB
@gnomedad:
I totally agree. I like to say that regulations are the infrastructure of markets, not their antithesis. If I get queasy about mockery of “free markets”, it’s because I’ve known lefty folks who seemed to have no concept that any good whatever could come from market forces. I think of these people as “economic creationists”, like those who refuse to believe anything interesting could happen in the natural world except by God’s design.
Amen.
On the other hand, the hypothetical free market on which the whole glibertarian world-view is based doesn’t actually exist.
Both ends of the spectrum are off their nut. In the middle, people recognize that structured and regulated markets often provide excellent incentives in a lot of situations. And, poor structure and regulation tend to create perverse incentives that wind up causing unwanted and unexpected outcomes.
Markets work, just not always and everywhere.
NobodySpecial
@Shygetz:
Great. Now explain that to the Hayekians out there out to destroy anyone non-rich in the world and make it stick.
Bella Q
The *cough* link gets me a 404 error at LOG. What I get for being late to the party. Great points in the post, mistermix. Thanks.
Redshift
@cleek: My favorite are the people dismiss climate science as “unproven” and then go on to argue against climate legislation because of the “disastrous economic effects” predicted by their favorite practitioner in that completely rigorous and undisputed field of economics.
hilzoy
Darn. I had a long comment that basically said: look, it’s very tough to be a conservative on a liberal blog, and (speaking from experience) very tough to keep conservatives on your blog, but it’s very much worth doing. But the blog ate it.
Darn.
I can’t find anything at the “cough” link either.
cleek
@Redshift:
exactly!
cleek
@hilzoy:
the “cough” post was deleted. EDK explains here.
Maxwell James
Great post.
I find that a fairly useful exercise when thinking about “free markets” in terms of governance is to ask: does this policy make it easier or harder for a new business to succeed?
Net neutrality, by that standard, ranks as a definite “yes”. Without it, new entrants to the dot-com field are going to be extremely hard pressed against established companies.
On the other hand, “free market” policies that result in higher market share for a few companies are simple corporatism, and should be called out for it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of actions our Congress takes are to support corporate rather than free market interests.
Corner Stone
@hilzoy:
I’m Fair Using it en toto. An FP can kill this if they find it not kosher.
El Cid
@morzer: Ba dum pum! Thanks! I’ll be here all night! Try the cordero asado!
slag
@middlewest:
Hehe.
Nonetheless, I’m with hilzoy on this to the extent that keeping the conservative doesn’t mean giving out participation prizes on a regular basis. He’s got to be able to hold his own. The blog can and should make some accommodations for him but not turn into a daily Care Bears singalong party.
mattt
Wonkfest, no.
The occasional substantive post in between items on pets, cooking, and making fun of stupid people, yes.
Thanks for this one.
—-
PS – I’m also a big fan of pets, dinner, and making fun of stupid people.
Martin
What I think defenders of wide-open markets also neglect is the effect of monopolies, even local ones. The only defense against monopolies is government in the form of regulation. But I don’t see how a market dominated by a single player, free to do as they please is any freer than a market where the government tells companies where to go and where to do business.
The reality is that examples of the latter are getting much harder to find as ED was good enough to highlight (and give fair credit to Dems) some weeks ago. But examples of the former are getting easier to find. ‘Free’ can’t just apply to the relationship between government and a given business, but also between businesses themselves. If an Exxon or Apple or Goldman Sachs is preventing access to a market, how is that any different than government doing it? Appropriate government is instrumental to a free market, but in broader discussions among republicans and libertarians, I rarely hear any specifics about the positive role of government here. That’s got to change.
shecky
Oddly enough, you make a good case why some occupational licenses (such as barbering) is so weak. It’s an endeavor by incumbent players seeking government backing to capture their own industry.
But what does a glibertarian like me know about the hair cutting trade? Oh, don’t forget BP and McArdle, too.
Mayur
@cleek:
That’s actually not true. You can cherry-pick economists’ policy prescriptions to support nearly any argument, but numbers really don’t lie. The “science-y” part of economics is a combination of statistics, econometrics, and sociology; the rest is really political economy, which is, or should be, a different academic discipline entirely but gets lumped with economics by two groups: libertarians and Marxists.
Most so-called libertarians don’t know shit about Economics, given that they ignore even the Macro 101 stuff about externalities, public goods, and G/I/S multipliers, to name just a few elements.
I recently experienced the irony of a (very libertarian) friend ranting about how lefty political economists are practicing the “economics equivalent of creationism” when he doesn’t even understand things like the elasticity of demand.
You are a smart commentator, and I seem to agree 100% with your views on policy, but don’t make libertarian nonsense the strawman for economics. That crap isn’t right. It usually isn’t even wrong.
Mayur
Sorry; by “that crap” I mean “their (libertarians’) crap.”
Mayur
@shecky:
Or it’s necessary health and safety regulation. These people do work with stuff that can cut you and infect you.
Please. Are you saying that ALL licensing is solely a sop to entrenched interests? Or is it possible that maybe, just maybe, there is a balance to be struck between setting some industry standards and avoiding monopolies?
Incidentally, please note, if you are a libertarian, that private cartelization, such as that practiced by my own member organization the ABA, carries all the downsides of a government licensing scheme, with much lower accountability.
Dr. Morpheus
@cleek:
It’s clowns all the way down.
Dr. Morpheus
@Michael:
Consumption that exhibits elasticity and consumption that is discretionary are diametrically opposite characteristics of consumption of a commodity. If a commodity is one, it cannot be the other by definition.
Remember, a commodity’s consumption which is elastic means that the amount of consumption is not directly proportional to it’s price. Specifically, if the consumption is logarithmically (or nearly so) proportional to it’s price.
The classic example being, “If the price of soap doubled, would you take half as many showers?”
A commodity that is discretionary cannot exhibit elasticity. Soap, being part of the ‘necessary’ social convention of personal hygiene is necessary and thus it’s consumption does not directly vary in proportion to it’s price.
A discretionary commodity, candy for instance, is inelastic. This logically follows from the fact that few adults consider the consumption of candy a necessity. So if the price of candy were to double it’s consumption would halve.