I was pondering the question, “what do I want in a politician?” Really, I just want someone I can forget about after he or she gets into office. The best government is probably one where you don’t notice its presence or its absence, leaving you free to do and think about other things.
I don’t think we can afford an unnoticed President. While that will be a relief for the world after the past 8 years, we instead need a balanced President on the world stage.
We need a President who is tough, but not overbearing. We need someone who is going to represent us honorably, and be ready to negotiate with anyone, anywhere about anything. That doesn’t mean backing down and becoming irrelevant, but it doesn’t mean being openly hostile either.
Case in point: China. I don’t know that I’ve heard any of the candidates talk about what they think we need to do with China, or how we’ll get them to change their human rights and currency policies – and do it in such a way that it doesn’t bankrupt us when they call in their debts. We need to be using both the carrot and the stick that if China is going to be a friend to the U.S., then we need to level the playing field a bit and make sure they accept the full responsibilities of being a world power.
A President who is unnoticed isn’t going to be able to get that done. He or she is going to have to be out there in front of the issues. He or she has to be very active in both listening to the public, but also educating them on why we should pick certain decisions over another. And so on.
In short, I think we need Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt in 2008. :)
I didn’t realize that you’re a libertarian.
I stray.
The 60s hippies (my generation) were power to the people’ anti-government, liberal libertarians,which kind of resembled anarchists in extreme form. Now we have conservative libertarians who just want to make sure nobody gets anything they can’t personally afford,and put all wealth into private hands, who then can afford all they want. Private control is always holy and just,and becomes our unoffical, unelected government,so we’re always back to square one.
Private control is not “holy and just”. It just works. Markets work. Governments don’t. Which, if you have half a brain, is not surprising. The legislative process is just not the proper vehicle for deciding most issues. Most issues are far too complex to be fixed through the legislative process.
But if people just get out of the way and let society evolve, most problems solve themselves. For example, $103 oil will do more to move forward wind power, solar power, plug-in hybrids, etc. than all the possible tax credits in the world.
That doesn’t even get into the efficacy of government programs. Most government programs are not just wasteful, but they make the worse the problems they are ostensibly supposed to fix.
‘If we don’t feel the presence of government then what do we have instead?’ is the 1st question that always comes to mind.
“Feel the presence of government”? What does that mean, and what does that have to do with anything?
Buzzcut writes:
Saying your dogma isn’t dogma makes it no less dogmatic.
Markets don’t always “just work”. And government doesn’t always fail. If your words are true:
* Why do we have government-run police forces?
* Why do we have government-run military forces?
* Why do we have government-run courts?
At least the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard–a hero of the U.S. Libertarian Party–was consistent in that he called for the complete privatization of all of the above (see his book For a New Liberty).
Moreover, if things were as you characterize them, we would not have the term “market failure”. “Natural” monopolies, externalities, and information asymmetries all exist in the real world, even in markets that are unregulated.
Of course, having grown up around libertarians and Objectivists, I know what the canned rebuttals to are:
* market failures don’t actually exist anyway; and/or
* they are natural and proper and right; and/or
* “true” capitalism has “never been tried”, and only if we eliminated all government in the entire world at a stroke (and maybe reprogrammed all human brains to be dutiful laissez-faire capitalists), would the perfection of capitalism come to light; and/or
* anyone who offers any criticisms of capitalism, no matter what the empirical foundations of their observation or how strong their argument, is a secret totalitarian bent on Evil.
Which one of these do you want to proffer?
These are all statements, routinely encountered in pro-capitalist literature, designed to foreclose discussion, not promote understanding. They offer capitalists comforting ways to remain ignorant of any critiques of capitalism.
Capitalism, as conceived of by its most militant advocates, is evidently a doctrine too fragile to be permitted to access to the marketplace of ideas. It survives only because it is subsidized by the processes of irrational brains that dare not confront critiques of it.
That is why what you espouse is dogma.
The purpose of government, says the libertarian, is to protect our liberties. Arguably, police, courts, and the military do that, up to a point.
What most people call a “market failure” is no such thing. It is a much abused term.
More importantly, just because there is a market failure in no way means that the government is in any way capable of providing a remedy.
Look, there’s a joke going around economist circles. Goes something like this:
Harvard School Economics: “Markets fail, try government”
Chicago School Economics: “Governments fail, try markets”
George Mason Economics: “Markets fail, try markets”.
That last one is the most truthful.
Buzzcut wrote:
So it’s option one (“market failures don’t actually exist”).
(Okay, so you concede that they might conceivably exist, but there’s nothing anyone can do about them–kind of like tachyons. In any case the policy consequences are nil.)
Thanks for cutting to the chase. :)
Not that they don’t exist, but they are few and far between, and the best solution to them is not government.
Sorry if that’s too nuanced an argument for you.
When the markets failed in he 30s my dad dropped out of high school,and entered the CCC.. He planted trees many places,did general conservation and worked on building lake walls and upgrading parks in Chicago.
My grandmother, his mother, made bread during the night and peddled in on the street the next day.The government paid my father a little but most went home to his mother,so she could survive. That was a sensible program at the time and it was what government did here and now against total human desperation ..
My mother’s father worked on the locks and dams construction on the upper Mississippi. Men sat on the river bank waiting to be called to work,and often that meant a man died in this very difficult construction, a new guy got a job.I’m in no way exaggerating;this was no soap opera with commercials.
To say there is no such thing as economic failure is political posturing,because only government was there to help the common man and woman and family.No business stepped in to bail out business. I heard many stories like this first hand.
I guess that’s why John Steinbeck was my inspirational author during my teens. He seemed to understood all this.
Tachyons. Is there nothing they can’t do?
As a physicist I never thought I’d see the day that tachyons would be discussed on a political blog…
Was the depression a failure of markets? If Milton Friedman was right, it was caused by the Federal Reserve, which is a quasi-government entity. The Fed mismanaged the money supply, causing it to shrink. Once the bank failures really started going, there was a huge decrease in liquidity (not unlike the subprime crisis today, just on a much larger scale).
If the Fed then did what the Fed is doing now (injecting huge sums of money into the banking system to keep banks from failing) perhaps the Depression would not have been so severe.
If the writers of “Star Trek the Next Generation” were advising the Federal Reserve circa 1930, they would have recommended using Tachyons to end the Great Depression.
How many problems on ST:TNG were solved with a mere tachyon pulse? Innumerable.
I don’t know what I find more disturbing:
-Using tachyons as an analogy.
-Reading the analogy using tachyons and thinking, “Hey, good point!”
Buzzut,
No, it’s not “too nuanced an argument” for me because of two factors:
* It’s not nuanced at all.
* It’s not an argument.
You are making categorical statements and championing them as irrefutable, not making an argument.
Jeff Pruitt,
Stop wasting your time on this blog and find me a Higgs scalar boson!
:)
The “Colbert Report” had a good comment on what do you want in a democratic candidate; compairing Hillary and Barack to pizza: Do you want a slice of half Hawaiian that looks great but you have no idea how it tastes-or do you want a slice of plain cheese that has been sitting under the heat lamp for 35 years?
You are making categorical statements and championing them as irrefutable, not making an argument.
Sure, because you’re arguing ideas on a theoretical plane. Hard not to be categorical in such a situation.
But what are typical examples of market failure that AREN’T market failure.
Best example here
When you really look at so called market failures in detail, they’re often not failures at all.
This is where my thinking is on market failure.
Stop wasting your time on this blog and find me a Higgs scalar boson!
What’s that good for? Can it pop a warp bubble? Can it close a space-time rift? Can is stop silicon based lifeforms from subspace from coming into real space and kidnapping people? Can it cause a disturbance in the force?
Tachyons, b****. Tachyons.
Masonomics sees market failure as a motivation for entrepreneurship. As an example of market failure, let us use a classic case described by a Nobel Laureate, which is that the seller of a used car knows more about the condition of the car than the buyer. Masonomics predicts that entrepreneurs will try to address this problem. In fact, there are a number of entrepreneurial solutions. Buyers can obtain vehicle history reports. Sellers can offer warranties. Firms such as Carmax undertake professional inspections and stake their reputation on the quality of the cars that they sell.
Masonomics worries much more about government failure than market failure. Governments do not face competitive pressure. They are immune from the “creative destruction” of entrepreneurial innovation. In the market, ineffective firms go out of business. In government, ineffective programs develop powerful constituent groups with a stake in their perpetuation.
Assertions are not evidence.
At any rate, we’re not going to get anywhere; where some folks hold the belief that Jesus Christ can do wrong, you hold the belief that the market can do no wrong.
“Masonomics predicts.” Fine. Untested predictions are worth about as much as those of the psychics in the Weekly World News. Where are the Masonists’ peer-reviewed results? Actually, I’m getting ahead of myself–if all “Masonomics” predicts is that “entrepreneurs” will arise to “address” the failure, then it’s not very potent. I can style myself an entrepreneur and hawk a patent medicine that enables you to lose weight without having to exercise or change or diet, at no health risk to yourself. So Masonomics predicts that entrepreneurs will claim to have solutions. Great! I’ll bet the venture capitalists are lining up!
How about the actual effects on the information asymmetries in the market? Are they mitigated? If so, in what ways and to what degrees? Are there some types of information more easily marketed than others? Do some sorts of information prove resistant to collection and dissemination by enterprising entrepreneurs? Surely that cannot be, for we do not have copyright laws[1][2], trade secret laws[3], or classification of information by the government[4] which limit trafficking in marketable information? Or do Masonists not dirty their hands with these real-world concerns?
As Heinlein said, “specialization is for insects”. Some folks worry about failures in proportion to their consequences. If a surgeon in private practice negligently removes a patient’s only remaining kidney, or a private pharmaceutical company manufactures lethal medication, I do not expect the victims of such failures to gasp with Masonist relief, “thank God it’s not the government who’s killing me!”
Okay, this so transparently false it makes me wonder if laissez-faire capitalists even listen to Republican politicians.
Here’s the lead paragraph of a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story chosen practically at random from a Google News search:
C’mon, how’d your boy Mitch Daniels get that Honda Plant in Decatur County?
Assuming that the term “creative destruction” has semantic content–a doubtful prospect–yet again there are counter-examples. Here’s one from Slate:
Surely that was a bit of destruction to be celebrated by laissez-faire capitalists. The explanation can even be (charitably) described as “creative”! What’s not to love?
Again, a categorical statement that does not withstand scrutiny. Canonical Software, Ltd., for example, is wholly funded by a very wealth South African private individual. Given its business model, it has never turned a profit. But it has not gone out of business for years, and likely will not for a very long time. In fact, with some clever investing the operating expenses of the company could be sustained through annuities (and since the founder, Mark Shuttleworth, established a foundation to support the company, this indeed may be the idea).
This isn’t to say that such arrangements aren’t perfectly capitalistic; it is to say that ineffectuality need not be a death sentence for a firm. Lack of capitalization is far more lethal.
Right, and this is never true of corporations. Shh, quiet–nobody tell the Masonists about these things called “shareholders”.
At any rate, Buzzcut, I’m not suffering under any delusions that you find any of this enlightening in the least, let alone persuasive, so I’ll leave the last word to you. If you want to do something other than bleat unverifiable, unfalsifiable revealed truths to your fellow parishoners in the Church of Unfettered Capitalism, I’ll be delighted.
[1] Since the 1978 Copyright Act at the latest, copyright has been usable to suppress dissemination of information as well as to restrict distribution privileges to information publicly distributed. See, e.g., the Church of Scientology, for several examples of copyright litigation undertaken to prevent the publication of information deemed sensitive by the copyright holder.
[2] One might expect a laissez-faire capitalist to assert that the government-granted monopoly of copyright is an unwelcome government intrustion into the marketplace of ideas; one would be wrong. Relative minarchists like Ayn Rand, and even anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard (who, as I mentioned above, saw no role for government in policing, military, or legal arbitration) enthusiastically embraced the State power wielded in defense of their copyrights. Doubtless this had nothing at all to do with either writer’s primary source of livelihood being grounded on the existence of copyright laws and the royalties they generated…
[3] See DeCSS or the 128-bit AACS key that was published all over the net last April, to name just two examples.
[4] Credit where credit is due: at least in the case of the identity of Valerie Plame, Dick Armitage, Robert Novak, and others behaved like good like anarcho-capitalists. Information wants to be free! Unless it’s about waterboarding, the firings of U.S. Attorneys, what happened to the White House’s emails, or what happened to the RNCC’s money…
I hesitated briefly to follow Branden Robinson with barstool wisdom, but a couple thoughts come to mind after reading the above. What keeps good-willed laissez-faire capitalism from becoming carte blanche economic disaster?
Pouring public money into failing corporations is a government solution after the fact.Why not distribute the money directly somehow to consumers and wage earners at the start? Laissez-faire is also a government ‘intervention’ in a sense because doing nothing to impede the private sector is a definable government policy. I don’t know what Masonomics is except as I read above,but it seems like laissez-faire with a different name..
We should ask what are the built-in mechanisms in Masonomics to prevent the inevitable carte blanche economics sprouting up from laisssez-faire neglect that brought this country to our knees in the 30s,and is causing great discomfort?
Conditions seem to be getting worse and we’re still on our unobstructed path led by unfettered, bigtime entrepeneurs. But my $300 May government check,bribe or not, will be welcomed.
What’s your point of bringing up copyright law? I don’t think that it’s inconsistant with libertarian ideals. Libertarians are… libertarian. Not anarchists.
You can argue that the US copyright law as it is now written is too powerful. Larry Lessig does. It is not inconsistant with libertarian ideals. There needs to be a governmental framework where rights can be defended.
I think free market economics is a lot like evolution. The nature of the beast is such that it cannot be proven to the same degree that, say, Newton’s second law can. This allows people to come up with a few counterexamples here or there.
But what does the preponderance of evidence show us? Evolution is true, and markets work. Governments work best when they are limited to a few specific areas, like blowing up things and killing people in far off lands.
Governments face competitive pressures? By Republicans?
Really?
You know, Republicans OWNED the legislative process in 1995. Totally owned it.
Name one program that was ended.
Nothing changes. There are too many powerful interests, interests far more powerful than the Republican party (for example, AFSCME, NEA, and the other government employee unions).
But look at what technical progress and free markets have achieved. Let’s see.
Who was the biggest internet provider in 1995? AOL? How they doin’?
What else? Who was the biggest carmaker in ’95? GM? Who’s the biggest today? Toyota?
How about television? Sony used to own the market for TVs. They are no longer dominate. Not even close. Go to Best Buy and count all the obscure Chinese brands that are out there now. It’s crazy.
Which TV network dominated in ’95? Does ANY network dominate now? Do people even watch network TV anymore?
How are the music labels doing? Do you think that they’d like to be where they were in ’95?
What retailer dominated in ’95? K-mart? Sears? How are they doing?
Energy? How is Amoco doing? Arco? They didn’t survive $10 a barrel oil in 1998.
All the big corporations I mention would be called “Big business” by an honest liberal. Why couldn’t they hold on to their competitive positions in the market?
Where are the Masonists’ peer-reviewed results?
Why don’t you get off your ass and look? Mason is, you know, a university economics department. Their economists are academics, with peer reviewed work. Why is it up to me to provide you references?
I mean, as I said, I linked to one Tyler Cowen commentary to give you a feel of where I’m coming from. Is that the only thing Cowen has ever written? Of course not. If you want to see his justifications, USE GOGGLE YOURSELF.
I feel so much *something*, having read all the above comments. Smarter? More informed? Maybe I’m not smart or informed enough to know.
What do I want?
I want to pay my six-figure tax bill and have someone be able to say, “paid in full”, rather than tell me it’s an installment and the rest I can pay over the course of my lifetime, plus interest. I don’t want to hear jack shit from Republicans about how theirs is the true way to get that request granted, because after they’ve controlled the federal government for most of the last eight years, the problem is twice as bad as it was before. National debt went from what, $4.5 trillion up to $9 trillion or something like that? I don’t manage my credit cards that way, and don’t appreciate my share of the debt being handled that way on my behalf.
I accept that things cost money. But some things are more useful than others. If a politician wants to cut a “social program” to help make the above wish come true, I hope that politician is also ending the Iraq war. That’s the item that really killed the budget. The sunk costs up to this point including longterm care or the injured will weigh us down for decades. Plus interest, of course. Dipshit president decided if “Rent-To-Own” works with a TV set, it should work with a war, too. So maybe we should stop adding to those costs. What tangible good has come from the Chinese investment in this war (with us agreeing to pay back with interest)? I guess it is that Iraq hasn’t attacked us (they never would have anyway), and they didn’t give non-existent weapons to terrorists they had no relationship with. Hoo-rah. Mission accomplished.
In short, I want us to pay as we go and don’t elect dipshits to get ourselves to shoot ourselves in our collective foot.
The vision of a ‘perfect and free market’ may have begun as an economic theory but has somehow morphed into a religion where money is God. If you worship money, you may find it appealing.
The vision of a ‘perfect and free market’ may have begun as an economic theory but has somehow morphed into a religion
Kind of like socialism.
And how is an Obama rally different than a religion?
Hey T, sorry to bust yer bubble there, but entitlements are bankrupting the country. Yeah, Iraq is expensive, but Medicare and Socialist Insecurity are where the money is.
Now, Dubya can be faulted for Part D, but few conservatives supported that expansion of Medicare.
There was also this little thing called “the war on terror”. You may have come acrossed it if you’ve been to an airport anytime over the last 6 and a half years.
You really have a six figure tax bill? Damn. You have my condolences.
Did you guys see this today?
George frickin McGovern is now a “Masonite”.
Put that in your bong and smoke it, hippie.
Be self-employed and responsible for payroll taxes for your staff, work six days/wk, and it’s not that hard to end up with a substantial tax bill.
Entitlement programs are a drag on the budget. Yet somehow the budget used to be balanced. The money from entitlement programs at least goes back into the economy. It’s no more right or wrong-headed than the proposed “stimulus” except that it’s always stimulating the economy, while always a drag on the budget–rather than only intermittently so as in the case of the “stimulus”.
How much of the Iraq bill goes to “U.S.” companies that offshore the profits and don’t pay taxes?
The “war on terror”? Please. We have war in Afghanistan that is more or less conventional (by late 20th-century standards), along with sensible surveillance of Pakistan and good police work in other places. These things are not greatly different than what was done in the cold war, just different targets and somewhat different tactics. But the cost shouldn’t be THAT much higher (given our troop size in Afghanistan, for instance, versus what it has been in Germany, Korea, etc., in the past). What makes it a “war on terror” rather than just “national defense” is precisely what you referenced–the airport. Vigilance against my eyedrops costs money. Compiling everyones’ records and routing everyones’ phone calls through special data rooms at AT&T, etc., costs money.
I’m not one to bitch about taxes too much, though. I would prefer to pay more and be told 2007 is off the books now, rather than carry 25% (or whatever) of it forward each year, forever, plus interest. The same principles of compounding that lead you to put a few thousand in a retirement plan here or there with the expectation that it will grow to hundreds of thousands at retirement, also apply to debt. Just in the opposite direction.
Yet somehow the budget used to be balanced.
That’s when the baby boomers were working. Now they’re retiring.
It has been 8 years since the budget was balanced. Medicare, Medicaid, and Socialist Insecurity are growing at double digit rates. The % of the budget they were in ’99 is completely different than now, or especially what they will cost in the near future.
Be self-employed
Ah-ha. So you’re counting payroll taxes? You self employed guys have to personally pay the portion of the payroll tax that we working stiffs have “paid” for us by our employer.
If I count the employer portion of the payroll tax, I pay substantially more than I gave myself credit for.
Still only 5 figures, though.
Buzzcut wrote:
“Feel the presence of government� What does that mean, and what does that have to do with anything?
The best way to answer that would be to send you a complete copy of any newspaper,but you already have access.