Posts Tagged Unintended Consequences
War on Hugs
Posted by The Marginalist in Unintended Consequences on May 28th, 2009
THE War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime and now the War on Hugs. (Hey, that rhymes!)
A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.
Suggested unintended consequences from this:
- Hugs will become even cooler, because now there’s a badass element to it. The reduction in the quantity of hugs will be diminished by the added badass effect of hugging (the policy won’t be that effective).
- The administration will greatly diminish its legitimacy (and therefore power) amongst the students.
- There’ll be an underground hugging community anyways.
- The administration will use all of the above to crack down even harder on hugging, desperately pouring resources into a useless, wrongheaded, and ultimately stupid venture.
As all domestic wars end.
Friday Freedom Post: How Freedom Was Lost
Posted by The Marginalist in Freedom Fridays on May 15th, 2009
Yeah, yeah, a new series… Freedom Fridays. The first post is a response to a Daily Kos article that a friend of mine wanted me to talk about.
How freedom was lost
IN the article, “How Freedom Was Lost,” Devilstower wrote of the deaths caused by pollution from a zinc factory in Donora, Pennsylvania, the floods from a coal mine in Saunders, WV, and the tragedy of the triangle shirtwaist factory in New York (NYU, by the way, owns the building now).
No one implemented health, safety, and environmental legislation because they thought it would be fun….. We did it because that kind of freedom, marketplace freedom, was literally killing us.
Read the article before going on — the rest of this post will make much more sense. Today’s topic: regulation and the free market. Onwards!
What a free market is (and is not)
CONSERVATIVES and free-marketeers talk about a “free market” all the time, but it’s sometimes unclear what this term means.
John Locke is famous for coining the three essential freedoms of humanity: life, liberty, and property. The violations of these three freedoms take some form of the following crimes: murder, slavery, and theft. According to many believers in the free market, the protection of these liberties is not only the purpose of society but creates the best outcomes.
That’s what a free market is — a society in which individuals are free to mutually trade with each other, given that they do not infringe on other peoples’ rights.
But, Devilstower argues, a purely free market lacks regulation, and without regulation, people infringe on each others’ rights — just look at the pollution in Donora!
Why a free market lives on regulation
The answer to this is that the situations Devilstower describes are not genuine free markets. Clearly pollution destroys property and injures — sometimes kills — people. That’s an infringement on those peoples’ rights, and therefore not part of a free market. A world where corporations can simply earn money without bearing the costs is corporatism, not freedom.
Devilstower tries to equate free markets with a complete lack of regulation — but from a geniune free market point of view, that’s preposterous. Of course free markets need regulation — it’s impossible to have a free market without regulation. Freedom needs government to protect it.
For example, police and courts are the most important form of regulation. The police regulates our behavoir in a free society so that we don’t infringe on the rights of other people — we don’t murder, steal, or enslave.
So no, Devilstower — the free market wasn’t killing us. An unfree market was. Don’t equate free markets and individual liberties with anarchy! Freedom is not only about protection from the state, but from other people.
I have a proposal, sir
So, as part of the conservative/libertarian/classical liberal backlash against Obama, I’ve called him “socialist.” I regret that. His policies certainly tend towards that direction, but to call him “a socialist” may — at least, for now — be too much. The word “socialist,” I think, is quite extreme, and isn’t so much used to accurately describe Obama, but to elicit an emotional reaction from listeners. Wrongheaded his policies are, but socialist they are not.
So, I have a proposal. I promise to stop calling Obama a socialist… if progressives and liberals stop calling our current system a free market. Because we don’t have a free market, and you can’t blame the free market for something if it doesn’t exist.
The WSJ on Bank Regulation
Posted by The Marginalist in Unintended Consequences on April 27th, 2009
From the Wall Street Journal: Regulators Fell One Bank, Spare a Rival
The starkly different fates of the neighboring banks show how the U.S. government’s approach to dealing with the industry’s worst crisis in a generation has shifted. The decision to allow only one of the two banks to survive has fueled criticism that regulators are picking winners and losers, without disclosing their criteria for making the calls. That, in turn, has shaken the confidence of bankers and private investors trying to decide whether to wade into the troubled sector.
The apparently arbitrary nature of how the government is choosing which firms to let survive and which to let die scares me.
Think about it: If you were an investor, how would you choose which companies to invest in? You’d choose companies you think will do well in the future — companies you think will be successful. But if the government steps in and selects, in an apparently random fashion, which companies will succeed, your choice becomes much harder — and much riskier.
It’s another unintended consequence of government action — by stepping into the economy, they’ve made things much more uncertain for investors (or any risk-taking individual or firm, for that matter), discouraging them from investing and starting up new companies.
– The Marginalist