A standard argument for government regulation or prohibition of private sector activities runs as follows: Individuals or businesses are doing something harmful and/or immoral. Therefore, the government must step in and ban it, or at least regulate to restrict it. A standard libertarian response (also sometimes used by liberals) is that, in a free society, people often have a “right to do wrong.” Maybe it’s wrong to engage in racist speech. But the government should not enact hate speech laws because even evil racists have a right to self-expression. My GMU colleague Bryan Caplan points out that this is often not the only or the best strategy for defending liberty:
Libertarians often highlight “the right to do wrong.” We are often morally obliged to tolerate the wicked and foolish behavior of others….
Fruitful as this insight is, however, it is often superfluous. If a law forbids actions that are good, or persecutes beliefs that are true, critics might as well start attacking the law by defending the merit of the violations. If the law persecutes creationists, it makes sense to appeal to freedom of belief. If the law persecutes evolutionists, on the other hand, it makes more sense to make the alibertarian argument that evolution is true.
Lately I’ve been reading the classic arguments in favor of regulation of reproductive technology. They usually take the rights-based position as their main foil. They’ll propose a ban on human cloning for the greater good, and libertarians will object, “You’re violating human rights.” On reflection, though, defenders of reproductive laissez-faire can do a lot better. Artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and yes, cloning deserve an affirmative defense. Here’s an outline:
1. Creating new human life is almost always good.
2. Voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial for the participants.
3. Third parties are also better off, at least on average.
When Leon Kass proposes a ban on human cloning, for example, the most obvious reply is, “Cloning creates human life. What kind of a monster would want to stop that?” When feminists say it’s “exploitation” to hire surrogates from the Third World, the obvious reply is, “The women we hire earn money that they need to buy extra food for their families.”
As Bryan emphasizes, many of the targets of government regulation can be defended on the grounds that their effects are on balance good. I adopted this strategy in my rebuttal to the standard claim that we must ban organ markets in order to prevent “exploitation” of the poor. I argued that organ markets actually benefit poor sellers, and that in any case the beneficial effect of saving thousands of lives greatly outweighs any possible harm caused by exploitation. This consequentialist argument against regulation is sometimes stronger than the “right to do wrong” argument because it requires less in the way of agreement on fundamental principles of morality.
There is also a third strategy of arguing in favor of liberty: pointing out that even if the activity we propose to ban is indeed harmful or immoral, government regulation and prohibition is likely to cause greater harm and immorality. Government power has systematic flaws that severely limit its ability to improve social outcomes relative to the private sector. This type of argument is, in my view, the strongest case against the War on Drugs. Using illegal drugs is often bad for your health and many people believe that it is immoral. But prohibition causes much greater harm and immorality by undermining the War on Terror, weakening family values, stimulating corruption and organized crime, and destabilizing societies such as Colombia and Mexico. Focusing on the flaws of government action is often a better argument for liberty than either of the others, because it doesn’t require either moral consensus on values or proof that the targeted activity actually has beneficial effects. Often, such arguments show that government action will make things worse even in terms of the regulators’ own professed values. For example, many of the advocates of drug prohibition are conservatives who care intensely about fighting terrorism and promoting family values.
None of the three pro-liberty arguments necessarily prove that regulation and prohibition are always undesirable. But defenders of liberty should consider all three, and should avoid relying too much on the traditional “right to do wrong” approach. For their part, advocates of regulation and prohibition should take note of all three as well, and avoid the standard fallacy of assuming that the case for government action has been established merely by proving that some private sector activity is harmful or immoral.
UPDATE: The original version of this post was probably overly ambiguous as to whether I am arguing that the second and third approaches to defending liberty are logically superior to the “right to do wrong” argument, or merely that they are more likely to persuade skeptics. So let me point out that I believe that both are often true: the two alternatives to the right to do wrong claim are often (though by no means always) both more logically sound and more likely to persuade.
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January 2, 2010, 4:19 pmyankee says:
I think this depends on what you think the goal of argumentation is. If your goal is to offer a rational defense of your position, you should offer whatever arguments you think are most sound. Unfortunately, people are rarely persuaded to change their position on the basis of an argument’s logical strength. If you want to convince people to adopt your position on the issue, you’re best off going straight for fallacies like appeal to majority, appeal to emotion, and appeal to prejudice.
January 2, 2010, 4:24 pmIlya Somin says:
If your goal is to offer a rational defense of your position, you should offer whatever arguments you think are most sound. Unfortunately, people are rarely convinced by logical arguments, even if the arguments are sound.
January 2, 2010, 4:27 pmEven if that is your only goal, I think arguments 2 and 3 are often as much or more sound than the “right to do wrong” approach.
LTEC says:
Once again, I have to object to your double negative, “against the War on Drugs”. The “war on drugs” was always a slogan with no clear meaning; if we treat it as referring in some vague sense to the status quo, your opposition to it is even more vague than it is, and is a slogan in its own right.
If you had said, “against the illegalization of drugs, including hard narcotics such as heroin and cocaine”, then it becomes clear what you are for: the legalization of drugs, including hard narcotics such as heroin and cocaine. Is this your position? If so, why not say so and avoid any confusing mention of “the war on drugs”? If this is not what you support, please tell us exactly what you do support.
For the record, I support the legalization of drugs, including hard narcotics such as heroin and cocaine, and I’m not afraid to say so (anonymously!).
January 2, 2010, 4:30 pmIlya Somin says:
Once again, I have to object to your double negative, “against the War on Drugs”. The “war on drugs” was always a slogan with no clear meaning; if we treat it as referring in some vague sense to the status quo, your opposition to it is even more vague than it is, and is a slogan in its own right….
For the record, I support the legalization of drugs, including hard narcotics such as heroin and cocaine, and I’m not afraid to say so (anonymously!).
“War on Drugs” is the conventional short hand reference to drug prohibition. If someone says they are against the War on Drugs, that is usually understood to mean that they are against prohibition and in favor of legalization, at least unless they specify otherwise. For the record, that is in fact my view. But I see no need to spell out in detail what most readers implicitly understand already. This is not a post intended to outline the details of my preferred approach to drug policy.
January 2, 2010, 4:35 pmGCA says:
The right to do wrong argument is flawed because not only does it not address the listener’s underlying concerns – drugs/crime, organ market/morality, etc. – it is a dead end as to those conserns. At most it should be a minor corollateral argument if persuasion is the goal. It will only convince people who already agree with it.
January 2, 2010, 5:22 pmLTEC says:
The term “war on drugs” postdates the illegalization of drugs, and is often used to refer to specific harsh penalties and to specific international policies (e.g. with respect to Colombia). I think there are many people who are uneasy about “the war on drugs” who are also unwilling to legalize drugs.
January 2, 2010, 5:28 pmHayek or Popper or Mill says:
We don’t even know all the time what’s wicked or not, or what’s foolish or not. We don’t know the future. Although some people do. They’re the politicians and journalists who, throughout the last year, said we’re in “denial” if we weren’t certain, like them, about a predicted, potential event. Used to be, “denial” referred to the historical record. Now you can be in “denial” about a predicted event.
So the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong, seems a good place to start. A lot of people presume to know more than they do, or they can, know about things. They’re not modest. They’re wise in their own conceit, in Adam Smith’s phrase.
We can try to persuade people to be less sure of themselves, but I think again of the War on Carbon, and the faith that grips them. The unintended consequences of banning things and raising the cost of everything should slow them down just a bit, and make them cautious, you’d think. The “precautionary principle” is the definition of conservatism, after all, so it’s not like they don’t know how that works. But then they don’t even pay heed to what we do know. If the intended consequence is to make people poor, and to make people pay for their sins, then what argument could convince them?
The idea of the right to do wrong presumes to know what wrong is. But the right to be wrong leaves the future open to learning, growth and change. It leaves open the possibility of being wrong.
January 2, 2010, 5:33 pmLarryA says:
A standard argument for government regulation or prohibition of private sector activities runs as follows: Individuals or businesses are doing something harmful and/or immoral. Therefore, the government must step in and ban it, or at least regulate to restrict it.
I think there’s a fourth argument.
People are moral if they are virtuous. Virtue is the process of making moral choices and resisting the temptations of immorality.
But if the government makes an immoral option illegal it seeks to prevent people from making that moral choice. A person can’t choose to go right without the option to go wrong, and virtue lies in the choice, not the act. If the government’s effort is successful, the result is that people can no longer be virtuous.
For example, presume that the government makes a law against gambling.* Presume+ further that the law is effective to the point that even if a person wants to make a bet, no one will be there to take it. Does that make the person who cannot place a wager virtuous?
No. There can be no virtue where there is no possibility of making an immoral choice. Further, since having no choice precludes learning how to make a moral choice, the end result will be a people who don’t know how to be virtuous.
(* Gambling is just an example. I’m not going to argue whether wagering is indeed a sin. If you want, substitute something else.)
January 2, 2010, 6:20 pm(+ Experience shows conclusively that effective prohibition doesn’t work, but play along, please.)
steve s says:
“Government power has systematic flaws that severely limit its ability to improve social outcomes relative to the private sector.”
A compelling argument for anarchy. Yet, that has never worked very well. Better we should make individual arguments for or against specific actions. If, OTOH, you are arguing for this as a starting point, placing the burden of proof on those who would create laws, I am with you.
Should we also point out that the private sector has relatively little interest in many/most social outcomes?
January 2, 2010, 6:21 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Larry, I realize you are using gambling as only an example.
But I’d like to mention that for years, the casinos in Mississippi were allowed to cash AFDC and social security checks. What that likely meant was that tax dollars that were supposed to go to meeting people’s needs, instead went to the casino owners and those needs went unmet. Was it virtuous of the legislature in Mississippi finally to outlaw this? Or should they have continued to allow casinos to make it very convenient for those people to decide to gamble away the rent money or the kids’ clothes and school supplies money, when that money came from taxes that were not optional for the taxpayers to pay?
Once you start down the road of government intervention, everything you do has consequences. People don’t learn to be virtuous and provident and frugal if the government has been providing for them all their lives.
January 2, 2010, 6:42 pmIlya Somin says:
“Government power has systematic flaws that severely limit its ability to improve social outcomes relative to the private sector.”
A compelling argument for anarchy. Yet, that has never worked very well. Better we should make individual arguments for or against specific actions. If, OTOH, you are arguing for this as a starting point, placing the burden of proof on those who would create laws, I am with you.
That is more or less what I’m saying, since both in the linked post and this one, I explicitly state that I don’t think the arguments I make disprove the case for govt intervention in all possible circumstances. At the same time, it’s important that our “individual arguments for or against specific actions” be informed by a sound general understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of government.
January 2, 2010, 7:00 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
1. Creating new human life is almost always good.
That is not a bad starting point if you are trying to argue in favor of new reproductive technologies for an audience of people whose objections are primarily theological. But Caplan will find it hard to maintain that premise all the time; at least, he will encounter serious backlash from people who (e.g.) think human overpopulation is an evil. I would wager that a majority of “elite” opinion strongly opposes (1.).
Now, if Caplan genuinely believes (1.), of course he should argue from it. But if he doesn’t — if he isn’t prepared (say) to defend large families, or to attack China’s “one-child” policy — then he’s just setting himself up to be ambushed if he uses it as an argument for new reproductive technologies.
January 2, 2010, 7:04 pmMartinned says:
I think it is usually a mistake to get too practical about such cases. Once you admit that your preference is simply based on a cost/benefit analysis, you’re giving away the moral high ground. You’re admitting that, if your interlocutor comes up with convincing enough data that points the other way, you would take the opposite position. For many questions, that is indeed the stance to take, it is a sign of intellectual maturity. But in other situations, it gets you bogged down in factual detail when in fact you’re arguing based on an (ontological) conviction that, in your mind, needs no further justification.
Strong protections for property rights may be good for economic growth, etc, but that’s not why most Conspirators favour them. Libertarians should never yield the moral high ground, and certainly not without being forced to do so.
January 2, 2010, 7:06 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Not to mention, it’s a terrible assertion to use as a principle.
I just read a novel in which clones had been created for the purpose of serving as organ donors. Far-fetched, you say? I wish. We humans have a long and sordid history of dehumanizing each other when it suits us.
January 2, 2010, 7:31 pmyankee says:
If you buy into this “right to to wrong” philosophy, then the argument is simple: people have a right to do wrong unless X; X does not apply to act Y; therefore people have a right to do Y; therefore people’s ability to do Y should not be restricted; Q.E.D. It’s pure logic, the conclusion follows as the night the day.
But once you get into this consequentialist stuff you have to deal with a bunch of messy fact-based questions about the relative costs and benefits of allowing or restricting Y and the relative flaws of government and the market in this particular situation. This can’t be sounder than the right to do wrong argument (which is valid as a matter of logic) unless you don’t buy into the “right to do wrong” stuff at all.
January 2, 2010, 7:31 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Laura(southernxyl),
I just read a novel in which clones had been created for the purpose of serving as organ donors. Far-fetched, you say? I wish. We humans have a long and sordid history of dehumanizing each other when it suits us.
“Far-fetched,” I don’t say; the idea of creating genetic duplicates of medical patients and farming them for spare parts is all over the place. That’s what “therapeutic cloning” is, basically. Granted that the idea was only to break up an embryo into stem cells and then coax them into forming or repairing this or that organ. I never saw anyone provide a principled difference between that process and the obvious short cut: implanting a cloned embryo, letting it grow to some point short of viability, and then harvesting its various cells, now conveniently differentiated into their eventual functions.
January 2, 2010, 7:50 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I agree, Michelle, and that’s what I found really chilling about that book. I couldn’t view it as just a frivolous work of fiction. Kept thinking about embryonic stem cells, and the argument that we need them so we have to continue to view human embryos as non-human. Even though embryonic stem cell research has been done for years, and as far as I know hasn’t helped anyone yet.
The book, of course, is Never Let Me Go. The clones are told that there are people who would probably view that practice as wrong and want to stop doing it, except that so-and-so’s kid might have cancer or whatever, and so they would never stop no matter what their consciences said.
January 2, 2010, 7:56 pmPragmaticist says:
David Friedman argues for libertarianism in his book The Machinery of Freedom solely on the basis of consequentialist, pragmatic arguments. Click here for his blog.
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January 2, 2010, 8:26 pmJohn Moore says:
I think it depends a lot on the audience for the argument. An argument for liberty is more likely to be received well by people who value that abstraction. A consequentialist argument can be received by anyone who accepts the assertions, and who doesn’t have a more abstract objection.
January 2, 2010, 8:27 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Laura(southernxyl),
Ishiguro? Golly. I didn’t know this book existed. Will go find!
This brings to mind Larry Niven’s “organ-donor problem.” (Niven reasons that once organ transplant becomes routine, and people twig that organ banks can only put out as much as goes in, people will see executed criminals as a source of scarce material, and start voting themselves more of them — ultimately making it a capital crime to, say, run a red light.)
January 2, 2010, 8:30 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
…And then there’s Silverberg’s Caught in the Organ Draft, 1974.
January 2, 2010, 8:37 pmTwirip says:
Maybe it is, for that case. But it’s a weak argument in general. It suggests that we need to get government out of the business of policing all crimes. After all, how dare the government try to improve social outcomes by going after murderers?
As for the “reproductive rights” argument, I don’t buy what Caplan is selling.
The problem is the “almost”, isn’t it? Cloning people is one of those cases which are not good.
I’d like to think that Caplan is not as much of a moral imbecile as he appears here. That aside, it’s pretty obvious that he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
January 2, 2010, 8:46 pmTwirip says:
The American people are advocates of drug prohibition. That’s why drugs are prohibited.
January 2, 2010, 8:50 pmreadery says:
Many people have tried to encapsulate the complexity and ambiguity of moral decision-making in a small number of axioms. All have failed. Simple axiom systems seem to lead to absurdities when applied to real-world situations. The real world is simply more complex than that. Actions have consequences not easily visible at the time they are done. Sometimes human moral intuition requires taking those consequences into account and to regard ourselves as responsible for them. Sometimes it requires ignoring them and to regard our selves as not responsible for them. People often disagree, among other disagreements, as to which category situations fit into.
Ilya, I know that you are haunted by the experience of totalitatrianism which filled much of the world in the middle of the 20th century. From my point of view, part of that totalitarian experience was in part based on too optimistic a view of human reason and power:. A belief that all problems can be solved if we only look at them rationally can lead to tyrrany. Tyrrany is often the result of a brash attempt to solve problems that wiser and cooler heads would leave unsolved. In many respects, humility is an antidote to tyrrany. It’s true that humililty inappropriately applied can keep us from doing good and solving tractable problems. But it can also keep us from bogging ourselves down in intractable ones, and from causing great harm.
For better for the worse, the rest of the world is starting to have a view of the United States markedly different from the way we have historically seen ourselves, and not necessarily a pretty one.
In my view hubris — a tendency to regard all problems as solvable and as being our job to solve — is a primrose path to tyrrany. Too simplistic a worldview is, in my view, a key source of hubris. It is the academic’s job to simplify and distill problems and distill in order to describe and examine essential characteristics, but confusing real-world problems and situations for academics’ simplifications and distillations of them is a common disease that has complicated the application of academic thought to real-world problems many times. Recognizing complexity and limits on what we know leads to humility, which leads to wisdom and ultimately to greater liberty.
January 2, 2010, 9:08 pmreadery says:
Note: this general skepticism can often agree with libertarian principles when one is part of a legislature, but it can cut against them when is part of a court. We don’t necessarily know, for example, that government action is always worse than private action. That’s simply a belief, and one which may turn out to be true, if at all, only under certain circumstances. Beliefs derived from logical propositions have often turned out not to be consistent with empirical investigation, and empirical investigation of modern societies is difficult since they haven’t been around very long, we haven’t observed their entire lifespan, and they vary by many factors which might influence the outcome. Being mere humans, non-omnipotent, non-immortal creatures, we can’t conduct an experiment assigning societies randomly to methods of organization, and seeing the experiment through over the life-span of the societies. Without the ability to conduct such an experiment, our ability to infer causality is very limited and uncertain. Hence, the idea that government is always worse than private action is merely a belief or theory, and not an empirical fact. It may or may not be true. It may be true when various cofactors are present and false when they are absent.
In any event, voters and legislatures have no obligation to adopt this theory. And courts have no rights to impose it on them. Democracy is to some extent a cover for our ignorance. None can know what the future will hold for us with any exactness. So when we turn out to be wrong, which is often the case, having a say in the matter lets us take responsibility for our guesses and hence for our actions. If courts imposed their own theories, beliefs, wishes, and hopes about the future on us based on their own seances, musings, intuitions, and personal feelings of certainty, the bond between people and government would be irretrievably weakened.
January 2, 2010, 9:34 pmbyomtov says:
in a free society, people often have a “right to do wrong.”
This is unhelpful. “Often?” What does that mean? When do we or do we not have the right to do wrong?
I doubt you can come up with a reasonable test to answer that. Certainly “harm to others” doesn’t work.
I’d like to think that Caplan is not as much of a moral imbecile as he appears here. That aside, it’s pretty obvious that he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
For once, Twirip and I agree.
January 2, 2010, 10:05 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
How about the Lori Drew case.
Or any case where a person tells ugly lies about another person, in such a way that they do not trigger laws about slander and libel.
January 2, 2010, 10:10 pmStephen says:
My observations from many libertarians is that they generally hold to the “government’s job is to prevent your exercise of your freedom from causing me harm.” That would be where freedom to do whatever you want to do stops. And before the chaos theory folks chastise me, there is an obvious attenuation aspect to this. The problem is that in my experience many libertarian leaning folks draw much too small of a snapshot of an act to evaluate or ascertain the effects, particularly economic effects, that the act has on society. For example, non-biological live-in boyfriends make up less than half of 2 parent households but they commit much more than half (more like over 65%) of all child abuse. But when we pass laws that benefit marriages, many libertarian-leaning people say it is morally wrong for government to pass those laws or to even be involved in marriage. I’m not so sure because the fallout of the abuse mentioned above has a strong correlation with the number of kids in gangs, resulting in increased crime, higher taxes for more law enforcement, and a ripple effect that affects everyone.
January 2, 2010, 10:12 pmAllan Walstad says:
In my experience, to make progress in promoting liberty you have to be prepared to deploy all good arguments, to come at the issue from more than one direction. And many times the person you are trying to convert is a bystander to the argument. In other words, you want to be Salviati to the collectivist’s Simplicio, not necessarily because you think you can convert Simplicio, but to give Sagredo something to think about.
For example, where the hard-core egalitarian holds up the banner of equality as an ideal, I certainly wouldn’t cede the moral or idealistic high ground. I too hold a heartfelt ideal: liberty. But most open-minded folks are not going to embrace one or another competing ideal without seeing how it cashes out in the world. The most effective move is where you can demonstrate the fact or likelihood that coercive egalitarianism is self-frustrating, in that the resulting policies hurt even those that the collectivist wishes to benefit. With traditionalist conservatives, I think you can get somewhere by pointing out that the very power levers of government that they would use against others are all too easily used against themselves. Religious conservatives ought to have learned that lesson already, not to say that they all have. To the drug prohibitionists down at the pistol range, I point out that gang violence generated by the war on drugs has more than a little to do with why many people are still receptive to the gun control agenda.
Regarding the “right to do wrong:” The way I’d put it is there has to be a fairly broad distinction between what we would disapprove of and what we would coercively stop or punish. Think of it as a sort of demilitarized zone to limit conflict. The attempt to define a precise realm, within which action is meritorious and outside of which it is punishable, must lead to perpetual and incessant political conflict over where the line is, and far too many resources are going to be squandered on policing. The large role (if any) of government should be to defend us from aggression.
January 2, 2010, 11:51 pmAnatid says:
Laura, if it helps rest your mind on the organ-donor issue, this is one area where the science is actually ahead of the science fiction: experimental technology exists to grow new organs from your own stem cells, negating the need for lifelong suppressants. They’re already having success with lab-grown tracheas and bladders.
I was under the impression that stepfathers had similar rates of abuse as unmarried live-in boyfriends?
January 3, 2010, 12:03 amAlan says:
“Creating new human life is almost always good.”
Huh?
January 3, 2010, 12:44 amKen Arromdee says:
Surrogates fall under a category of things that libertarianism doesn’t handle very well: things which are typically valued more by the person selling them than they can bring on the open market. As such, they don’t get sold, except when the person selling them is desperate or emotionally distraught. They fall into the same category as prostitution, organ selling, and selling yourselves into slavery, as well as selling things at high prices in emergencies.
Libertarians would say that if someone is desperate enough to be willing to sell themselves or their organs in order to survive, whatever price they are willing to sell it as is its value to them. If you don’t admit that the concept of “selling for less than its value” exists, then you might see nothing wrong.
(Note that you can argue that we should legalize some of these things for practical reasons–prostitution should be legal so pimps can’t threaten them; selling things at high prices in emergencies can help encourage vendors to prepare for emergencies by stocking goods in advance. However, these arguments only imply that we should allow such activities to the extent that the good practical consequences follow, and don’t imply no limits whatsoever on them.)
January 3, 2010, 10:48 amOren says:
Martinned is exactly right. It is equally wrong for the government to censor creationists and evolutionists alike. The morality of free speech does not ebb and wane depending on the truthhood or falsity of what is said.
In a practical sense, your argument will be turned around against you in the next iteration of the debate. Today you debate alternative reproduction, tomorrow fornication. The terms of your debate on AR will severely constrain the kinds of arguments you can make about fornication — you will now have to argue that it is a legitimate social good because that’s how you justified AR.
January 3, 2010, 11:06 amOren says:
Of course “selling for less [or more] than value” exists — in an emergency bottles of water go for $5 whereas a person who must move house will sell their TV and furniture for a pittance rather than shlep it to storage.
The real problem here is that surrogates cannot organize into an association that allows for efficient bargaining (and presumably they would benefit from better legal protection and dispute resolution if they pooled their resources).
January 3, 2010, 11:11 amOren says:
It’s rare that I agree with Twirip, so I’ll quote it just for posterity.
Good thing too, since public support for MJ prohibition (our decrim initiative here in MA passed 65-35) is waning.
January 3, 2010, 11:12 amchiMaxx says:
Laura(southernxyl) says:
Alternatively, there’s Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand:
(In case it’s unclear: In this novel, the fact that flesh of animals–and humans–is grown in vats for consumption by the populace is considered a good thing–far preferable to raising and slaughtering whole animals. What Marq Dyeth objects to is the way his new boyfriend’s DNA was sampled for a food culture on the street without explanation or consent.)
January 3, 2010, 1:01 pmAllan Walstad says:
If a person chooses to sell it, then its value to that person at that moment is less than the value (to that person, in that moment) of what they got for it. Prohibiting the transaction simply eliminates the person’s best option, as judged by that person, leaving him or her with a poorer option. But you’re welcome to contribute to charitable organizations that come to the aid of all those folks you consider to be desperate, to provide them with other options, in order to prevent them from engaging in transactions that offend your sensibilities.
January 3, 2010, 1:15 pmKen Arromdee says:
I’ve had libertarians seriously tell me that since the person buying the bottle of water is willing to pay the $5, he obviously values the bottle of water at at least $5, and therefore he isn’t selling it below value.
That’s like the prostitutes example. It would no doubt benefit them, but it’s just slightly improving a bad situation. It’s still going to be people selling things below value because they are desperate or messed up. I highly doubt that collective bargaining will let them charge enough for surrogacy that there will be a significant number of surrogates that are not in those categories.
January 3, 2010, 1:19 pmAllan Walstad says:
If A bought it for $5, then A valued it more than $5. If B sold it for $5, then B valued it less than $5. A bought it for less than A’s value and B sold it for more than B’s value. Both therefore benefited, by their own lights. What business of yours is this transaction?
January 3, 2010, 2:41 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Allan – after Katrina hit, gas prices in Tennessee went up to around $4 per gallon, IIRC. Some gas stations in areas where there wasn’t a station on every corner went up to as much as $7 per gallon. Then the state AG announced that he would vigorously prosecute any price gouging and profiteering that he found out about, and those prices immediately dropped down to about the same amount that everyone else was charging. In your view, was the state AG wrong to do that?
January 3, 2010, 3:22 pmJohn Moore says:
Laura, I’ll answer that.
Yes, the state was wrong to do that. “Price gouging” causes people to change their gasoline usage habits based on their priorities. Someone who needed to get a pregnant woman to a hospital at a moment’s notice would thus be incentivized to buy that high priced gas, while someone with a lesser need might forego it. In case of scarcity, the “gouging” would allow the person really needing the gas would be more likely to be able to get it.
Likewise, the opportunity to “gouge” may lead people to speculatively acquire excess supply, which would then be available (for a high price) to the community in a time of need.
In most cases, “gouging” is good.
January 3, 2010, 3:45 pmAllan Walstad says:
Laura: Yes. Price “gouging” is just a negative label for people not choosing to part with something for less when they can get more. The rise in prices reflects a shortage and serves to ration goods in short supply. It’s generally a good thing, not a bad thing.
January 3, 2010, 3:48 pmAllan Walstad says:
(i.e., what John said…)
January 3, 2010, 3:49 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
A – this wasn’t a case of scarcity.
B – the person really needing the gas won’t be the person more likely to get it, but rather, the person who has the money. I’m saying this not to suggest we allocate resources based on need, but to point out a lack of logic.
January 3, 2010, 3:52 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
No, the rise in prices reflected the station owners’ willingness to lie to their customers. Evidenced by the fact that the prices returned to normal immediately after that statement.
January 3, 2010, 3:53 pmAllan Walstad says:
What was the falsehood they told?
January 3, 2010, 4:18 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
That they had to raise the prices because there was a shortage.
There was a shortage in Mississippi. For about a week it was hard to find gas south of Tupelo. But there was never a shortage in Tennessee.
January 3, 2010, 4:23 pmbyomtov says:
Or any case where a person tells ugly lies about another person, in such a way that they do not trigger laws about slander and libel.
Laura,
But that doesn’t answer the question. The libel laws can be changed, and of course they vary form -place to place. The question is how we decide what should be prohibited.
Also, much legal speech is in fact harmful. I’d argue that racist speech is clearly harmful to identifiable individuals. On a simpler level, much ordinary advice on some topics is harmful. Many people would consider religious proselytization is harmful. Yet we do not, and don’t want to, bar such speech.
That’s why I think “we often have the right to do wrong” is useless.
Why do we have that right, and what are its limits? This formulation ignores those issues.
January 3, 2010, 5:05 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I won’t argue with you. I thought it was a shame that Lori Drew couldn’t be prosecuted. But I thought you were simply asking for examples.
January 3, 2010, 5:10 pmAllan Walstad says:
I didn’t see that mentioned earlier, sorry if I missed it. I don’t fault people too much for lying to escape unjust coercion, but leave that aside. The fact is, in general, that in a storm or other stressful event there will be a heightened demand for some goods, and the rise in prices (self-interested on the part of the sellers, no doubt), will serve to stretch out the temporarily limited supplies. An anticipated shortage, whether or not it materializes, will do the same, and again this is a good thing. The shortage may thereby be avoided as buying is moderated and increased supplies are stimulated. (All this is basic economics and applies much more widely, for example to the anticipated exhaustion of certain resources such as fossil fuels.) The fact that prices went down upon a threat by the attorney general doesn’t mean the stations were lying; most of us do what we’re told when we have a gun to out heads.
January 3, 2010, 5:33 pmreadery says:
Dare I point out that the definitions of “good” and “bad” here are value-judgments that have no scientific basis? The principle that money is a perfect measure of utility is dubious. In the world of propositions established by evidence, measuremnt is imperfect and measures are prone to err and break down at times. The measurement apparatus itself has internal properties which get confused with the thing measured.
The atmosphere vibrates with heat, causing stars to appear to vibrate. Waves refract light. Dealing the cards bends them and changes their odds of appearing. So money refracts and perterbates utility. It’s an approximation at best. Sometimes it’s a rather bad one.
Push come to shove, economics has operated largely the way certain kinds of religion has, through a dogmatic process in which theorems are deduced from axioms held on faith, without challenging them empirically. It’s pretty well-known that people simply do not make choices the way rational choice theory predicts they will. We can say that people are wrong and they ought to behave differently. But when planets don’t behave the way astronomers predict, we don’t say the planets are wrong. That’s the difference between dogma and science.
January 3, 2010, 5:45 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Allen, so if John’s hypothetical pregnant woman had to deliver at home b/c they could not afford $7/gal gas, you’d consider that just one of those things? Suppose there were complications and she really needed to be at the hospital? Remember, there was no gas shortage; the station owners thought they saw an opportunity to make a killing on the gas they sold right then b/c people would think there was one. That’s just the market working like it’s supposed to?
January 3, 2010, 5:51 pmAllan Walstad says:
Readery, in my (economic) book, what it means to say people are rational is that they make choices in pursuit of their goals, and they do so based on their beliefs. They may indeed make choices that they later regret, and you might actually be able sometimes to see it coming from the outside because you have more accurate information or more talent in projecting future outcomes from a given knowledge base.
Modern mainstream neoclassical econ has gotten itself into a lot of trouble by making unwarranted assumptions about what people know and want and how quickly (if at all) their actions will bring about some pre-defined optimum. They’ve done this for the sake of mathematical models that provide the trappings of a hard science. The Austrian school does not worship at the god of calculus and makes rather more sense to me.
January 3, 2010, 5:59 pmJohn Moore says:
Laura writes:
Then anyone buying at the $7 price was a fool and shouldn’t have done so.
In this situation, that’s unlikely to be true. A prudent person expecting a baby would be willing to pay a lot more than the normal price to assure gasoline. Other folks, for the most part, would wait for the price to drop.
If there is a real shortage, then keeping the price at the lower level would result in rationing by who got to the gas station first – and many folks who didn’t need it as badly as the pregnant woman would likely win. If there is no shortage, there is no problem.
We had a similar situation here in the Phoenix area a few years ago. The only pipeline providing EPA allowable fuel broke, producing a shortage. Many people rushed to the stations to tank up. One station raised its prices quite a bit, and our government promptly cracked down on the one place that might end up with remaining supply for an emergency. It was illogical then, too.
Are you suggesting that a gas station provider, in a situation where there is no shortage, should sell at a government specified price rather than what the market will bear? Why?
January 3, 2010, 6:00 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
John, I think it’s wrong for people to take advantage of a natural disaster to lie to their neighbors for profit. If a group of gas stations in a small town decided to triple their prices out of the blue, just for the hell of it, people would have driven to the next town to gas their cars until those station owners came to their senses. In a situation like the aftermath of Katrina, when most people didn’t really know what the situation was, it would have been more likely that the station owners in the other towns would have seen their chance to do the same. To me, this kind of thing is akin to looting. Things get into enough of an upheaval without crap like that.
January 3, 2010, 6:15 pmAllan Walstad says:
Laura, this just goes back to the same old egalitarian complaint that it’s unfair some people have more money than others. If you’re concerned about less well-off people, feel free to give to charity. Feel free to come to the aid of folks in need. How far do you have to drive to get to the nearest hospital, anyway? One gallon gets you, say 20 miles. If these folks don’t have an extra 4 or $5 to buy a gallon of gas, maybe they should’ve thought first before conceiving a child. Don’t they have any friends or family? Or belong to a church? You might think a family with a pregnant woman nearing the end of term would make sure to have gas in the tank, rather than having to go out to buy gas just to get to the hospital. People are responsible for themselves, but you’re welcome to help. You’re not welcome to steal, and forcing the gas station to part with their gas for less than they accept is stealing (or should I say, “akin to looting?”)
January 3, 2010, 6:15 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
No, it doesn’t. It just goes back to the old moralistic complaint that it’s wrong to lie and it’s wrong to use a common disaster to take unwarranted advantage of other people. Evidently you disagree. Whatever.
January 3, 2010, 6:37 pmLarryA says:
1. Legislatures aren’t virtuous, people are virtuous.
January 3, 2010, 6:46 pm2. Did the new law make any difference? Casino patrons had to visit a Stop-n-Cash before hitting the casino.
3. The principle I think you are arguing is that government is “giving” people welfare assistance, but it still remains “taxpayer money” when the clients spend it in ways legislators don’t approve of. Personally I think treating clients like children is one of the worst features of the welfare system.
4. Your last sentence makes my point. As long as the U.S. welfare system treats clients like children by making decisions for them, as when the system issues food stamps that can theoretically only be used for approved food purchases, clients will never learn the economic skills necessary to get off welfare.
Laura(southernxyl) says:
Oh, it’s taxpayer money from beginning to end. But it wasn’t the legislators not approving of it. They were happy to let that go on until there was enough public feeling to influence them to stop it. One could speculate about why that was.
I’m glad my last sentence makes your point, because it makes my point too.
If you’re going to meddle in somebody else’s business, you take on a certain amount of responsibility. If you’re not prepared to take that on, then you might better leave him alone.
January 3, 2010, 7:02 pmKen Arromdee says:
Consider an abstraction of the gouging issue. You have one person, with some food, and a second who’s hungry and will die without food. The person with the food offers to sell it for ten thousand dollars.
The pro-gouging argument would be that if you don’t let people sell food for ten thousand dollars, they won’t have incentives to save food for sale in an emergency, and that any food that is available will go to the first comer instead of to the one who needs it the most.
The trouble with that argument is that the dollar value needed to help with those two goals probably isn’t ten thousand dollars. If you limit it to, say, a hundred dollars, that’s plenty of incentive to stockpile food for sale during emergencies. These arguments can justify some gouging, but they don’t justify the unlimited gouging that libertarians would insist on.
Also, as Laura pointed out above, some gouging amounts to misleading the customer–implying that there’s a shortage when there isn’t. In the context of a disaster, raising gas prices by a lot sends a message to the consumer that there is a shortage. Just because the owner didn’t hang a sign explicitly saying that there’s a shortage doesn’t mean it’s not misleading, and “buyer beware” rshouldn’t extend to intentional deception on the grounds that it’s the buyer’s responsibility to figure out the deception.
January 3, 2010, 7:22 pmAllan Walstad says:
As I suggested way earlier on this thread, there has to be some sort of buffer zone between what you disapprove of and what you claim as a basis for punishment or coercion. If the gas station owners really just decided to take advantage of an excuse to raise prices for awhile, when they didn’t see or expect any shortage, well, I guess I’d think that was pretty crass of them. Maybe I wouldn’t invite them to my next wine and cheese party. Maybe I’d choose to take my business to a new gas station that moves into town. But I would acknowledge that they have a right to their property and to decide what it will take for them to part with it.
January 3, 2010, 7:22 pmAnatid says:
Detecting a discrepancy here …
… anyway. Allan, correct me if I am wrong, but the definition of “rational” you are using to describe decisionmaking INCLUDES cognitive assessment (what most people call “rational”) and INCLUDES emotional and heuristic assessment (what most people depend on equally, if not more, than cognitive assessment when making decisions) but EXCLUDES the impact of context and circumstances on the above two, yes?
January 3, 2010, 7:22 pmJohn Moore says:
I agree that lying to one’s neighbors is bad, but I do not agree that it justifies government intervention. I would also suggest it is bad business and will get its own punishment.
Also, something doesn’t add up here. How did the gas station owner know that there was no shortage, while the neighbors did not? You are implying an asymmetry of information that is not at all clear. Is it possible that the gas station owner also feared a loss of supply (like his neighbors) and raised prices accordingly?
January 3, 2010, 7:57 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
You think the neighbors had any way of knowing what the gas station owners were hearing from their suppliers, and how much they were paying for their gas? Do you know the wholesale prices your local gas stations are paying right now?
January 3, 2010, 8:01 pmJohn Moore says:
Laura, I don’t understand the relevance of your question. Do you know what the gas station owner was hearing from his supplier at the time in question? Do you know that the station owner knew there was no shortage?
It is my experience, having assisted in a number of disasters, that information is very badly degraded.
January 3, 2010, 8:05 pmAllan Walstad says:
That reminds me of a social philosophy course I sat in on one semester. The prof, a Marxist, started with a scenario in which someone refuses to share a soda with someone dying of thirst, and asked whether students all believed the refusal to be a punishable offense. Virtually all hands went up. With her foot wedged thereby in the door, she proceeded to drive a Mack truck through carrying the entire corpus of radical egalitarianism. For my part, I suppose there may be a point which the refusal to offer a purely incidental measure of aid (or accept less than the market might bear at that instant) to save a dying person might be punishable–assuming it’s understood that no foot gets in the door thereby. Otherwise, no. As far as some gas stations jacking up their gas prices for a couple days, that’s well inside the door. As explained earlier, in general, the freedom to price “gouge” is in fact socially useful in a shortage.
What a laughably tenuous line of argument. What raising your prices says is that gas costs more at your station now. Period.
January 3, 2010, 8:10 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
John, the fact that throughout the area prices went up to less than $4/gal, but a few isolated stations went up to $7 and dropped immediately to around $4 when the AG made his announcement is a clue.
Katrina was not a disaster in Tennessee. It was in Mississippi, but it was not in Tennessee. The AG was trying to keep it from becoming one. Frankly, when we drove just as far south as Columbus and saw how that area was genuinely affected I was disgusted by the people in Tennessee trying to horn in on the hurricane scenario.
I also thought the Memphis people who broke into cars with Louisiana license plates during the weeks following Katrina were scummier than run-of-the-mill thieves.
You pull together at a time like that, you don’t take the opportunity to victimize your neighbors.
January 3, 2010, 8:11 pmJohn Moore says:
That is still not evidence to me. The owner would of course drop his prices when faced by an AG. It doesn’t mean that the prices were raised only as gouging.
But let’s say it was gouging – the owner knew full well there was no shortage. That still doesn’t justify government intervention. The market would take of it pretty well:
1) People would find out there was gas available elsewhere at a lower price, and go there if they could.
2) People would resent being gouged and this would hurt the gouger’s business in the long run.
I agree that people should pull together in a disaster. But, you say there was no disaster there.
So it seems like we have, at worst, two sets of malefactors here:
1) Gas station owners who apparently took advantage of an information asymmetry to “gouge” customers
2) The government, which used its mighty powers to horn in on what should have been an issue between businesses and their customers.
#2 is far worse.
January 3, 2010, 8:17 pmAnatid says:
If this was a single gas station owner raising his prices, then the model you describe would work fine, John. But what Laura describes sounds more like all the stations in (say) a five-city radius raised their prices simultaneously. At that point, many people begin to lose mobility to choose to buy elsewhere.
January 3, 2010, 8:24 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Since the AG has now taken over pricing for all retail sales in the state of Tennessee, I guess you’re right. (insert eye rolling)
January 3, 2010, 8:28 pmAllan Walstad says:
Readery:
One of the ways in which people may make choices they later regret is if they allow short-term purposes to take precedence over longer-term ones. Their action is still rational in the sense that they choose means to pursue ends. So, for example, I may regret in the morning my choice to get delightfully drunk tonight, but given my purpose tonight I select means to the end–booze, based on my belief that it will get me drunk. In the morning, ruefully seeking relief, I once again choose means–aspirin with lots of water. In each case my action was rational, in that I chose means to ends. But I can still regret placing drunkenness last night above feeling ok this morning. I shoulda thought more about it then–shoulda thought more about my priorities. I concede that in general parlance one might say that I didn’t behave rationally last night. But means-ends choice is a more serviceable and less brittle concept of rationality than perfect foresight, perfect knowledge, and perfect logic. That’s the kind of “rationality” that gets modern mainstream econ in trouble.
Not entirely sure what you’re trying to get at. Cognitive assessment has to have something to assess, doesn’t it? I would have thought that context and circumstances provide material toward which cognition is directed, for the purposes of selecting action. Does that help?
January 3, 2010, 8:44 pmJohn Moore says:
Did they collude? If so, that’s against the law. If they didn’t, then what information were they operating on? Finally, why aren’t the prices still $7/hour?
January 3, 2010, 8:45 pmOren says:
It’s not just collective bargaining — it’s standards of practice, institutional protections, legal support and the weight of the organization behind you. Compare the lives of street prostitutes to those in the Bunny Ranches of NV or the high-end escorts services of NY/NJ/CT and you will see what I mean.
I think maybe this ties into the relationship between Ilya’s points (2) and (3) with (1) — that liberty naturally leads to people organizing their lives in productive ways.
Bingo, it’s a collusive attempt by those holding a monopoly in a particular resource to raise prices.
But this has been proven absolutely false in dozens of experiments. People make choices only partly based on their beliefs and partly based on immaterial factors and coincidences (e.g. what order the options appear on a list, whether one needs to fill a form to sign up or drop out, which option has the most explanatory text …).
There’s no sense it which these immaterial factors can be said to be relevant to either the attainment of those goals or the beliefs about the future. They are, in every sense, entirely logically irrelevant excepting of course the fact that they do make an impact on human decisions.
January 3, 2010, 8:46 pmOren says:
Demand for gasoline is quite inelastic.
January 3, 2010, 8:48 pmOren says:
But that’s what happened in TN, there was no shortage — even at the lower prices everyone’s demand was fully met.
There are substantial barriers to just opening another gas station even if it would be marginally profitable. Pretending like the economy operates without such friction (and, more importantly, frictional losses) is one of the largest sins in classical economics.
January 3, 2010, 8:54 pmJohn Moore says:
Oren:
Are you asserting that without the government action, everyone would still be paying $7?
January 3, 2010, 8:57 pmAllan Walstad says:
Right, so now ridicule the notion that ideas have consequences. Nixon imposed price controls back in the 70s. Kleptocratic pols are always pushing windfall profits taxes and other counterproductive market interventions. Our wing-nut Congress is about to seize control over one-sixth of the economy. Having assumed powers in an emergency, government often keeps and expands them; case in point: President Obama obviously looks more favorably on Bush’s attitude toward the Bill of Rights than candidate Obam did. Enjoy your eye-rolling while you can.
January 3, 2010, 9:00 pmAllan Walstad says:
That hits the nail on the head. If demand is so inelastic, there’s no reason why gas prices couldn’t go up a whole lot more–everywhere!–sending profits through the roof.
Oren, I assure you I was making no such assumption, any more than I was assuming my failure to invite gas station owners to my next party would make them change their ways.
January 3, 2010, 9:07 pmKen Arromdee says:
That’s one of my points: some freedom to gouge might be socially useful, but that doesn’t imply that unlimited freedom to gouge is. It’s one thing to say that $7 for a gallon of gas is okay in an emergency. It’s another to say that any price whatsoever is okay, but justify it using the benefits gained when the price is $7.
It’s possible for something to be misleading in context without containing anything explicitly false. Raising your prices to $7, in the middle of a disaster where shortages are likely, says that you are raising your prices because of a shortage. If there’s no shortage, but you’re trying to fool people into thinking there is, you’re being misleading, even if you don’t actually put up a sign saying “Prices $7 because of shortage”.
January 3, 2010, 9:23 pmAllan Walstad says:
And we can trust the pols to make the call on a case-by-case basis? Long experience teaches otherwise by now. See, there’s not just one argument here. The gas is somebody’s private property, to which they are entitled. Allowing prices to float freely in the market generally is highly socially beneficial–including, or perhaps even especially, in emergencies, contrary to popular impression and political demagoguery. And ceding more power to government tends to be socially harmful because, contrary to popular impression, government is not the public interest personified.
Since this has come up again, I have to ask the question: did the gas stations in Tennessee actually tell people there was a shortage? Because if not, then this whole line of insinuation that they were lying is not worth another second of anybody’s consideration.
January 3, 2010, 9:50 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I think it’s pretty obvious that they colluded.
Why is it okay for that to be against the law, but not gouging?
January 3, 2010, 9:50 pmJohn Moore says:
Can you define “gouging?”
For that matter, can you make an argument for why the government should force someone to sell their property at a government set price (which is what anti-gouging does)?
It’s easy to define collusion, and price collusion has long been held to be detrimental to the free market system (whether it should be against the law or not is not something I’m ready to comment on).
January 3, 2010, 9:54 pmchiMaxx says:
Agreed. The AG should have refused to intervene between the businesses and their customers by simply declaring that his office would refuse to prosecute drive-offs at any station selling gas at over $4. Let the businesses and their customers settle it themselves.
January 3, 2010, 9:55 pmJohn Moore says:
BTW, it’s still not obvious to me that they colluded. Maybe they had the same bad information that their customers did. That’s not uncommon in a situation like Katrina.
For example, if their information was that the refineries had been damaged, and re-supply might not have adequate quantity, then raising their prices would be completely reasonable. Heck, prices here in Phoenix went up after Katrina also.
You have yet to show that they acted out of some motive nastier than simply pricing at what they thought was appropriate given the information they had at the time.
January 3, 2010, 9:57 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
John, I don’t have to show you anything. You will continue to believe what you want no matter what I say.
If I see a Citgo station and a 7/11 across the street from each other, and both have gas at $7/gal, but I can drive into the next town in any direction and get it for $4, I am going to draw a conclusion. Especially if the AG says he’s going to prosecute profiteering and that price magically tumbles to $4 immediately. But you certainly don’t have to. You can think what you want. Or don’t think at all. Whatever.
January 3, 2010, 10:05 pmJohn Moore says:
What is it people here have against businessmen? Hey, if you don’t like the their prices, don’t buy from them. Calling in the AG, or alternatively, having the AG be intentionally derelict in his duties, is anti-freedom.
January 3, 2010, 10:16 pmKen Arromdee says:
If you want to argue that in theory preventing gouging might be good, but there’s no practical way, given untrustworthy politicians, to do so, that’s one thing. However, if you want to argue that preventing gouging is bad in theory, that argument isn’t relevant.
I’ll repeat: it doesn’t take making an explicitly false statement to be misleading. They don’t have to tell people there’s a shortage if they raise their prices by an amount and in a context designed to get people to believe there is one.
January 3, 2010, 10:20 pmAllan Walstad says:
Yeah that stuff is actually very interesting, although perhaps overblown in the case of some examples I’ve seen. Look–to use a working definition of rationality is not an assertion that everything anybody does is rational, even by that definition. If you poke my knee, I think it’s still true that my leg will pop out, but not because I cognitively selected the action. At the other end of things, I generally do quite a bit of research in Consumer Reports and shop around before deciding on a car. There are some decisions I make by flipping a coin, simply to be done with the trouble of weighing pros and cons. A significant part of seemingly non-rational decision-making may reflect economizing on deliberative effort. I also suspect that conscious cognition (including scientific modeling) is a fairly continuous outgrowth or elaboration of unconscious perceptual and relatively hard-wired heuristic processing of information by the brain. Nevertheless, psych and econ are distinct disciplines, even though we may draw insights from both. If we construct economic models of human affairs on the basis that humans make choices in pursuit of their goals, they are not the only models we might deploy–but I think they can be very good ones if we don’t get seduced by the math fetish.
January 3, 2010, 10:26 pmAllan Walstad says:
Ken-I read your last response. There are several good arguments, and they are all relevant in my opinion, but I am closing up shop for the night.
January 3, 2010, 10:31 pmOren says:
No, but there would have been a larger dead-weight loss in which the collusive players were rewarded despite their lack of (increased) economically productive activity.
January 3, 2010, 10:31 pmmischief says:
Most of those I’ve read, whose objections are mainly theological, think that new human life is a good, but nevertheless the technologies are wrong — chiefly for violating the child’s rights.
January 4, 2010, 1:00 pmRay Mumme says:
6hRvWz
January 4, 2010, 11:07 pm