A quote from today's column by David Limbaugh (the saner brother) and a few comments from me

[fpb]

No central planning-type guru is as smart at allocating scarce resources as a free market pricing mechanism.
(David Limbaugh, Townhall.com, 6 January 2009)

The market in drugs is not free. But in so far as it is free at all - that is, in so far as the prohibition can be dodged - enormous amounts of resources are allocated to drugs; large enough to pay for mighty criminal armies in Latin America and for colossal illegal businesses in the First World. Even so, the trade in illegal drugs is small in volume compared to the trade in legal drugs, specifically spirits, which have no other purpose than intoxication. The free market allocates enough resources to them to support the GDP of several countries. The market in pornography is for all practical purposes free - and in fact it extends to businesses not normally conceived of as pornographic, such as advertising and most of the daily press - and it is large beyond reckoning. The immensely rational and inconceivably smart invisible hand of the free market allocates enough resources to the wholly irrational goal of intoxication and self-abasement that, if it were removed, the result would be economic catastrophe around the world.

Comments

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

Well, as a free-marketer in general, I'd point out that that statement is about the efficiency of free-markets versus central planning in allocating resources to produce what we want, and doesn't really touch on the issue of what we ought to want. Which is something less in the field of economics and more in that of morality.

As a cynical free-marketer, however, I'd add that that the invisible hand will deliver self-abasement and self-destruction in copious quantities and with tremendous efficiency to people who desire them is a feature, not a bug.

It quietly and efficiently gives people what they want, even if what they want is stupid, harmful, or self-destructive. And then, because it's no more possible to defy moral laws than economic ones in the final analysis, the irrational then have to suffer the consequences of their stupid, harmful and self-destructive choices, and so are automatically "punished" for making those choices with no further effort required by anyone. Therefore, those choices are disincentivised for people capable of making rational decisions based on observed results.

Rather elegant, really.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If the harm of self-destructive choices were restricted to those who make them, I could agree with you. Since they debase the whole of society - just think of pornography - I still think this is a major criticism of free marketeerism, certainly in the naively arrogant formulation of Mr.Limbaugh and his likes.

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

I won't deny that you have a point, because I'm fairly certain that I'd agree with you on the harmful externalities of most of the things in question.

On the other hand, I would still hold that this is less an issue of free market vs. central planning (how we get what we want), but rather an issue of morality (what we ought to want). Assuming, arguendo, that we can address the latter by legislatively banning pornography, drugs, etc. from the sphere of what we ought to want or at least what we can be able to get, then that's really orthogonal to the question of how we allocate resources in the remaining economy. And I would argue that you can thus ban pornography and drugs and still have a free market in goods, just like we can ban murder-for-hire and still have a free market in services.

(On the gripping hand, given the history of Prohibition and the War on Drugs [which, if you'll permit me, I'll use as examples because I happen to know more about the drug trade than the pornography industry], it looks like there's a convincing argument to be made that we actually can't, practically speaking, legislatively ban such things from the sphere of wants and able-to-gets, since the people who don't pay attention to the free-market lessons don't appear to pay attention to the law, either; and that thus we're stuck with the externalities either way, and so we might as well pick the policy that doesn't require gratuitously intrusive enforcement, a billions-a-year budget, and the enablement of unsavory Columbian thugs, et. al.

The externalities of the regulation and of the regulation driving the trade underground into the criminal markets only might actually be worse than those of the trade itself, in short, and maybe we'd be better off with the externalities of the hypothetical GlaxoSmithKline Recreational Products Division than with those of the Norte del Valle Cartel and the police powers [no-knock warrants, civil asset forfeiture, etc.] ginned up to oppose them.

But now this is going off into what's really a side issue to the free markets question...)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I do not think that it is alien to the matter of free markets. The point is that you admit government intervention into the markets, limiting or preventing the supply of a widely saleable good, because such a good is not just immoral in itself - that, I tend to agree, would be no business of the State - but because its consequences make it socially damaging. At that point, you have admitted the right of the state to control the markets in order to restrict or prevent the circulation of socially damaging goods. After that, how and where to interene in the markets is merely a question of practicality and, above all, of preferences. You may decide. for instance, that it s socially necessary to favour public transport over individual car driving and structure taxation and legislation to that purpose. Or you may decide it is better to favour the car industry, Either way, you are intervening in the market; and indeed you cannot avoid it, because such a thing as neutral taxation does not exist. The State has to tax; and, having to tax, it is bound to make significant choices. The State would be remiss if it did not have policies for the future of the country; and those will inevitably affect markets.

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

Of course, re-reading that, it sounds rather like helpless kvetching along the lines of 'people will be people, whatever you do'. Which isn't really my position.

But I do think for both practical and ethical reasons that in this sphere, we're likely to find the best solutions in educating people so that they make better choices, rather than trying to ban them from making bad choices. Actually make people more virtuous, so to say, rather than set out on the Herculean task of regulating away the ability to act on lack of virtue - which in the end, doesn't actually improve the people or the society they're members of.

Of course, how to do that is the difficult question, outside the individual level, and I must admit that the trends in society at large are all running against me here...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Socrates believed that evil arose out of ignorance; so he was forced to live through one of the worst tyrannies in history, the Thirty Tirants - selected from the best educated and best born persons in Athens. He thought it would be possible to educate people into virtue; so, as soon as that tyranny was overthrown, he was charged with impiety and corrupting youth and murdered under form of law. You cannot educate people into virtue; you can only give them more opportunities to be decent or wicked, as their individual nature leads them. Hindus and Buddhists call it Karma, Christians and Jews Original Sin; but most great religions agree that human beings are born with a weight of inborn sin within them. (The only religion which believes that men are born without sin is Islam.) Education as such does not banish or convert or baptize it, or else there would not be corrupt university professors.

[notebuyer.livejournal.com]

most great religions agree that human beings are born with a weight of inborn sin within them.

And so is this something in the face of which we are helpless, or do we attempt to talk to those destroying social capital (as drunks do) or encourage those building social capital (as those "wine and cheese mixers" do sponosored by various local charities)? Or do we just say "People, can't trust them, got to keep them away from the stuff"? The results of Prohibition in the US would argue against the third: the various reforms of state liquor/driving laws and their success at keeping drunk driving arrests down might argue for the first, and you're the first person I've heard from in a long time arguing that the only purpose of alcohol was intoxication, which appears to have historical problems.

I'm likely to go with Aquinas on this one. We do not perfect people (only God can do that), but people can improve their behavior, and should be encouraged and educated to do so, and given the choices to see for themselves that they have the power to make choices.

BTW, confusing universities with sources of moral enlightenment doesn't serve to move the conversation forward: education, in the sense of the previous paragraph, is resisted, denounced, and eliminated from university curricula.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Remember, all that this item was meant to do was to criticize - even ironize about - the very naive and rather unreasonable version of free market theory stated by Mr.Limbaugh. Personally, I am against prohibition, not only for spirits, but for other drugs as well, because my view is that it would do less damage to society to have ten per cent more cocainized twits ruining themselves without feeding criminal networks than to have rather less dopers, but feed their money directly into mafia armies. On the other hand, I detest drunkenness and intoxication, and do not believe that there is such a thing as a benignant drug - all my experiences with potheads, in particular, have been utterly negative.

Prohibition

[lametiger.livejournal.com]

I did not live through prohibition. My mother did. From her perspective, public drunkenness decreased and people in general and women in particular were safer. I have heard the same from her contemporaries in other parts of the country. These are the views not of theorists but of people who experienced the differences before and after for themselves.

Re: Prohibition

[notebuyer.livejournal.com]

Your mother, and her contemporaries, have a lovely illusion to pass on, unsupported by the crime figures. I like lovely illusions. The publicly available figures on crime are quite otherwise, and are not theoretical.

Statistics is concerned with accurately reflecting the data, all of it.

Re: Prohibition

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Your mother refuses to deal with the politico-economic effects of Prohibition - in particular, the frightful rise in the power and violence of the Mafia. In the nineteen-twenties, Americans were seriously looking at the danger of a whole nation governed by violent gangs, as large swathes of it - Chicago was just one example - certainly was. Contemporaries saw a close relationship between the rise of increasingly political gangsterism in America and the gangsterization of politics in Russia, Italy and Germany. You may remember that in CS Lewis' first undoubted Christian masterpiece, The Pilgrim's Regress, the murderous dwarves bred by Mr.Savage are divided in four tribes: Marxomanni, Mussolimini, Swastici and Gangomanni. Lewis reflected contemporary views and contemporary fact. I have seen newspaper caricatures where Al Capone was visibly made to look like Mussolini (in real life, the two people could not have looked more different). And it was similar in action: in Italy and in Germany as in Chicago and New York City, it took the iconic shape of huge fast cars loaded with violent young men, rushing by to suddenly discorge a corpse that would tumble into a ditch, or to destroy someone with machine-gun fire in the sight of casual passers-by, or of silent, savage beatings in dark alleys, or of unexplained disappearances - the American "taking for a ride", the European "midnight knock at the door", and of a complicit or cowed police force and politicians who not only accepted, but positively fed upon this violence. (In 1921, the deputy Minister of the Interior of the German state of Bavaria was told that there were political murderers at large in the state. "Yes," he replied icily, :but not enough!")

Your mother does not bother to remember this sort of thing. Perhaps it was too large for her frame of reference; or perhaps she could not see the connection between armies of murderers fed by illegal trade and Prohibition - a connection that is clearly visible in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere to this day. But she is like some old Italians who say nostalgically that in the twenties there was no crime in Sicily. It is true: thanks to the notorious Prefetto (police chief) Cesare Mori, the Mafia met a violence worse than its own and pragmatically fell quiescent - although events were to show that it had been cowed, not uprooted. Those sad old nostalgic men are quite correct that the violent young Sicilians with guns were not as violent under Fascism as they were before or since - like your mother, I suppose, is correct in her day-to-day memories. But the fact is that when the whole state was criminalized, the notion of civil peace was at best a narrow perception and at worse an illusion. And America before 1934 was taking swift, long strides along the same dark road - thanks to Prohibition.

Re: Prohibition

[lametiger.livejournal.com]

Your use of the present tense in referring to my mother is interesting given how long ago prohibition was. In fact, if still with us, my mother would have been 96 next month--not an unheard of age, but not assured either. As for the denigration of her perceptions, I imagine it was probably another of those cases where America, large country that it is, was vastly different in those places we hear so much about from the way it was in much of the rest of the country. I personally am willing to accept that where she lived, and where those of her contemporaries whom I have heard on the subject lived. the main goal of Prohibition WAS being achieved. It is frankly insulting for people who did not share their experiences nor know them to claim that they HAD to have been rosy-eyed or deluded in their memories of what it was like at the time.

Concerning the undisputed history of Chicago and the other places where Prohibition was openly flouted and the organized crime bosses ruled the roost, there is an important question to be considered. Did Prohibition cause the corruption, or merely reveal the corruption that already existed?

Re: Prohibition

[fpb.livejournal.com]

To which I answer: would there be criminal armies in Mexico without the American market in drugs? Organized crime had existed in America for decades - possibly even before the Sicilians introduced their own particularly effective brand. (Unfortunately we Italians have this bad habit of being the best at anything we take seriously.) But Prohibition gave it undreamed-of power and wealth. Al Capone, who had begun his career as an accountant and could not tell good booze from bad, nevertheless built his power on spirits; in other circumstances, one can doubt whether he would ever even have gone into the rackets (for one thing, he was not Sioilian, which meant that the Sicilian owners of New York City hated him). And drugs are now doing the same: powering an immense array of criminal armies, including the Taliban - who are enriched by the immense and unbreakable Afghan poppy crop. I detest drunkenness and intoxication, and I have had bad experiences with drug users; but I say that in the balance of societal evils, it is less bad to make the trade in intoxicating substances legal, and therefore controllable, taxable and non-violent, than to try uselessly to suppress it while it powers a scary and internationally dangerous undergrowth.

Oh, and I must have misread you - I thought you spoke as if your mother were still alive. If that was in any way painful or demeaning, I apologize.

Re: Prohibition

[lametiger.livejournal.com]

I actually said nothing to indicate the mortal status of my mother one way or another. You made an assumption, just as you made other assumptions about her credibility as a witness to conditions in her time and place. Hearing her spoken of as though she were still alive is not particularly painful to me, and by no stretch is that demeaning. Other statements you made (e.g., "Your mother does not bother to remember this sort of thing. Perhaps it was too large for her frame of reference") were most certainly insulting and totally unwarranted since you knew nothing at all about her "frame of reference" or breadth of life experience.

Apology (if truly meant) accepted.

Re: Prohibition

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I do not think that was insulting. It really was a possible answer to a question that must arise in anyone's mind when faced with that kind of testimony: did the lady really not think of Cosa Nostra and the rest of the horrors of underground alcohol sale as part of the picture of Prohibition? It is a sufficiently known and understood feature of it. I have met at least another person who said more or less the same thing, and I found myself wondering whether they did not consider mass illegality a part of the result of the nineteenth amendment. The comparison with my fellow-citizens who look with nostalgia and admiration on the times of Prefetto Mori occurred to me. It is not a contemptous comparison.

Re: Prohibition

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

I would think it might just have been a case of her having lived in a rural area -- my own grandmother lived through that era as a young woman, but in a tiny town in central Illinois, far from Chicago. It was a time before television, when mass media was still in its barest infancy. She was in her teens before her family even had a radio, so most of her view of the world beyond the town of Broadlands came from newspapers -- and those would have been downstate ones, which focused primarily upon local affairs, with passing coverage of affairs in the wider world. There just wasn't the obsession with knowing all the news as it happened.

And the mentality didn't entirely go away with the rise of television -- I can remember many times when I was scolded for "excessive" interest in world affairs, told to concentrate on my own life and classes/job and leave such matters to those who were charged with handling them. Spending "too much" time reading the news and wanting to discuss it put me out of step with peers who believed I should put more effort into observing and mastering the dynamics of the various cliques that ruled their interactions.

Re: Prohibition

[lametiger.livejournal.com]

"And the mentality didn't entirely go away with the rise of television -- I can remember many times when I was scolded for 'excessive' interest in world affairs"

This mentality does NOT describe my mother, but I guess I can't keep anyone from making their own assumptions and projecting their own experiences and/or prejudices onto her evaluation of Prohibition. At this point, I have said all I am going to say on the subject. As I began by saying, I did not experience these things for myself. I merely wanted to point out that there was more to what was happening at the time than the one-sided picture we get from the usual sources.