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Liberal Media Summed Up in One Sentence
An article in today’s Washington Post about President Trump’s Florida rally quotes a supporter on one of the administration’s early moves to preserve jobs in the mining sector:
Several people said they would have liked to see more coverage of a measure that Trump signed Thursday that rolled back a last-minute Obama regulation that would have restricted coal mines from dumping debris in nearby streams. At the signing, Trump was joined by coal miners in hard hats.
“If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been put out of work,” Patricia Nana, a 42-year-old naturalized citizen from Cameroon. “I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back, and he had miners with their hard hats and everything — you could see how happy they were.”
Having thus set her up, the article proceeds to knock her down:
The regulation actually would have cost relatively few mining jobs and would have created nearly as many new jobs on the regulatory side, according to a government report — an example of the frequent distance between Trump’s rhetoric, which many of his supporters wholeheartedly believe, and verifiable facts.
This sentence floored me. There are at least 3 major problems with it:
- “Relatively few” is not quantified. Relative to what, precisely? Is this supposed to contradict her citation of 70,000? That number could be correct but still judged “relatively few” relative to the total employment figures in the mining industry.
- The source of their “verifiable facts” is “a government report,” because naturally we can trust the same government bureaucracy that created the regulations to come up with accurate, unbiased figures as to the impacts of said regulations. No unforeseen consequences escape the attention of our all-knowing central planners! Supposing I wanted to verify this “verifiable fact” for myself, they haven’t even bothered to tell me which government report they used as a source.
- What really floored me here is the underlying concept that we can compensate for lost jobs in the mining sector with new jobs “on the regulatory side.” Seriously? Jobs moved from farming to manufacturing, to the service sector, and now we can move them all into the regulatory sector. Let’s have a nation where everyone has a job regulating someone else, and we’ll finally have full employment! What could possibly go wrong?
The iron fist of the communist party outweighs any effect from the market.
Part of that is a regulatory issue. Pollution is the classic free rider/tragedy of the commons kind of problem and it’s difficult to solve without some kind of regulation. Part of it, though, is just relative poverty. Clean air and clean water are, at some level of economic development, luxury goods. We’re fortunate to be rich enough to have them.
Well, remember that the 1,000 jobs at Carrier were “relatively few” in the MSM.
What I can’t remember is any job losses at closing newspapers being characterized as “relatively few.” No those are always deeply distressing.
To be fair, they have regulations. They just don’t have well-developed environmental regulations.
A case could be made that the regulation will lower healthcare and pollution costs by an amount greater than the new coal miners’ economic output.
Yes, but no attempt was made to demonstrate that possibility. They simply asserted that regulatory jobs are an equal trade for mining jobs.
By the way, it’s nice to hear a voice from the other side of the spectrum. Glad you’re here!
The argument Ryan mentioned is not that the market will regulate itself, but rather:
How well developed is the tort law system in China? Are the judges impartial? Are the courts accessible to ordinary citizens? Can companies or people who injure their neighbors be held accountable in court, or can they get away with it if they know the right party officials?
Right, I’m not trying to say the case for this particular regulation is indefensible, I’m just saying that (a) the defense offered by WaPo is farcical and (b) it is an opinion masquerading as an example of a “verifiable fact” that does not belong in a piece of supposedly-objective straight news reporting.
The iron fist of the communist party is a myth. They only regulate political dissent.
I saw the article when it was released, and I did think that the quoted sentence was odd.
Amusingly odd, but odd nonetheless.
Guangxi, or personal relationships, outweigh any kind of law or regulation. We are very lucky to have the rule of law. We must fight with all our might to preserve it.
Well said. Fully agree.
Completely agree. I fear over-regulation is likely to destroy the rule of law: first the bureaucracy issues so many Byzantine and impossible-to-obey rules until everyone is effectively a criminal, then hand out waivers to those with connections, or simply leave it up to powerful officials to decide when to prosecute and when to look the other way. Soon personal relationships to those officials outweigh the letter of the law.
Maybe it’s not free market enough?
Lots of corruption from what I hear (Is that related to “Guanxi”?).
Then again, that argument doesn’t have much purchase with me when it comes from Leftists.
i.e. “True” communism has never been tried and therefore we must try it but this time for real.
oh, I wish I was good enough to remember exactly what I’m referring to. ;)
Take an example of a pig farmer. It stinks up the nearby property… seems like an incursion of sorts. The natural instinct is to regulate that sort of behavior. Look at it the other way around – might the presence of nearby homes be an incursion on the farmer’s ability to raise pigs? Governments would regulate that behavior, but markets might also regulate that behavior by, say, the farmer paying nearby landowners or even purchasing their property…
That’s what I was thinking of. Not sure where I got it. I am reminded of the sorts of government solutions we encounter every day – never very innovative, always somewhat ham-fisted. What has done a better job of regulating various ills (environmental is a great example) over time, governments or markets? Seems the switch from horses to cars did a lot more than a government might have done by outlawing horses…
Try Hong Kong. I don’t think you can really compare China to the United States while pretending that “free market” is some sort of constant. I don’t think many libertarians would spend time in China and feel that they’ve learned much at all about the free market… except, perhaps, what happens when one doesn’t really exist.
Regulatory work doesn’t add value to productivity. It’s overhead. This is the Broken Windows economic theory and is false and phony as they come.
possibly… But a similar case could be made for nuclear and clean coal and other forms of energy that the left is dead-set against. That’s the thing about government regulation. It’s not even a question about whether a regulation may have marginally improved some particular statistic (remember Obama’s “jobs created or saved?”), the question (kind of like opportunity cost) is how private innovation might have improved that same thing at a much smaller cost, and potentially a far greater benefit.
You are thinking of The Problem of Social Cost. It is the groundbreaking paper for which he won the Nobel Prize.
Awesome. I knew it was good! :)
A similar idea to regulatory jobs being good is also being played in the green energy debate. I recently read an article praising the solar industry because there at now as many jobs in the solar industry and in the fossil fuel industry. I don’t believe this, but if it were true, it is not a plus for the solar industry. Solar energy production is less than 1% of fossil fuel production. If it takes the same amount of labor to produce that little amount, I would call that a disaster, not a success.
It isn’t true. There is no way in hell there are as many jobs in solar energy as in fossil fuels. They are using the new math.
Maybe what they’re referring to is job growth. In other words, the solar industry is adding as many new jobs (relative to the total amount of jobs in that industry) as is the fossil fuel industry. The only way I can see that working is if you are sure to use that parenthetical. Of course, if you consider that the solar industry is being subsidized while the fossil fuel industry is being crippled by regulation, the only useful thing that really tells us is that government intervention can, in fact, create statistics that the market would otherwise not support. Remove the subsidies and regulation, and you’d see the numbers skyrocketing/plummeting in opposite directions, I think.
(another thought might be that the definition of “solar industry” is somewhat broad. A lot of people put solar panels on their houses. I don’t think I’d count that, but I imagine it is counted nonetheless.)
Why don’t we just hire people to ride on exercise bikes connected to generators? That would produce an even higher ratio of jobs-per-kilowatt-hour!
I’m sure they do count them. There’s probably a lot of jobs installing solar panels, even if most of the jobs manufacturing them are overseas.
Not bikes, treadmills. Treadmills would wear out more shoes, and create even more jobs for cobblers, which would create more demand for leather, which would create more jobs raising cattle, which would create jobs raising grain, which would create more wheat threshing jobs (which should be done by hand instead of machine because…jobs).
If the pig farmer had to bargain with a single developer they might, as Coase posits, agree on the most efficient solution, i.e., let the one who can bear the costs of solving their problem at least cost be the one to do so, possibly by relocating.
But if the farmer has to bargain with 200 individual homeowners a holdout problem or free rider problem would arise. The efficient solution might not be attainable through bargaining. Thus, it may be best for the government to institute a rule that is most likely to mandate the efficient solution in most cases.