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Why the Left Thinks We’re Evil
I think that it’s easier for people on the right to understand that leftists mean well than it is for leftists to understand that people on the right also mean well. In his book, Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt wrote:
The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
In Thomas Sowell’s phrase, a good economist must go beyond “stage one” thinking.
Unfortunately, people on the left tend to get stuck at stage one. They see, for example, that a high minimum wage will make minimum-wage workers better off. Additional thought is needed to understand that increasing the cost of low-skilled labor will reduce the demand for that labor.
Even more thought is required to see that the people helped by the increase – those who keep their jobs or can still find jobs after the increase – are likely to be the most employable. That is, they have the most knowledge and experience and they are the least discriminated against. Those hurt by the laws will be the least employable – the least educated, least skilled, and the most discriminated against. In other words, minimum wages help those who need help the least and hurt those who need help the most.
To someone who can’t, or won’t, go beyond stage one thinking, it’s so blindingly obvious that an increased minimum wage will help the poor that they believe that anyone who disagrees must hate poor people – that is, they must be evil. Someone who can see to stage two or three also understands stage one and is unlikely to believe that someone who can’t get beyond stage one is evil.
Moreover, people who truly believe that an election brought evil people into power are more likely to take to the streets than are those who believe that an election merely put stage one thinkers in office.
Published in General
They do it all the time. It’s called the Cancel Culture, Deplatforming Conservatives, Doxxing, and so on. They get people fired from their jobs, whatever comes to hand. Remember what they tried to do to Kavanaugh?
I’m not aware of left wingers being treated that way by right wingers. It wouldn’t work, anyway. Try to MeToo the presumptive Democratic nominee and all of a sudden MeToo disappears. They’ve got principles, and if those become inconvenient they’ve got others.
Ok, I’ll bite. What’s that to do with what I wrote?
Sure it is. Profits are a measure of how much benefit it is providing to its customers.
Sure it is. If potential customers are not willing to pay the marginal cost of producing marginal goods, then the producer is benefiting them by not providing them.
That’s not true. In a free society, if a trade isn’t beneficial to a person, he won’t make it. So every trade a person makes is beneficial to him. Every time a voluntary trade is made, an hour of labor for a certain quantity of money, both the employee and the employer benefit.
That’s how they fight (what they think is) evil. It doesn’t follow they fight that way because they have a good/evil framework.
Now that I re-read your comment, I’m not sure it does. Though you did agree with what I responded to, so…
I think we’re defining the word benefit differently.
Does this apply to monopolies?
Maybe. Monopolies pop up all the time in free markets, though they rarely last long without government intervention. Some government monopoly grants – such as patents and copyrights – are generally considered to be beneficial because they reward innovation.
However, such protection can be abused by individuals and firms looking to “game” the system. For example, pharmaceutical companies may extend a drug’s patent by making minor changes to its molecular structure, to its dosage, or to the means by which the drug is administered. Significant resources are thus redirected away from developing new drugs and toward making trivial changes to existing ones.
Companies that pioneer new sales techniques may enjoy a monopoly of sorts until others copy their innovations. Home Depot, for example, opened the country’s first “big-box” hardware store in 1986, while Lowe’s, Home Depot’s main competitor, didn’t open its first megastore until 1994.
Alcoa, one of the few monopolies in the United States that lasted without government intervention, had a monopoly on the production of ingot aluminum for decades. However, the price of aluminum dropped significantly during this time – not because Alcoa was altruistic, but because the company didn’t have a monopoly on substitutes for aluminum such as wood and steel.
Similarly, during the time that Standard Oil owned most of the nation’s petroleum refining capacity, the quality of oil increased while its price plummeted. The company wasn’t brought to court for anti-trust violations by its customers, but by competitors who couldn’t match Standard’s efficiency.
Charges that Standard undersold or bought out its competitors and then raised its prices were simply untrue. Nor would such a scheme have worked. The problem with “predatory pricing” strategies is that they create arbitrage opportunities. Rivals can buy up the products being sold below cost and sell them elsewhere for a tidy profit. That’s why it’s rarely done in practice. Here’s a link to the story of how Dow Chemical beat a German bromine cartel with this technique: https://www.investopedia.com/…/dow-chemical-bromine…
Government-created monopolies are another thing entirely. As economist Michael Mitchell wrote in his pamphlet The Pathology of Privilege: The Economic Consequences of Government Favoritism:
Fighting the Reich? That’s crazy. Then again, there really was Operation Paperclip.
I tend to disagree with the clean purity of the mercantilism you are justifying. I knew a little 1- or 2-year-old girl whose very first words were “Micky Dee”s!!!”
If you can hypnotize people into desiring your product, and then you sell it to them, are you really providing a benefit to your customers?
“Mercantilism” is the belief that a country can enrich itself by promoting exports and discouraging imports.
As to “hypnotizing” people into buying a product, that might work. Once. As William Bernbach, the “father of modern advertising,” said: A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster.
“Mercantilism” is the wrong word? Call it merchantry.
Please define.
I am using “benefit someone” to mean “make conditions better for someone than they would have been”.
It’s consistent with common usage. Let’s agree to this definition, unless you object and want to use a different one.
Examples: If you and I make a voluntary trade, for example
then your life is better than it would have been. I would say that I “benefited” you. My life is better than it would have been. I would say that you “benefited” me.
Yes, absolutely. How could anyone question that?
Those who structured American society in the 1800’s would have disagreed with you. When someone through their work, timing, masses of capital not only captures an industry, but the entire surrounding networks, there is a huge danger to the society as a whole. That is how those people who were society structuring people came up with the idea of AntiTrust.
From time to time, some writers on ricochet state how this President or that one, say Teddy Roosevelt or Wilson, gave in to the crass and terrorist threats of the Wobblies or others, only they miss the point. If the economic system becomes too heavily weighted in favor of the top one percent of one percent, class revolt will happen. Then our nation would end up like Russia did in 1917.
An economic philosophy must never be so sacrosanct that the society which gives birth to it is destroyed by it.
Yeah, I don’t think a monopolist has to respond to market (pricing) signals. Especially if he’s providing essential products/services (fuel oil, for example).
@Western Chauvinist,
The question is
I think you answered a different question.
Camp
@CarolJoy,
Do you?
Cheers,
Camp
So a law or regulation against price-fixing that reduces profits is denying some additional customer benefits.
Any coercive measure (including a law) forbidding any voluntary exchange denies the two people who would have made it exactly the benefit that they would have received from it, had they been free to make it.
You expect me to define a word I just made up? That’s too much! This requires me to think!
What I meant by “mercantilism” (and I apologize for misusing the word) or merchantry was the barest, cleanest experience of buying and selling, of engaging with a merchant; the idea that all buying is, at its finest, voluntary and when all is done, the seller is always doing nothing more than supplying a need or a want at a negotiated and mutually-agreed price.
As a Christian, I believe that luring a person into temptation is not benefiting him, but harming him. Here I am using the word “benefit”as Christ did. I am making a moral judgement.
When I speak of “benefit” as a economic scientist, I mean something very different. I am necessarily eschewing moral judgement, which is by definition unscientific. A scientist can never discover any moral truth. Morality is completely outside of the domain of a scientist.
Does the same schism hold true for politics?
But I would argue that even science, or the pursuit of science, or the pursuit of knowledge is not morally isolated. Scientists are moral creatures, and their endeavors are never morally void.
I was born a citizen of the United States so until recently I never had to consider too seriously the economic choices relative to political choices. So I remain a ‘constitutionalist’ which means I support a mostly free market domestically and an international or foreign trade market constrained only by measures deemed necessary to maintain national sovereignty and our national interests under that same Constitution. The federal government has powers enumerated within the Constitution to legislate and regulate interstate commerce and foreign trade.
When I do an economic or market transaction, regardless of which side of the transaction I am on, I don’t consider that act as isolated from other considerations such as the role of our Constitution government described above. So I am not really of a mind to argue this in a pure theoretical framework without empirical influences and effects.
No. Morality is completely inside the domain of politics.
I didn’t write clearly. A scientist as such never asserts any moral truth. When a person is curious about a scientific question, he is never curious about a moral question. When he proposes an answer, it is never a moral assertion.
That means that a scientific question is, by definition, a question about how things are, not how they ought to be. A moral question is, by definition, a question about how things ought to be, regardless of how they are.
“What is the mass of this sample?” is not a moral question. The sample has no ability to have a mass that is morally good, nor a mass that is morally wrong. That is a scientific question. You are right that every person acts sometimes as a scientist and sometimes as a moral creature, but you are missing my point.
Yes, perhaps I am splitting hairs here, but there is a moral difference between the weatherman who gives a daily forecast and the climate scientist who predicts the end of the world as we know it — both are statistically based, but one is much broader and intricate and requires greater presuppositions than the other. Economics is more like the climate than the weather, and the amount of faith it takes to make predictions is greater.
I completely disagree. In my view, there is not moral difference between any two statements about facts about physical reality. There is no moral difference between the statement of the weatherman, “I think that the high today will be 60 degrees” and a statement of a climate scientist “I think that the average temperature in 100 years will be 15 degrees higher than today.”
You are confusing science with morality.
I don’t understand what “arguing this in a pure theoretical framework without empirical influences and effects” means. Could you give a simple example?