Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Who Gets to Define and Impose the “Common Good”?
George Will’s column, When American Conservatism Becomes Un-American, talks about Senator Marco Rubio’s offer of “common-good capitalism,” which is capitalism minus respect for individuals’ right to freely express their preferences and values in the marketplace, and about Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule’s offer of “common-good constitutionalism,” which is the Constitution minus respect for “individuals’ diverse notions of the life worth living.”
Both the Senator and the professor want the power to define and impose a “common good” that doesn’t respect the common man’s freedom. Neither specifies how they will identify the common good, nor do they provide a plan for preventing the power they demand from being abused.
Both see very real problems in the American economy, and they place the blame on “unfettered capitalism,” ignoring Washington’s countless fetter factories, including:
- Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF)
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
- Consumer Product Safety Commission
- Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
- Employment and Training Administration (ETA)
- Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
- Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
- Farm Credit Administration (FCA)
- Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
- Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
- Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC)
- Federal Election Commission (FEC)
- Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
- Federal Highway Administration (FHA)
- Federal Maritime Commission (FMC)
- Federal Railroad Administration (FRA)
- Federal Reserve Bank
- Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
- Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
- Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA)
- Office of Energy & Renewable Energy
- United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
- United States Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC)
Their solution? More fetters.
They see the inequities caused by crony capitalism, codified by government-created cartels in industries such as banking, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and shipping. Their solution? More cartels – more special privileges for favored companies and organizations and even, in the case of Vermeule, favored religious institutions.
Before giving up more of our freedom and imposing the new government controls that Rubio and Vermeule want, let’s try eliminating existing government programs that coercively create and sustain poverty and inequality. For example, let’s stop:
- Penalizing companies for hiring low-skilled workers. Minimum wage laws make it more expensive to hire such workers and make it that much harder for the least employable (i.e., the least educated, the least experienced, and the most discriminated against) to get and retain jobs.
- Proliferating job licensing.
- Creating new regulatory hoops for would-be business owners to jump through.
- Restricting school choice. Parents should be able to get their children out of failing schools and into schools in which they can actually learn to read and write.
- Imposing rent controls, which create shortages of low-cost housing.
- Imposing zoning restrictions, which also create low-cost housing shortages.
True, free markets don’t solve every problem, but they typically do less harm than government. Let’s start with the dying towns. Many died because: (1) local governments were using their towns’ factories as cash cows, and (2) unions empowered by federal law to monopolize the labor available to the towns’ factories and to legally use violence to enforce their will. Many of the factories that left what is now the Rust Belt, didn’t move overseas, but to the South where unions had little strength.
Did federal regulations really make refrigerators more efficient? Yes, they required Whirlpool et al to add more insulation, replace Freon, etc. But all that raised the cost of manufacturing refrigerators. Raising the cost of manufacturing typically translates into raising the inputs, including the energy requirements. Was the additional energy required in manufacturing offset by the energy savings over the life of the refrigerators? Maybe.
Regulations probably made dishwashers less efficient by requiring them to use less water. The dishwashers don’t clean as well, so additional water must be used to rinse dishes before placing them in the “improved” dishwashers.
Check out the movie, The Tucker. It tells the story of Preston Tucker, an entrepreneur who came up with a revolutionary automobile that had safety glass and seatbelts long before either were required by law. The Big Three auto companies were able to use their pull with the federal government to shut Tucker down. Had he been left alone, the Big Three would have had to up their games to stay in business. As it was, the government protected established U.S. auto manufacturers from competitors both at home and abroad. By the 1980’s, Detroit was producing junk.
I think when one realizes that market efficiency is A good and not THE good. Being A good among many goods means we can have serious conversations about balance.
But its about balance, and thinking seriously about the trade offs.
Here’s a partial list of regulatory pitfalls:
Tucker has been thoroughly mythologized by now, but the truth of his failures is a lot more complicated, and the Detroit conspiracy obscures an awful lot of Preston’s own massive failures. Put simply, he likely would have failed anyway. For one, he was massively undercapitalized, which is why he had to resort to pre-selling things, and why he ultimately got into trouble with the SEC. Even absent the many regulations that came on cars later, the Tucker was not a cheap car to build because his innovations lacked the sorts of infrastructures of scale to make them inexpensively – that meant that everything that went into developing how to even make them had to be learned on the fly (I speak from hard recent experience here: my company has developed an entirely new way of manufacturing a particular type of electronic circuit assembly, and we’ve been through 2 1/2 years of development on how to do it in volume). His rear-mounted engine was not an automotive engine, but one that came right of the then new helicopter industry, and it was paired to a front-transaxle that they couldn’t even build – all of the 50 Tuckers used transaxles scrounged and rebuilt from wrecked or junked 1930s Cords. Detroit may have helped him fail, but they didn’t make him fail.
Of course, in the late 40s and early 50s you didn’t have the Big 3, you still had 5 or 6 companies going who, at their best, could be competitive with GM, Ford, and Chrysler (especially Chrysler). And when they all merged to form AMC, that left “the big 4” going for another 20+ years.
As for Detroit in the 1980s, if you were to compare 80s American cars with 50s American cars, would you still call them junk? It was very rare to still find 50s cars as daily drivers in the 70s, but early 80s cars were still pretty common on the road in the early 2000s. Same time gap, very different results. What made early 80s Detroit cars bad was by comparing them with Japanese cars, which were leaps and bounds better (except for the way Datsuns would turn to rust come winter).
I don’t think anyone here is going to dispute all the dangers you’ve laid out in this list. They’re very real (and I’ve heard some insider stories over the years that range from the hilarious to the tragic when it comes to bureaucratic cupidity, regulatory capture, and so forth). But laying out the dangers is not by itself an argument that regulations ought not to exist at all – I mean, every new pharmaceutical commercial is about 99.9% possible dangers and side effects, but we still get our scrips refilled because we have to balance the dangers out. Do I take statins and reduce the likelihood a heart attack or stroke before I turn 60, but increase the risk of death afterwards, or do I avoid the statins now and gamble for the next 20 years? As @guruforhire and @garymcvey have both noted, there are balances between hyper-regulation and zero-regulation, and I would add that such balances must be flexible over time.
Kind of reminds me of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism”. Adding the adjective implies the base noun doesn’t already contain the characteristic . . .
Agreed. However, I think that, when market failures are identified, people automatically think in terms of government intervention without realizing that there are government failures as well, and that, as Kevin Williamson once observed, when the government does stupid, it does immortally stupid. Also, a market failure is a also a market opportunity for an entrepreneur.
Some of the market failures from government has been regulations, so when I hear one side saying “something must be done!” I’d think the conservative response would be to point to the regulation that is harming the situation rather than saying government shouldn’t get involved. It already is involved.
Please read my list of suggestions again at the bottom of my post.
Good question. I generally agree with your specific proposals, except the zoning one. Even the zoning change is probably appropriate in some jurisdictions. Where I live, in Tucson, AZ, zoning works pretty well and housing prices aren’t out of control.
My objection was directed at the more generic point, in your first two paragraphs.
Oh, well. Nobody’s perfect.
Socialism can’t exist without the veil of the collective (e.g., “The People,” “The Proletariat,” “The Bourgeoise”) and the belief that the “Will” or the “Common Good” of this or that collective can be divined. Without the muddle-headed thinking engendered by dealing with categories rather than people, Socialism in theory would collapse as obviously and completely as does Socialism in practice.
I read this clear, concise exposure of the defective foundation of Socialism, and my heart soars like a hawk.
Socialism is known to be dead before it is tried. You don’t have to do a statistical analysis of the results of a double-blind randomized study of 2000 cases involving counting red and green jellybeans to know that 2 + 2 does not equal 5, just as you don’t have to try a Socialist experiment to know that it can’t achieve its stated objectives.