Saturday, February 28, 2009

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

reason.tv John Stossel 20/20 Special

Mark your calendar or set your DVR for John Stossel's upcoming 20/20 special.

Bull---- in America!
An ABC News John Stossel Special featuring Drew Carey and Reason.tv


In his next special, John Stossel takes his shovel to six piles of "Bull---- in America!"— the crackdown on medical marijuana, universal preschool, traffic congestion, eminent domain, border walls, and the myth of the struggling middle class—all inspired by Drew Carey's Reason.tv videos.

Tentative Air date: Friday, March 13 on ABC (check local listings)

Monday, February 16, 2009

Saturday, February 14, 2009

A libertarian critique of corporate power

Often times libertarians are seen as defenders of big business, because of big business's contrast with government. It's true that the relationship between a government and a corporation is different, because a corporation does not have the legal protection to coerce its customers, at least directly. Still, I'll argue here that intellectual defense of corporations is bad for libertarianism, and actually contradictory to advocacy for a free market.

I don't criticize concentrations of private wealth as unjustified power, but it is a problem that very wealthy entities can buy off political power, creating de jure or de facto barriers to entry, and thus circumventing the free market through government protection. It's a popular left-wing myth that big business is a product of the free market. Big business is actually an enemy of the free market.

I started thinking about this a few months ago from an excellent essay by Roderick Long. Long makes his points better than I can about the subject, but I'll offer my thoughts, after having his ideas brew in my head for a while. As I see it, big business isn't bad intrinsically because of an accumulation of wealth. It's a left-wing fallacy that trade is zero-sum, and that concentrations of wealth are illegitimate because that wealth is being withheld from "the people" out of greed and selfishness. Accumulation of wealth is often be a sign that economic institutions are functioning properly, that people are secure in their property rights. If any entity really attains wealth in a free market, there is nothing objectionable. Corporations today though, haven't achieved their wealth in a free market.

It's important to understand the institutions that produce this regrettable situation. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did government grant illegitimate legal protections to businesses, or did big businesses grow by themselves and buy off political power to protect themselves from market forces? It's definitely both, but one body, to my mind, gets the blame. It's the body that operates by violence, the government. If the government actually limited itself to protecting property rights, and didn't involve itself in arbitrarily and unfairly violating property rights and interfering in market transactions, then no corporate entity would be capable of the abuses that we some coming from these monstrosities today. Furthermore, if you're the CEO of one of these corporations, and popular opinion, indeed both inside and outside of government, holds that a legitimate function of government is to reallocate property and institute legal protections from the big scary market, you'd be a fool not to take advantage of such laws, especially when competitors would be doing so. These corporations, with governmental approval, steal land and resources, pollute with impunity, and prevent good companies from challenging them by legitimate competition. These problems can't be resolved if the body that's supposed to keep such abuses in check, the government, goes along with the corporate plan, granting legal protection. Often politicians get flat-out bribes, or they're simply misguided, when offered higher tax revenues from the productive activities of a local business. So the interest in these two bodies should not align, but they often do. Private-public partnerships are totally unaccountable. This is tyranny.

Some have made the case to me that big businesses are more efficient, which I don't accept. It's true that large businesses might be able to bargain collectively to get especially cheap capital and labor, but this is actually inefficient, for the very same same reasons that cartels are. A competitive market is actually more efficient, but it's more fair. Collective bargaining for cheap prices is not more efficient; it's more coercive. This dynamic is a step closer to exploitation than the dynamic that a free market would produce, because a large business can bargain collectively. In foreign labor markets, large corporations are monopsonies. With their market power in the labor market, they can trade producer surplus for consumer surplus.

This does not mean that I'm an opponent of Wal-Mart because they "exploit" foreign workers. Actually I'm glad that there are lots sweatshops abroad, but I also recognize that these workers aren't getting as much as they should be getting for their labor, what they would get in a more competitive market. Notice that my position is not left-wing. Left-wingers advocate that wages should be set higher by government, because they think that corporations are maliciously withholding wages. Of course, those left-wingers also don't really understand the political institutions that create wealth, and assume that if not for greedy companies, we could just distribute wealth more evenly to people who are poorer. This is nonsense. Such policy is not compatible with sustainable wealth. Alas, I've digressed.

So, I hope I've already made a convincing case that getting cheap goods isn't from the efficiency of big business. There's another reason, which I touched on before, on why big business is actually more inefficient than when operating in a market. As I explained before, big businesses can buy off political power specifically so that they don't have to be efficient in the market. They can afford to produce worse products and charge an inappropriately high price, with impunity, when not subject to market discipline. So the Left advocates for government intervention to correct for these inefficiencies. The position of the Right is just reactionary, arguing that government will produce worse outcomes than what a market would. This is true, but those on the Right miss the fact that corporate monstrosities aren't operating in a free market. Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky actually seem to understand this, but much to my irritation they still do not recognize the superiority of truly free markets. This is typical inconsistency and unreason from the Left. Klein and Chomsky aside, most of those on the Left miss the point entirely, since they're totally ignorant of the fact that a free market wouldn't produce the objectionable inefficiencies from large institutions for which they want to correct. It is idiotic to institute legal protections that produce big business and then call for regulation when these problems ensue. The problems of inefficiency arising from the massive market power of big businesses are intrinsic to the structural political arrangement.

This idiotic cycle happens because politicians, and most people for that matter, only think in the short term. Psychology informs us as to just how irrational we humans are. Such irrationality is much more problematic when there's political power behind decisions. Is it any surprise that we get disastrous policies like bailouts?

I've conflated corporations and big business in my discussion here, but I can offer an excellent critique specifically about limited liability. I find the reasoning in the article persuasive. This is an important point, describing the actual mechanism of illegitimate growth of businesses. A corollary to this point is that bankruptcy laws are at least highly questionable, and at most, totally illegitimate.

So, in short, a free market would not produce the kind of unaccountable big businesses that we see today. That's a good thing, and libertarians should embrace this fact.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

High Five Escalator

Monday, February 2, 2009

Counterknowledge

Counterknowledge looks like a cool skeptical book. The title is such a great word to describe pseudoscience and quackery. The blog for the book looks far more interesting and involved than the usual promotional sites for such books. I found this from the author of the Fallacy Files, an excellent resource devoted to a topic that all skeptics, and all people for that matter, should master.

Cross-posted from Charlottesville Skeptics