Neither political party gives a shit about the constitution, so how can you apply this double standard to his belief?

Also, since Caplan is talking in a purely utilitarian mindset, how can you keep referring to moral objections when he OBVIOUSLY never presented HIS moral case?

Among those “other things” are assuring the commonweal and public interest. Market systems assure maximum satisfaction of participating private interests. Those two are not the same thing. (Public good is not the same as maximum private good.)

The question here is whether a market-based political system can effectively replace our current (flawed) democratic one…

My answer is NO. “Economic decision making” is too narrow a framework for capturing all the many dimensions of human interest. Using it as the sole mechanism for collective political decisions would leave us open to the worst kind of monpolistic SOCIAL control…. without a third-party advocate to resort to.

For crying out loud, Caplan wants judges to be market tested! When their legal interpretations and rulings don’t match up with the marketplace (e.g., voter opinion) they get the boot. How long do you think it would take for the Constitution to be decimated in that kind of environment?

Laws are not markets. Principles are not markets. Society operates according to more complex, informal, nuanced and moral considerations than one could ever hope to replicate with market dynamics. As a form of government it would be laughable if it weren’t so scary.

I will say again… markets and market discipline work for SOME THINGS. Replacing democratic institutions is not one of them.

The only solution is for the politician to have never had that power in the first place — for the people to have freedom of trade. You may think that’s a ridiculous idea — that people can’t have freedom of trade because they’ll get screwed Prior to America, most governments thought that people can’t have freedom of religion because they’ll go to hell if they’re allowed to choose their own religion. So, as ridiculous as you think is freedom of trade, it’s not more ridiculous than is freedom of religion.

You suggest in some of your other points that businesses can’t be trusted. I agree with you! That’s why I want the most competition — so that each business tries harder to screw the other business — rather than have legislated barriers to competition so the business concentrates on screwing ME.

You may say “but businesses have to be regulated!” I agree with you. I want businesses to be regulated by the consumer’s freedom to go elsewhere. Nearly every monopoly today is a government-established monopoly. If you look at the history of monopolies, they created value by putting their competitors out of business — by standardizing. There’s no evidence that any of them were successful at raising their profits by restricting their output.

I hope I’ve pre-answered some of your objections.

Case in point: the subprime debacle.

When bankers want deregulation they get it. When bankers want cheap money they get it. When bankers run into problems from their own idiocy they are the first ones to throw aside market discipline and demand a taxpayer funded bailout.

Now extend the paradigm of the subprime mess to every kind of economic and social policy and that’s what you’ll get from Caplan’s electionomics. Centralization of profits and benefits with socialization of costs.

If you want representative government that truly delivers on the promise of the Constitution then his elitist boondoggle won’t work.

100% immediate transparency in election and lobbying funding will be a good start. (They are making headway on this in Virginia and seems to be working.)

Publicly funded elections would be another option. Some hate it some love it, but it would much of the private influence out of running an election.

Forcing broadcast outlets to do their civic duty and and allocate time to election ads at wholesale rates would be another step.

Federally mandated voter IDs would help eliminate fraud.

There are lots of incremental things you can do without depriving people of their right to vote.

As a lot of right-wingers are fond of saying… “freedom ain’t free.”

It comes with a cost. Either you pay up front with real dollars. Or you pay on the back end with corruption and unanswerable oligarchs who pick the taxpayers’ pocket at their convenience with no consequences.

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that in the REAL world (as opposed to theoretical worlds of charts and graphs and equations) that is exactly what you will get.

And ultimately, Caplan’s system is just shockingly inhuman.

All the best and I’m off to poke around here a bit more.

Cheers,

mnuez
http://www.mnuez.blogspot.com

* http://mnuez.blogspot.com/2007/11/yes-bryan-caplan-is-cold-blooded.html

E.g., when the NYC transit workers went on strike a couple of years back, police set up road blocks to keep cars from entering downtown manhattan unless they had three or more people. About two blocks above the block, there were homeless guys selling the following service: for $5 they’d ride with you through the roadblock if you didn’t have the requisite number of people… then they’d get out a few block later, walk back to their starting point and do it again!… peoples’ ingenuity never ceases to be amazing… and we should not, if at all possible, squelch it.

But Caplan is one of those economists who is relentless in pushing market dynamics as an explanation for everything. It isn’t. And it’s dangerous to act that way.

You should read his book, because he apparently has a lot of followers in the libertarian wing of the GOP and we may find ourselves living under the kinds of policies he advocates sooner rather than later… unless people fully appreciate the consequences, they might just swallow it hook line and sinker.

I don’t actually argue with him about voters being uninformed and irrational. The proof is in how easily the polity is manipulated by corrupt and morally bankrupt incumbents… It’s his prescriptions I disagree with.

I can’t speak to Bryan’s book because I haven’t read it yet. And there’s plenty you’ve quoted that I would probably take issue with, if it’s a fair presentation.

It is obtuse to try to take nonmaterial quality of life issues and try to explain them in terms of consumable goods or other material terms. But I do think there is a place for free markets and freer democratic cultures to solve problems more effectively than the concentrated power of government. Collaborative relationships between regulating agencies and those they regulate might address some of this, but I must say that I am just as suspicious of the corrupt concentrations of power in 19th and 20th century democratic goverments as I am in concentrated wealth and power in markets.

The truth is that in both arenas slow progress has resulted from recognizing the problems with concentrations of power and wealth and all of our reforms have been dependent on the forever limited and less than ideal decency of those who reformed both within government and within the market. Mark Hanna and Ulysses Grant were just as corrupt as Alfred Sloan. And the the two major political parties have been just as resistant to efforts that might challenge their power as major corporations have been to efforts that might challenge their market share.

The fact of life that neither markets nor government, as abstractions, will ever completely correct is that people are shitheads much of the time. And the only thing that can ever really correct for that is for people to choose to stop being such shitheads.

The good news is that they do, over time. Democracies get more democratic. Markets get freer and fairer. But it takes time for people to face up to the bullshit that they are responsible for. And I’ve just lost faith in any one group or individual or entity to be responsible for such progress anymore, because they so notoriously fail, absent more engagement with appeals to conscience and engaging fuller debate and discussion about where progress lies. When any form of overwheming power is present, it makes it very difficult to have that conversation. That is why I defer to freer relationships between those parties to resolve issues they face.

Regulation is only helpful insofar as it engages a more collaborative and humble effort to make progress. Regulation does much bad in the world, as well – price controls from the ’70s or a whole slew of Neal Deal legislation, agricultural subsidies for non-production, for instance – because, as it turns out, no one group, party, entity, or person has any monopoly over wisdom about how markets or peoples’ lives should function. But they all share the arrogance that they do, which is what makes them all so dangerous with that power absent a more genuine, engaged and collaborative effort to resolve problems they face in good faith. And absent that, I am suspicious of all players with concentrations of power with deference to freer, more creative folks to resolve problems out of commitment and ingenuity more than to any player resolving problems with any level of concentration of power.

In the meantime, we limp forward. Not because we have ever had effective brakes on our bad behavior, because too often it is the brakes that have been bad and often much worse than the behavior. We limp forward because people thoughtfully engage one another in freer forums where their arrogance that they have more answers than they do can be replaced with more humility that their certainty really is so certain.

The current period is a sign of how far we have to go, since hubris is all the rage and democratic humility is seen as weakness.

But the arrogance will give way. As it always has. Because it can’t deliver. And soon enough people will look more to those who can. Ultimately, that means all of us. But it means doing so with more openness and free engagement and thoughtfulness and with less presumption that any one group or entity or person has more answers than they do.

That can’t happen in a world where everyone is trying to force one another’s hand. Which is why that governing philosophy, which animated all of the worst atrocities of the 20th century and the history of humanity, will fall away as people begin to face up to its failures.

And in it’s place, freer and more humbled democratic peoples will have to solve problems that they can’t and never will be able to trust any large concentration of power to solve for them. And, in the meantime, we will have to deal with what shitheads we so often are to one another, as we always have, until we face up to it. I wish I could say that there was a party or an ideology or a group or even an individual who I could trust to finally resolve all that for us. But I just can’t. Because everyone abuses it. The only people I trust with it, anymore at all, are people who want it and want to use it least. But they don’t compel popular support, today, the way that some old-fashioned, ass-kicking strong-arming does. Which speaks poorly, to me, of our propensity to face up to our bullshitting of ourselves and one another. But we will have to face it, because it clearly hasn’t solved the problems we’ve meant it to solve, if we just look honestly at our efforts and their results.

Ben

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I appreciate it. Maybe I should clarify, that I am not a knee-jerk free market opponent. I say quite clearly that markets work… for what they are intended to do.

What I argue with is the idea that economic “empiricism” can broadly capture all the quality-of-life issues that are much more important than money and materiality in making life worth living. Economists have a tendency to eschew these other factors as long as the line on their graph is moving in the right direction. Problem is that is denies the difficult empirical evidence on the ground: people’s lives.

My second area of contention is the idea that economic theory has limitless application to other areas of life besides economics. Not every aspect of human thought, activity, or feeling can be treated as a “consumption good” and measured/managed with empirical economics. The p.r. snow job I refer to has less to do with the efficiency of markets than the slow creep of market theory into other areas of life where it has no place.

(Finally, I do actually question some of Caplan’s empirics. I am still waiting for someone to explain why he hypocritically avoids restricting free market policy benefits with his “probability discount”… which looks to me to have the counterintuitive result of shooting his own theory in the foot.)