… is from page 232 of Randy Simmons’s 2011 Revised Edition of his and the late William Mitchell’s excellent 1994 volume, Beyond Politics:
Creating government schools violates basic principles of economics. First, it violates the notion of consumer sovereignty. Parents are told where their children are to go to school, what the curriculum will be, how many days the child must attend school each year, and which holidays will be observed. The unit of society patronized by government is the school, not the consumers of education. Schooling may be “free” but parents are not free to choose.
To grow up is to cultivate methods of separating the wheat from the chaff in what we see and hear. Early on we learn to discount—if not disbelieve—the claims we hear in television commercials because we understand the role interest plays in describing goods and services. We also learn (one hopes) to treat the claims of politicians, the traditional targets of American ridicule, the same way.
There is no substitute for this sort of skepticism; it’s is a sign of maturity. A government effort to protect us from misinformation in the name of preserving “our democratic institutions” would be a contradiction, not to mention a “cure” far worse than the alleged disease. The best protection against one-sided, erroneous, even dishonest assertions is competition, the universal solvent.
Occupational licensing is ostensibly intended to protect the public from unsafe and low-quality service, but there is little evidence this intention is realized. Rather, there is a growing consensus among economists that these rules serve to protect incumbent providers from competition by creating barriers for new entrants that lead to higher prices for consumers.
Many Americans insist on “reciprocity” — that U.S. tariffs and other import restrictions and export subsidies should be removed only if other governments remove theirs. Why stop at trade? The same logic can be extended indefinitely. For example, U.S. cops should not stop murdering residents of the USA until cops in other countries stop murdering people there.
Mark Perry used data to construct this revealing graph that makes a point very much like one of the points that I made in my debate last week at Hillsdale College with Ian Fletcher – namely, a rising U.S. trade deficit U.S. capital-inflow surplus does not mean that Americans are losing net wealth. Quite the opposite, as reality turns out.
Now, here, is the normative contradiction that does confront anyone who takes a classical liberal position. Margaret Thatcher, as you recall, was roundly chastized for her statement that there is no society as such. Her intent in that statement was to suggest that only individuals offer loci of value and evaluation. But taken literally, there could then exist no national interest, not national purpose, no national vision – whether for Germany, the United States or any other nation-state or group thereof. Yet almost all commentators – academic and media alike – proceed as if such an aggregate of interest exists, and regardless of their own position on some ideological spectrum. It’s almost as if we are forced willy-nilly to adopt an organicist conception of society, while simultaneously mouthing individualist norms in our philosophies.
This magnification of danger and hurt is prevalent on campus today. It no longer matters what a person intended to say, or how a reasonable listener would interpret a statement—what matters is whether any individual feels offended by it. If so, the speaker has committed a “microaggression,” and the offended party’s purely subjective reaction is a sufficient basis for emailing a dean or filing a complaint with the university’s “bias response team.” The net effect is that both professors and students today report that they are walking on eggshells. This interferes with the process of free inquiry and open debate—the active ingredients in a college education.
Without benefit of law, ranchers had divided the range among themselves by a system that was informal, that had no standing in court, but was enforced by the cattlemen themselves.
DBx: Boorstin here, discussing post-U.S. Civil War western cattle raising, identifies one of the now-more-famous examples of spontaneous law-making. My only gripe is with the quotation’s fourth word. That word should instead be “legislation,” for the rules that the ranchers developed among themselves, without the direction or even the help of the state, are indeed law. I will insist until my dying day that one of the greatest errors about the nature of society – namely, the fallacy that law is that which the state commands and forbids – is fostered by the mistaken use of “legislation” as synonym for “law.”
The U.S. government should unilaterally abolish all tariffs and duties on imports and all subsidies to exports, thereby making all reciprocal trade agreements with other countries unnecessary.
You correctly point out that Pres. Trump’s ignorance of trade leads to policies that reduce American exports (“Trump’s Pacific Trade Tear,” Nov. 11). But an even deeper problem with such policies is that they reduce American imports. This truth cannot be too often repeated: exports are costs incurred in order to receive benefits called “imports.”
If Trump were correct that exports are benefits and imports are costs, we Americans could become fabulously wealthy simply by loading all of our production onto ships and then sinking the ships in mid-ocean. Getting nothing from us, foreigners will send nothing to us. In fact, of course, as even a six-year-old child would recognize, such a trade policy would ensure our impoverishment.
Yet the trade policy championed by Trump differs from the sink-all-exports-in-mid-ocean policy only in degree and detail and not in kind. Trump is using his much-ballyhooed bargaining skills to arrange for us Americans to pay more to foreigners and to get less in return. The American president, in other words, is bargaining hard to make foreigners artificially richer by making Americans artificially poorer.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
The physical scientist can, I think, learn much from the economist. Essentially, he can learn humility as he appreciates the limitations of science and scientific method in application to the inordinately complex problems of human relationships. To the extent that he can learn that, by comparison, his own problems are indeed elementary; despite his great achievements, he becomes both a better scientist and a better citizen.
DBx: Physical scientists’ frequent failure to grasp the nature of the economy and of society leads them to regard the economy and society as entities to be studied in the same way that scientists study phenomena such as the cosmos and chemical reactions. But such purely physical phenomena are far less complex in their structures and their interrelationships than are social phenomena. Failure to recognize this reality is furthered by careless labeling that lumps myriad and often conflicting smaller entities into one large and seemingly homogeneous unit (for example, our talk of “the American economy” or of “the business community”). Social scientists’ own careless – and sometimes downright reckless – use of aggregates (such as the Keynesian notion of “aggregate demand”) only further furthers the failure to recognize the vital details of social interactions and reactions.
All of this failure to correctly understand the complexity of society contributes to the false and dangerous impression that society and the economy are things to be engineered.
Creating government schools violates basic principles of economics. First, it violates the notion of consumer sovereignty. Parents are told where their children are to go to school, what the curriculum will be, how many days the child must attend school each year, and which holidays will be observed. The unit of society patronized by government is the school, not the consumers of education. Schooling may be “free” but parents are not free to choose.
Now, here, is the normative contradiction that does confront anyone who takes a classical liberal position. Margaret Thatcher, as you recall, was roundly chastized for her statement that there is no society as such. Her intent in that statement was to suggest that only individuals offer loci of value and evaluation. But taken literally, there could then exist no national interest, not national purpose, no national vision – whether for Germany, the United States or any other nation-state or group thereof. Yet almost all commentators – academic and media alike – proceed as if such an aggregate of interest exists, and regardless of their own position on some ideological spectrum. It’s almost as if we are forced willy-nilly to adopt an organicist conception of society, while simultaneously mouthing individualist norms in our philosophies.
Without benefit of law, ranchers had divided the range among themselves by a system that was informal, that had no standing in court, but was enforced by the cattlemen themselves.
The physical scientist can, I think, learn much from the economist. Essentially, he can learn humility as he appreciates the limitations of science and scientific method in application to the inordinately complex problems of human relationships. To the extent that he can learn that, by comparison, his own problems are indeed elementary; despite his great achievements, he becomes both a better scientist and a better citizen.
