61 thoughts on “An Idiotarian”

  1. I don’t know, but I suppose it was because no one trusted the very people who let conditions get so horrible in the first place.

    Are you denying that conditions in factories often become utterly horrible, unacceptable even to you? Would it help my case if I cut and pasted horror stories from various anti-sweatshop groups?

  3. Bob, I’m coming late to this argument, but a few tidbits for you:

    (1) I read the first 3 pages of the MIT manifesto, and I would have to say, yes, they are if not deluded at least complete morons. There are certainly good arguments to be made about workplace safety and product safety regulations — but they didn’t appear in this paper. Instead, we get childish slogans like this:

    But, obviously, if corporations were allowed to do whatever they wanted, our world would go to hell

    You can see why this was an MIT production, huh? Probably it took someone with a double PhD in history and economics came up with that “argument.”

    As an MIT alumnus, it pains me to say this, but the place attracts a fair number of people who are very, very bright in exactly one narrowly focussed area, if you know what I mean. Most of them recognize their limitations in other areas, but not all.

    (2) It also seems to me in your recounting of the history of meatpacking and the muckrakers you undercut your own argument. First, you yourself note that the fastest actual effective response came from the meatpackers themselves in response to the book. In other words, once word got out, public reaction and PR concerns were sufficient to get a speedy response. It usually is. I can’t think of a single case where new government regulatory action in response to an outcry among the public did not arrive well after the public outcry itself had already corrected the situation. Got an example for me?

    Second, the meatpackers were not unregulated, they were just not regulated by the Federal government. There certainly were state and local regulations. Why weren’t they effective? You know why: corruption. This is the era of the local machine. What role did malfeasance in government play in this travesty? That’s not a trivial question, as the seamy story of the present subprime mortgage mess illustrates.

    (3) You said Sinclair himself was not happy with the direct result of his book. It raised public ire, but not in the direction he thought it would. In this case, we can hope the result was benign: instead of OSHA we got the FDA, and, well, that’s OK. If the missile misses the target, but hits one just as good…not a problem.

    But what about the cases where the unforeseen shift in massive government response is not benign? What if, just coincidentally, Sinclair had mentioned the Jewishness of his most notorious meatpacker owner — and the result was a government pogrom? Think that’s far-fetched? It’s not. During the Civil War in the Mississippi valley, the Union Army had trouble with cotton-smugglers. A modest few were Jewish, and when this was brought to then General Grant’s attention, he issued an order expelling all Jews from his jurisdiction (most of the Mississippi valley states in the South). Fortunately it was immediately revoked by Lincoln.

    Or just consider the response of the 2009 Congress to public “outrage” over bonuses. Hopefully it’s clear that this response, however satisfying (and good for re-election) in the short range, is terrible in the long range.

    In short, there’s little doubt that people make major mistakes in their private ventures, some out of ignorance, some out of malice. These mistakes seem to be worse the larger the ventures are — big ventures can simply do more, and affect more people, plus the guys at the top are more disconnected, plus it gets harder and harder to make top-down policy choices that work for every situation and worker on the front line.

    But to suggest that the obvious solution to these problems is still larger and more complex ventures — big government — to look after the medium-sized ventures, strikes me as lunacy, a priori. I know you see some magic difference between a big government agency and, say, just a bigger company charged with the mission of looking after the smaller — as if government employees drank a magic elixir that prevented them from human folly and malice. But don’t you need to come up with convincing reason why that must be true, to convince anyone else?

    Part of your irony is that the better a case you make that Big Corp screw up regularly and badly, the better an implicit case you make that Even Bigger Gov would do it just as regularly and even more badly.

    We’re seeing that right now. As bad as AIG buggered up the finances of their employees, customers and owners, the folks who are presently “helping” — Congress, the Treasury — look like they’re set to spread that incompetence and misery to millions of more people, and treble or quadruple the final cost.

  4. Are you denying that conditions in factories often become utterly horrible, unacceptable even to you?

    No, Bob. Most conditions in factories are unacceptable to me, currently. That is why I don’t work in factories. But unlike you, I’m not going to deny someone else the right to work there (which is what you effectively do when you force conditions upon the employer and employee that may not be conducive to profit). When you create or raise a minimum wage, you have eliminated job opportunities for those whose labor is worth less than that amount. Why do you think that the youth unemployment rate in the inner city is so high? Because kind-hearted souls like you have arbitrarily priced many first-time job seekers out of the market.

    In any event, agree or disagree, this is what libertarians believe. You can believe otherwise, but you can’t do so and sensibly call yourself a libertarian. I’m not sure why you are so determined to attempt (in futility) to prove otherwise.

  5. I think Rand has it right on minimum wage and sweatshops. On the other hand, in some countries, past government taking and redistribution to a favored few meant that a small number of families ended up with a large share of the wealth (land in particular) that everone else needed to make a living, without an unarguably just claim to it. In those cases you could makee the argument that some level of distribution was more just than letting the status quo property rights of the lucky few stand unquestioned.

  6. Rand:

    Freedom to immigrate, to seek a better job wherever it is, isn’t simply a civil libertarian position. It’s a very important economic liberty.

  7. Yes, that’s a big problem in Latin America. It’s one of the ways that the Anglosphere and the Hispanosphere differ in their cultural and socioeconomic bases. Because it was settled by Spain instead of England, much of Central and South America remains mired in mercantilism and feudalism. Of course, the War On (Some) Drugs doesn’t help.

  8. Why do you think that the youth unemployment rate in the inner city is so high? Because kind-hearted souls like you have arbitrarily priced many first-time job seekers out of the market.

    I should add that this kind of thinking and action was one of the things that worsened and prolonged the Depression. Roosevelt and his brain trust thought that the problem with the economy was that wages and prices were too low, to the point at which the administration jailed a man for charging too little for dry cleaning. It should be no shock to anyone who understands basic economics that unemployment remained high throughout.

  9. Freedom to immigrate, to seek a better job wherever it is, isn’t simply a civil libertarian position. It’s a very important economic liberty.

    I agree. It’s perhaps the most important one (which the Soviets understood, and Cubans understand, which is why it had to go).

  10. Re unjust status quo allocation pf property rights:

    The Anglosphere wasn’t entirely virtuous on this score. Great Britain ca. 1900 had a lot of rents going to people that won the Lucky Ancestor Lottery.

    Since then a lot of that has been taxed away by death duties.

  11. a small number of families ended up with a large share of the wealth (land in particular) that everone else needed to make a living, without an unarguably just claim to it. In those cases you could makee the argument that some level of distribution was more just than letting the status quo property rights of the lucky few stand unquestioned.

    Sometimes this is true. But a solution which is equally arbitrary and unfree, government redistribution, is no better answer. You just go from South Africa under apartheid to Zimbabwe, from one disaster to another of a different color. This is progress?

    The answer is to free your markets. Accumulated wealth that isn’t based on merit doesn’t last two generations under those circumstances. Think of all the rich people of whom you’ve heard in the United States. How many come from wealthy families going all the way back to the 19th century? How wealthy were Bill Gates’s grandparents? Warren Buffet’s? Conversely, are there scions of raillroad tycoons swanning about in wealth today? Do the great-grandchildren of Morgan run Wall Street, the great-grandnephews of Crocker own airlines? Nope.

    Arguably it may have been true that when all wealth was based on land ownership you could, by inheritance, keep the wealth in the same hands generation after generation. But not any more. Even if Sam Walton left his entire empire to his kids, if they aren’t just as supremely competent as he was, they’re going to piss away their fortune in a mere half century. Free markets ruthlessly eliminate any accumulation of wealth that isn’t earned, and continually re-earned.

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