Arguments you should not let slip by

Economics Political Theory
1

Today’s Daily article (http://mises.org/daily/5786/I-Dont-Know) states that you should not be afraid of saying “I don’t know” when asked “well, how would you manage company/agency X?”

This is important because answering that question immediately establishes a socialist, centrally-planned framework, which we know not to work. You don’t know how to fix that compnay because you have no connections, no information, no market forces of supply and demand, no information on competition, no anything.

This inspired me to create a list of arguments that you should not let your “opponent” get away with:

  • “how would you manage company/agency X to fix problem Y?”

See above for explanation

  • “capitalism and socialism work great in theory …”

Don’t let them get away with this. Tons of people say it while it simply isn’t true: Communism/socialism have been disproven numerous times! They do not look good on paper unless you simply look at the pretty parchment and not read the actual words. Look up the calculation problem and the coordination problem. Mises has written about how socialism is impossible even in theory.

  • “The Gilded Age, a time of laissez-faire capitalism”

One of the biggest mistakes that keeps people from the free market. The Gilded Age was not laissez faire. There was plenty government intervention, especially active help to companies, which is definitely not a free market. See these:

No Laissez Faire There

It Just Ain’t So!

The Robber Barons and the Real Gilded Age

The Gilded Age: A Modest Revision

Explanation of tariffs and monopoly

Government monopoly on land is tilted in favor of bigger businesses

  • “the free market fails because Ma Bell had to be broken up because it got too big”

If this is brought up, it’s an automatic win for you. AT&T was in fact a government-created monopoly. See here:

UNNATURAL MONOPOLY: CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BELL SYSTEM MONOPOLY

and

http://mises.org/daily/5266/The-Myth-of-Natural-Monopoly (scroll down to “The Natural-Monopoly Myth: Telephone Services”)

  • “Deregulation? Do you want us to have poisoned food and crappy doctors?”

This is a big straw man against libertarianism. We do not in fact want de-regulation in the ultimate sense. We want a de-monopolization of the regulatory appartus. We’re in fact cool with regulation and see the need for it quite clearly - Voluntary regulation. We desire licensing and certifying companies that will inspect companies and certify their products.

Why the heck would companies voluntarily allow certification companies to inspect their facilities? Well, as a society we appreciate clean food. If a company refuses inspection by a certification company, it begins to look very shady and consumers will become wary of buying from that company, losing it market share. For more info, see What Will Keep Our Food Safe?

Lastly, remember the power of contracts. Consumer unions may create contracts with companies that compensate customers for possible losses.

I will add more later and certainly hope for more input

2

I have one you should not let people get away with.

That is to allow them to claim a cost (in particular a sales tax) is passed on to consumers. On the contrary Murray Rothbard states:

Having challenged the merits of the goal of taxing only consumption and freeing savings from taxation, we now proceed to deny the very possibility of achieving that goal, i.e., we maintain that a consumption tax will devolve, willy-nilly, into a tax on income and therefore on savings as well. In short, that even if, for the sake of argument, we should want to tax only consumption and not income, we should not be able to do so… the sales tax is subject to an extra complication: the general assumption that a sales tax can be readily shifted forward to the consumer is totally fallacious. In fact, the sales tax cannot be shifted forward at all!..In the long run, of course, and that run is not very long, the retail firms will not be able to absorb a sales tax; they are not unlimited pools of wealth ready to be confiscated. As the retail firms suffer losses, their demand curves for all intermediate goods, and then for all factors of production, will shift sharply downward, and these declines in demand schedules will be rapidly transmitted to all the ultimate factors of production: labor, land, and interest income. And since all firms tend to earn a uniform interest return determined by social time preference, the incidence of the fall in demand curves will rest rather quickly on the two ultimate factors of production: land and labor.

Hence, the seemingly common-sense view that a retail sales tax will readily be shifted forward to the consumer is totally incorrect. In contrast, the initial impact of the tax will be on the net incomes of retail firms. Their severe losses will lead to a rapid downward shift in demand curves, backward to land and labor, i.e., to wage rates and ground rents. Hence, instead of the retail sales tax being quickly and painlessly shifted forward, it will, in a longer-run, be painfully shifted backward to the incomes of labor and landowners. Once again, an alleged tax on consumption, has been transmuted by the processes of the market into a tax on incomes.

http://mises.org/daily/1768

This claim about passing costs on is not limited to sales taxes of course so keep an eye out for it.