What “normative” criteria? I’m not even talking about “full information” here. Merely the means to analyse the suitability of a particular means for a given end. Voters have little incentive in the first place to inform themselves as to the consquences of various policies (their directly perceived cost is marginal vs e.g. the potential loss of life rising up against the government, seceding etc. or even the high costs both pecuniary and in terms of time involved in lobbying), and often little belief that their vote will make a difference. If they view the alternative - removing the government - as too cost-prohibitive at the moment, how does that endorse its own efficiency? Similarly with agitating for the removal of a policy to give a less extreme example.
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How do you even begin to conclude this? It says NOTHING about the benefits they generate. Only the opportunity cost of removing them, as I said with regards to the house fumigation analogy.
Because the costs of the subsidy are more dilute to those paying the subsidy than the benefits to those who are receiving the subsidy, so the incentives to political organization in opposition to the subsidy are far less than the incentives to political organization by the sugar lobby.
This is where the moral dimension of liberalism becomes so important. Let’s say that the government only transferred money directly from taxpayers (in some “fair” fashion) directly to the sugar industry, not taking any of the money for itself. Further, let’s ignore deadweight losses or any other negative effects to the economy. Let’s just say the money magically goes from our accounts to their accounts with no other alterations to the economic conditions. Is not such an unjustified seizure of wealth clearly immoral and morally injurious to those who have been victimized by it? The whole point of taking money from one group and giving it to another group is supposed to be its economic effects.
The moral principle underlying ownership and property is that your dollar belongs to you - regardless of how many other dollars you may own - unless you’ve injured someone or gotten the dollar through ill means. The number of dollars you have can never be tortious so a person’s wealth (or, what is the derivative* of their wealth, their income) is never in itself a justification for seizing any of their property.
Now, if sugar-growers want to claim that the rest of us are somehow injuring them, I say go right on ahead. Sue us (class-action lawsuit against all Americans) and prove it. Short of that, they’re just con-artists. “The taxpayers owe us money because blah blah blah.” It doesn’t matter what reason they give because the reason is just a cover for expropriation.
Well, yeah, the cost of overthrowing the government is certainly higher than the benefit of eliminating the sugar subsidy or even eliminating all the government’s insane spending programs. But the costs of fighting the mugger are also higher than the benefit of retaining your wallet (which you won’t, even if you fight back). I see no logical distinction between getting mugged and being taxed to pay for a subsidy.
Or, to torture the metaphor further, they see the bills but don’t understand their value. People may realize that no state is an option (they see the $20 bill on the ground), but don’t realize the benefits of it (they see the $20 bill as litter and not as money).
Really, it seems like the entire argument can be refuted with one word: Advertising.
Also, Neoclassical (why the name change?), can you address my first post, regarding the separation of costs from benefits? It looks like Clayton has now argued pretty much the same point, but you’ve defined efficiency as “achieving the ends we want while minimizing costs to the best of our current abilities.” How can we possibly know this, as we have no easy way to determine the costs or benefits of political action. See, for instance, Anthony de Jasay’s “Disjunction, Conjunction.”
Once again, that’s all entirely normative: to claim that voters are not sufficiently informing themselves of their choices is casting a value judgment; it’s in league with claiming that obese consumers are too ignorant about what they eat. You’re casting an idealistic light onto democratic processes: intelligent voters at the helm of decision-making, producing policies aligned to their preferences; that’s not what I’m implying at all. One could easily claim I know too little about telecommunications technology, for instance, to properly select a cellular phone.
But therein lies the strangeness of what Stigler is proposing: if you are truly “getting screwed,” then why hasn’t the subsidy been repealed? If the cost is exceeding the benefit of acting, then that explains why the subsidy is peristent and efficient.
Uhm every heard of Friedman??? The costs are devided over 300 million ppl the benefits over less than 1 million. Who has the best incentive to lobby?
Let us assume you’re born in a home with noisy traffic going by your windows every day. You grow up in that home. You are told that the traffic is a necessary evil, that it will always be there. Only two things are certain in your life: death and noisy traffic. You can’t even comprehend what it means to live without the sound of cars going by your windows.
Am I to assume that, since you make no discernible effort to stop the traffic, you have concluded it is in your best interest to tolerate traffic noise? Certainly, you’re acting rationally in the Misesian sense. But if your aim is to live a life of peace and quiet, and I know there is a simple solution to stop the traffic, I feel qualified to say that you are acting unwisely and contrary to your interest. I would embark on an intellectual campaign to convince you of the benefits to be had in a traffic-sound-less life.
“We make pragmatic utility-maximizing decisions all the time without being able to quantify the costs and benefits of the alternatives among which we are choosing.” – Richard Posner
Stated interest, then. If you claim that you want a life of peace and quiet, your toleration of the traffic while an inexpensive solution exists (but is unknown to you) is an improper method for attaining your goal. Just as the bloodletter (unknowingly) acts contrary to his (stated) interest of improving the patient’s health.
And what I meant to include in the last post: If you observe a man from a barter economy passing a $20 bill on the street, would you still conclude, “For this man, the costs of picking up the bill must be greater than $20!”? Or would you check your assumptions and consider the more reasonable conclusion that this man might not realize the benefits to be had by picking up a $20 bill, and therefore we have no idea what the cost is of picking up the $20 bill? The benefits and opportunity costs exist, but you (well, Stigler and others) assume that everyone has perfect knowledge of them.
Well, good for you. Note the irony in this statement, “I don’t believe morality should enter in discussion, except rhetorically” - I hope that was merely a rhetorical statement.
But your illustration presupposes its own conclusion in a subtle way. You are saying, “Given the government in its current state and given the laws, regulations and policies of the government and its courts, if you determined legal taking action against X is not worth the cost, then not acting on X is an efficient outcome by your own estimation.”
But the very point in contention is whether the government - including its laws, regulations, policies and courts - is “efficient”. The problem with your illustration is that we don’t know what the market price of acting on X would be if the government did not prohibit free entry into the production of law, so our choice is rational only in the same sense that the mugging victim’s choice to comply is rational. Both are actually decisions made under duress and do not reveal our true preferences in the absence of coercion.
I care very little for stated interests; revealed preferences are more informative (e.g., a person might state he wants to lose weight, but if he consistently eats fatty food, then I think his actual interests have been revealed).
I do believe that unexploited opportunities won’t last indefinitely; if you disagree, then I’m not sure how to persuade you (I thought even Austrians believed that the marketplace had equilibriating tendencies).
Sure if I get robbed, the cost of avoiding robbery (staying at home all the time) was maybe too high, that in no way proves that robbery is “efficient”
Clayton, I don’t believe prohibition of “free entry into the production of law” matters for two reasons:
Governments are ubiquitous, not rivaling emergent anarcho-capitalistic societies anywhere (hence, the data suggests that public sectors are more socially beneficial than fully-privatized alternatives).
Even given the actually-existing conditions of our government (e.g., alleged “coercion,” prevention of competing agencies, etc.), those are calculated as costs; if your conceived benefits outweigh them, then an alternative social arrangement would be actionable.
