So, John (rightly, imho) points out that the crazy is full upon us when our fellow citizens spy the dead claw of Marx/Lenin/Obama bearing down on suburbia in the decision of some town to hire a single trash hauler.
Then E.D. comes along and says, no, this is what sanity looks like, in the sense that choice is always and everywhere an unfettered good. (His words: “the Tea Partiers are right this time: having choice is a good thing, even for trash collection.” — italics in the original)
Then E.D. takes some lumps here and there and responds forcefully.
[Boy, have I got to stop doing such extraneous crap like reading to my son. Now John’s gone and weighed in again. I give up. I’m just going to post this sucker and live with its irrelevance.]I’ve a couple of thoughts on that latter post of E. D.;s, which I’ll deal with first, and then I’ll dive into my larger objection to his original argument, which seems to me to make a naive error on the nature of markets.
Please jump the jump for the rest of this. And remember: I never promised you either brevity or wit.
On this more recent post: One: I think E.D. conflates unhelpfully the concept of a short term -sole provider contract with a true monopoly. It makes his argument stronger, but it misses at least one key difference, which is that a properly maintained bidding program makes it difficult for corporations to block market access to each other, but monopolies maintained by force of law aim explicitly at preserving such moats.
Two: E. D. rewards some people with the power of choice at the expense of others for no obvious reasons. For example, if Fountain Hills does choose to pollute, what of the poor, mythical community of West Fountain Hills, who now have to pay to purify the run-off into their reservoir? Contrary to his claim, there is something pernicious, at least potentially, in such decisions, and one of the reasons we have government, and especially different levels of government, is to navigate through what economists call the externalities of economic actions. (More on that below).
Three: I think the corporatist argument is a red herring; it is not obvious that “the most efficient” solution to Fountain Hills’ trash collection issues is to create a town department (again, E. D.’s italics). If the routes to be served could occupy 3 and a 1/2 trucks and 6 1/4 people — then it may indeed be more efficient to hire someone who can deploy resources over a larger area and so on. None of this comes as a surprise to folks who’ve actually spent their own money on projects in the world.*
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There’s more to say about this post, but someone else can say it…except for this. E. D. concludes by asking “do we, as a people have the right to make stupid choices.” And the answer I’d give is “yes.”
But where we differ is that I would argue that this “right” is not unfettered. And you can see what I mean if you think, as I do, that the question of whether you can buy a happy meal (which has next to no impact on anyone but yourself and or your kid) is different from the question of whether or not you can let your garbage rot on the street that fronts my house as well as yours.
But all that is prologue to what I see as the larger error E. D. makes in his initial argument, that what this is all about is the superior value of choice over all other potential goods.
Now, based on his more recent post, I’ll accept that E. D. is making something more than a pure economic claim; he sees the right to choose a lousy garbage hauling system as a crucial liberty issue. But at least as I read his original post, and looking at his remarks about monopolies in more recent one, there is a certain amount of economic reasoning going here as well. So that’s what I’m going to talk about for the rest of this overlong post.
So, to E. D.’s first post, two responses.
1: Any thought that begins “the Tea Partiers are right this time,” does indeed have a small but finite chance of being correct. But you won’t lose many bar bets by taking the other side every time.
2: It seems to me that E. D. falls into a conservative tic that drives me crazy every time. E. D. being smart, the error is a little more subtle than usual, but look carefully at this passage:
We want to be able to choose what kind of computer we buy – and not just because maybe we prefer Apple, but because we know that competition keeps innovation up and prices down.
Now, in trash collection you probably won’t see too much innovation, but competition will keep prices down and quality of service high. If you don’t like the people picking up your trash, or the containers they provide, or the driver is rude, or whatever – you can switch.
The assumption that lies behind this is that there is a truly free market, the kind of abstract, Ec 10 market we learn about in the first economics course one takes in college.
__
These are the markets beloved of budding economists, as they are very easy to analyze mathematically. They are even more cherished by Randbots, McArdle acolytes and too many of the incoming GOP Congressional delegation.
__
And they exist! Kinda.
__
That is to say that there are some markets in which information is truly equally available to all parties, there is a fully competitive suite of market actors are engaged in transactions and so on, such that the market finds maximally efficient pricing at all times.
But almost all markets we experience on a daily basis aren’t like that. They lack one or more of the properties needed to achieve that perfect efficiency. Information is unevenly distributed. Scarcity/equity concerns don’t get reflected in raw free market outcomes you (who gets places at Bronx High of Science or in the best charter school in town) and so on.
And as discussed above, externalities abound. (Sniff deeply at the thought of your neighbor on a once a fortnight pick-up plan. She may tolerate rotting garbage funk in her back yard more readily than you do when it drifts over your rhododendrons. And I’ll bet you can imagine a much richer range of crap to fall out from too fundamentalist an genuflection at the Divine Rand’s altar.)
Most important: “free” markets as they exist in the world in which we all live are very often much less freely competitive than they need to be for the outcomes of economic activity to be efficient.
Lots of examples exist, and I’m not even going to try to sketch the universe. But it doesn’t take much to work out ways that a choice of three or so providers doesn’t actually produce market efficiencies. For reference sake, think of the way cable and internet services are priced in lots of American communities. Competitive, much, even with multiple players?
There is in fact an emerging sub-discipline of academic economics focused on questions of market design that studies exactly how to deal with all the real world situations in which the simple free market example doesn’t hold. (See, e.g., this blog.)
Finally, just this last thought: there is a real problem, at least for me, in what I interpret as E. D.’s conception of liberty. If elected representatives shouldn’t make choices that bind on their constituents, then what’s the point, or possibility, for any kind of governance?
This is what E. D. said:
Freedom of choice is something near and dear to most Americans of every political stripe. We just tend to snub our noses at other people’s choices – whether we’re talking about trash pickup or economic association on the one hand, or reproductive choice on the other – someone is always looking to limit what we can and cannot choose.
That sounds lovely…but recall that what we are talking about is a town government, i.e., a body subject to the discipline of elections, figuring out how to provide a public services. That town did not say, “we shall have one hauler of trash to eternity!” Rather, it let out a contract through a competitive bidding process. Such contracts have terms, some number of years, as well as conditions — some services (curbside recycling, in this case) included, others perhaps not. The town got to choose among different bids; and the residents of the town get to choose those decision makers in these funny things called elections.
__
It remains a mystery to me just how this is a meaningful assault on the liberty of those poor deprived trash haulees — or rather, I do not see how anyone seriously thinks that the principle that E. D. defends as he defends it here is compatible with any society more complex than a village.
__
If that.
Certainly teabaggers disagree with me They are willing to forgo any efficiencies or other social goods that might result from such a structured sequence of choices — if they believe that these might exist at all. They do not take as consequential the notion that their actions have consequences for others, who therefore have a legitimate interest in their “free” choice. They seem to think, foolishly IMHO, that any communal decision is at best a kind of petty tyranny, and we would all be able to live in harmony if every interaction were negotiated between individual, fully autonomous parties.
And they don’t want anyone to touch their Social Security.
Which, I guess frames the point I want to make about E. D.’s post. He’s too smart to fall into the solipsism snarked here, and he is, as far as I can tell through only reading acquaintance, he is genuinely committed to the notion that you need government to allow society to work — which is another way of saying he’s no teabagger.
But habits of thought die hard, and I’m sure I’ve got my own tics — but here the fetishization of choice requires one to suspend what one actually knows about the world. And that’s never good.
*I’ll cop to a little exasperation here, because this is one of those where a little real-world experience helps a lot. This exact question is one every small film/video production company asks itself, as my tiny enterprise did for more than a decade. You can come to different responses — I never bought production equipment, because I could never use the gear enough in any given year to amortize it. Much better for me to rent gear.
Other folks came to different answers….all of which to say that the search for efficiency in the use of capital (which is what we are talking here) is exceptionally grounded in the specifics of what you are trying to do on the ground.
To say, as E. D. does, that ” The most efficient and sensible thing to do would be to provide the town with a public municipal trash service, cutting out the middle-man and the corporatist trap altogether…” (italics in the original), is simply wrong.
Images: Trash people in Köln/Germany by HA Schult
Henry Charles Bryant, “Market Scene,” before 1915.
matoko_chan
well..since E.D. the glibertarian poseur BROUGHT UP reproductive choice as a GOOD THING, i think i am entitled to ax ….
HAY ED…..ARE THE FETUSES STLL SLAVES?
Omnes Omnibus
What about soul? Did you promise us soul?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I’m both mesmerized and curious by your need to put art in your articles.
Tunch may get jealous.
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
FFS would you get off that damned chicken. You have *two* notes, both of them long played out.
jl
We need those citizen trash people here in the U.S. to use individual initiative to turn trash into high fashion, at no cost to the taxpayer (the helpless slaves of the heavy hand of Big and Unaccountable Local Government).
Or, are those oppressed and miserable slaves of dhimmituded commufascist Eurosocialism wearing trash as punishment for not eating free range sauerkraut rather than inhumane factor farm sauerkraut?
I am confused, but it all the posters think that the fate of democracy and civilization hangs on this local squabble over trash pickup and recycling, so I am scared too.
And I am fed up and I am not going to take it anymore!
Maody
OT : Steve Martin really is good, a teatards nightmare.
Face
Mr. Levenson — I’m sure you meant well, but the immaturity level and type-geek personalities of a majority of my fellow readers cannot neither digest this much post nor make cogent discussions thereof. As such, I’m forced to lay out the tl:dr poastah killah and merely remark that if it was up to the “free market”, a majority of trash would just be dumped in the ocean.
Duane
I could say more but i will go with:
what Tom said!
excellent points.
jacy
It seems like days ago when I first said this (to ED’s original post), so I’m going to say it again.
The gist I got from Cole’s post was not so much that the crazy people were up in arms about not having “choice” as to providers, but that the soshulist government was going to throw them into concentration camps for not properly recycling.
Therefore the question was not so much about free market, but about how people like the teatards demagogue any issue, no matter how benign, into a wacky conspiracy theory that ultimately ends up robbing real ‘Mericans of their freedom to burn stuff in their yards.
Michael
Count me in for really liking the art. While it plays hell the times I look at BJ on my Blackberry, it makes me feel like I’m reading something intellectual and edifying.
burnspbesq
@jacy:
It is the essential core of the Teabagger mindset that no one should be allowed to interfere with their God-given right to be a free-rider problem. To them, there is no such thing as negative externalities, and you will be condemned to Hell for all eternity for even suggesting such a thing.
asiangrrlMN
You know, I have stayed out of the fracas because it seemed like such a silly thing over which to bicker, but this is the best post about the whole damn story I’ve read. I have a proposition. I would like to see all the front-pagers write a post on a particular topic. I think it would be a fun read.
Chris
Such tight well ordered prose! Even a well thought out discussion of trash collection requires nuance.
mike
I used to live in the backward state of Arizona. In my area you had to make your own trash arrangements via the free market – it was really expensive. The arrangement many of my freedom-loving neighbors preferred was to haul their trash out into the desert or pile it in their yards. Some had these constantly smoldering stinkholes they threw it into. The most creative ones would take the big items like fridges, TV’s, water heaters and stuff out into the desert and shoot them full of holes.
Arizona is a primitive place and the best thing for the rest of the nation would be to TURN OFF all the free water they get from the government-provided dams and canals.
Bella Q
Thanks Tom, for such a thoughtful analysis of what I found to be an argument for liberty that was too absurd in its application to even warrant a response. Beyond the tired, “some people need to get actual lives.”
mr. whipple
Where do I get the cheap Apple?
Bill Murray
@Face: or would be just left in the street of the poor areas of town.
and for a better understanding of the whole choice paradigm, Tom Slee’s “No one makes you shop at Walmart” can hardly be beaten.
Carnacki
@Michael: What Michael said except for the blackberry part. Why he is reading BJ in a cobbler filling, I have no clue.
suzanne
Thank you for the sanity.
I just want to note, for the record, that “West Fountain Hills” is actually “North Scottsdale”, a.k.a. one of the most odious right-wing places on Earth. The kind of place I cannot drive through fast enough.
@matoko_chan: Would you shut up or get funny already? Fo’ shizzle.
WereBear
“Choice” has become a scam. I can choose from many different items; only in many cases, they are all crap.
When my “choices” are an illusion, it is not freedom, only different colors of the same trap. It seems that some people don’t want to offer this town a choice of what they think is the best use of their resources; and what will offer the best service.
The tyranny of choice, indeed.
Bill Murray
@mr. whipple: the garden of eden
slag
Meh. Not enough empty platitudes and baseless assumptions. Try harder next time, Levenson.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: sry, but im collecting data for a research paper. How can reproductive choice be a GOOD THING if the FETUSES ARE SLAVES?
The cognitive dissonance makes my head spin.
:)
i have a lot more that two memes, AWS…lemme seeee…..which bugged you the most? Oh, yeah…..that we lost to Islam in Iraq just like we lost to Communism in Vietnam.
tee hee.
you see….those pesky muslims are just like the darned Cong…they would rather die than accept Our Wunnerful Jesus-democracy.
/spit
jeff
Thanks for writing this. I couldn’t put my finger on some of this earlier, but you’ve generously assisted me. The art is most welcome, too. (Guys, the artwork is extremely similar to what you would have in a print article in, say, Harper’s….it both breaks up the text and illustrates it, often mordantly.
JGabriel
Tom Levenson:
I said this in response to Erik’s original post:
I don’t know if it’s always the most efficient. I suspect it is for most cities and suburban areas. But it does strike me as the best general solution for any municipality, or county, large enough to fill a full-time schedule of pick-ups.
I can see how contracting the job to a separate company may make sense for rural areas or small communities that can be covered in a day or two per week, though.
.
Jewish Steel
You keep saying you’re not witty but the paintings you post give lie to the claim.
matoko_chan
@suzanne: i am funnie, but in a bitter sarcastic scene sort of way that greys dont get..
The whole comedié noir of E.D. the earnest libertarian poseur trotting out repackaged ‘conservative’ failmemes while teh ‘serious juicers’ ponder his sophomoric pronouncements and pronounce him a ‘good guy’.
Hes not a good guy.
He’s McMegan with a dick.
And Another Thing...
@asiangrrlMN: This works as a post topic because it’s something that we all think we have experience with. Trash collection has become the petri dish for our social, political and economic theories. If the ostensible subject were something complicated and arcane we’d all be off on an Olbermann post.
John’s original observation stands. The Arizona residents are behaving like wackaloons. I suppose we should be grateful they’re focused on beating up their elected representatives instead of some other pursuit like say looking for illegals.
Good post Tom L. Thanks
Mike Kay (Team America)
We we need is a Public Option™ for trash collection
mclaren
Let me get this straight…
…America is turning into a militaristic fascist police state with a military budget skyrocketing out of control until it gobbles up every tax dollar coming into the federal government to the exclusion of welfare or medicare or anything else…
…the rich are pillaging main street with impunity an giving themselves billion dollar bonuses for their financial crimes…
…sick people are shooting themselves in the shoulder just so they can get into the Emergency Room to get treated for the illnesses for which they can’t afford health insurance…
…college tuition is exploding out of control at a rate 5 times worse than the housing bubble…
…America is exporting both low-skilled manufacturing and high-skilled knowledge work overseas so fast that our tax base has hollowed out until the U.S. economy has collapsed…
…police have turned into muggers with badges who now beat to death and tase to death anyone who even dares to state their constitutional rights whenever the cops break down their door and shoot their dog…
…the insane unwinnable war on drugs has continued to expand until it now hurls a greater percentage of people into prison than the Soviet Union put into gulags at the height of their repression…
…the insane unwinnable on copyright infringement is now ramping up to fever pitch, with the Department of Homeland Security so completely out of control and beyond it’s original mission charter that it’s now acting as corporate copyright cops for Disney…
…and the insane unwinnable foreign wars continue to expand into bottomless sinkholes of money and American troops in a futile pointless global war on terror without end that’s destroying our democracy even as it bankrupts us…
…And you people are haggling and squabbling about trash collection?
Trash collection?
Gimme a fuckin’ break.
You clowns don’t have a clue.
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
Sorry, you’re right. You have *three* tired memes you won’t STFU up about.
I eagerly await your research paper on “How to be a l33t speaking, three-note troll.”
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
Your history is almost as bad as your command of the English language, makeatoke_chan.
suzanne
@matoko_chan:
You’re hilarious. Like impetigo.
Omnes Omnibus
The most efficient solution to any problem is going to be fact specific. Even then, one has to determine what one means by efficiency. Is it purely based on price? Is frequency important? Time of day? I mean we are talking about finding an optimal trade off between utility and cost, right? How do we define utility? What about situations where there are multiple options that are Pareto efficient? This starts to get complicated quite quickly.
Further, as far as liberty goes, don’t small “L” libertarians tend to accept that one’s liberty extends until it conflicts with the liberty of another and isn’t that where governments come in?
Omnes Omnibus
@suzanne: Don’t get sucked in. I used to. It would start with m_c saying something off base, but possibly interesting. Then, I would respond. Quickly, it would spiral out of control into one of the repetitive and poorly spelled rants about memetic selection for IQ, Hacker Nation, Islam’s immunization from proselytization, or some nightmarish hybrid mish-mash of those topics. Just say no.
arguingwithsignposts
@Omnes Omnibus:
What O^2 said.
MattR
@asiangrrlMN: Do they all write them at the same time? Or does each respond to the previous one and we see how far they end up from the point of the original post?
arguingwithsignposts
@MattR:
Sounds like an episode of bloggingheadstv.
ETA: And how could DougJ spoof the discussion if we know it’s him?
Omnes Omnibus
@MattR: Like playing telephone? Cool.
different church-lady
Hey, you people wanna stop socialism in its tracks? Then haul your own DogGam trash to the dump yourself.
You wanna end the nanny-state? Then stop acting like children.
RalfW
One point I haven’t seen: ED says we citizens want choice. In many things, that may be true. Right now I want to choose a refrigerator and various other things for a major kitchen remodel.
About the last frikin’ thing I wanna do at the moment is read thru the 5 different service packages from the 5 different service companies that will all take my crap to the same landfill and bury it, but:
Company A will be Tues mornings except major holidays.
Co B will be every other Wed but with recycling, and
Co C will be Friday afternoon when I want to be washing my car in the driveway, but 5 bucks cheaper.
Co D will be the 10th, 20th and 30th of the month and even cheaper, but will destroy my trash cans in the process.
Co E will … oh my goddes, Shut UP I Don’t Care just take my trash for gods sake NOW!!
See, choice is great for picking an MP3 player or a boyfriend, but utterly pointless for all but the most committed libertarian when it comes to things like trash: make it work, make it not to expensive, and leave me alone! I elect people to city hall to figure this boring-assed minutia out.
General Stuck
like I intimated in a previous thread, that in the presence of gun right libertarian enthusiasts, and probability of downsides to free market model trash collection who is too say that competive un tidy trash collection would not enhance or create new markets, in something say like rodent control.
Free market wheeling trash with allowance for those who can’t smell too good, may well let the nasty stuff pile up and save a nickel or two from turning their properties into a sanitary landfill, or for the more eco friendly, a big ginormous compost pit.
Enters new jobs and market for rat patrols firing lethal projectiles into fat and sassy rats that would likely flourish in such an environment. A pelt bounty could be collected for bubbas in their flatbeds with scope mounted sniper rifles. More jobs, and it likely wouldn’t hurt the undertaker business neither from collateral damage. Expanding economy. win win. Feedom Rings.
suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
And “crunk”. Don’t forget that.
But I can’t stop! Mocking her insane ass is the greatest high I’ve gotten all day!
srv
Just visited my parents little village, which had some republicans who took a gov grant to green up the town courthouse, one of those old buildings in a central square. They then built a little convention center, a walk around their lake, and brought in sand and built a cute little beach with tiki torches and thatched hut patios. It’s the kind of thing where you know the good ole boys are cleaning up on the contracts, like back in LBJ’s days, but it’s good for business and plenty for everyone to enjoy, which apparently the whole town does in summer.
Whole town apparently also turned out to vote that city council out and bring in some teahadists to stop the runaway republican spending.
MattR
@srv: This is why we can’t have nice things?
Omnes Omnibus
@suzanne: Do what you have to do, but, remember, you have been warned.
Redshift
In my experience, the most common flaw in libertarian arguments is the complete denial that different people’s rights ever come into conflict, and that government is one of the mechanisms we have devised to mediate those conflicts (and one of the better ones — without it the other choices are often “whoever has the most money or guns wins.”)
American Voter
Is there anything precluding public provision of trash pickup and private purveyors of the same, or similar service, existing side by side?
For donkey’s years it seems to have worked in education — which is why, of course, the model is targeted for elimination.
srv
Tom, nice post and all, but are we really going to spend the next two years trying to rationalize with “libertarians?”
Mike Kay (Team America)
As Christians we should leave this in God’s hands.
After all, who are we to question God’s plans for trash removal.
Nylund
I think this is a good post to remind people that most of the claims of the awesomeness of the free market come from the “perfect competition” economic model. Let’s first review the assumptions of that model
1. Infinite buyers and sellers
2. Zero entry and exit barriers
3. Perfect factor mobility
4. Perfect information
4. Zero transaction costs
5. Profit maximization
6. Homogeneous products
7. Constant returns to scale
If you don’t speak econ, you may not understand all 7, but the average person should understand enough of them to realize that very rarely are these 7 things actually true for any given market. If, by miracle, they all are, Libertarian arguments actually hold up pretty well. Sadly for Libertarians, they rarely do. Its pretty easy to pick apart any Libertarian argument by picking one of the untrue assumptions and thinking about how changing that assumption changes the analysis.
The unattainable (because the above assumptions don’t hold here) perfect competition outcome is possibly* more likely to be approximated through the gov’t auction system than through the oligopoly outcome resulting from a few firms being in the market at the same time. This would depend on both the nature of the oligopolistic competition and the auction mechanism, and may ultimately depend on which scenario is more likely to result in secret collusion amongst the competing firms.
*I say possibly because I haven’t worked it out, but my intuition says you’re more likely to approximate the socially optimal/efficient outcome with a well-designed auction system than you are with a few select firms competing/colluding in the “open market”.
Moral of the story: Economics is complex! Libertarians, with their zeal for ideological purity, love to avoid all that by making unrealistic assumptions about the market they are examining. The irony being that their desired outcome could likely be attained more closely through means that are counter-intuitive (if not contradictory) to the means implied by their simple (and wrong) models.
arguingwithsignposts
@srv:
I think it will take more than two years.
Roger Moore
@RalfW:
This. There’s little benefit in choosing between different flavors of wrong.
Redshift
@American Voter: No, there isn’t. Parts of my county are like that, though not my part. Here I have the choice of (I think) a couple of companies vetted by the county. I’ve had one of them since I moved in, and I have no idea whether the other one is better, since the one I have does a fine job and it’s not worth my damn time to research them just to possibly save a couple of bucks.
In fact, the only reason I remember that I have a choice is that one of the Republican volunteers up at the polls last week was regaling me with how he’d saved money by switching to the other company, and they were great. His budget-consciousness would have impressed me more if he hadn’t started the story by griping about how they hadn’t picked up his trash last week for some reason. Instead, I was left wondering if they were actually better, or if he’d just convinced himself they were better because it makes him look smarter.
Tom Levenson
A: what Nylund said @49.
B: Many thanks for the many kind props above. Glad folks like the art, and tolerate the logorrhea and all that.
C: No, SRV @47 — the next two years are about crushing their enemies, stealing their stuff and hearing the lamentations of the survivors (see Conan the B. for the original I’m butchering here). But E. D. is both sticking his neck out posting here and is not crazy, so engaging is better (it seems to me) than a Cato the Elder approach.
And D: again, thanks all. I should take more part in this discussion, but I’m an old man, doing dishes and heading for bed.
Night all.
b-psycho
@mr. whipple: Psystar! Oh, wait, Apple ran them out of business, never mind…
Eh, there’s the OSX86 Project if you want to build it yourself.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@mclaren: Why are you commenting here? Don’t you have a world to save? Although, clearly, the most efficient way to solve these problems is to yell about them on the Internet.
Bella Q
@suzanne: I was thinking more the comedy of listeria.
Redshift
@Nylund:
Heh. Back in the days of the Microsoft anti-trust suit, I knew a libertarian who was part of an Internet circle-jerk called “People for the Ethical Defense of Microsoft” or some such. Their basic argument was that MS couldn’t possibly have a monopoly, because if they attempted to exercise monopoly power and charge more, a competitor would charge less and take their business away.
Really.
MattR
@Nylund: Good summary and a good reminder of why the theoretical side of economics was so fascinating to me as an undergraduate but why I knew that I had no interest in doing anything with that degree in the real world where true capitalism rarely exists.
PeakVT
@RalfW: Basically libertarians are intent on forcing everyone to become experts on a wide variety of issues: trash collection, fire protection, food safety, teaching, sidewalk installation, etc., that are current handled by the government This runs counter to Adam Smith’s central insight, which is that specialization increases productivity – provided people are able to trade, which through the magic of money, participants in modern economies are able to do to an amazing degree. In a libertarian fantasy world, we would be forced to spend what we currently regard as free time on choosing between various basic services instead of choosing between iPods or vacation locations. Call it the fascism of infinite freedom.
Nylund
For any econ nerds out there, my intuition for the above is this:
Any auction that grants a monopoly is unlikely to lead to collusion since there can only be one winner that takes the whole market, creating the incentive to undercut any bid amount previously agreed upon.
Whereas, if they are all in the market, they could start a price war, but the winning “low” price that won the market would probably result in lower profits than if the firms agreed to split the market and all charge a higher amount.
In short, by forcing a “winner takes all” outcome, you actually foster competition and make collusion less likely since sharing the market is not an option.
E.D. Kain
Good, thoughtful post. I appreciate the response and I’ll do my best to respond to it in more depth in the future, though all this trash talk has me plumb tuckered.
Matako – you confuse me. The last email you sent was rather kind. C’est la vie.
P.S. I’m not a libertarian, but I think choice is important. It’s not the most important thing in the world, but it’s important.
Tom Levenson
@Nylund: That sounds to me like it’s right, even tho I can’t drum up the cites now to show that someone has formalized that intuition. But auctions (if clean…) are a very nice tool.
thomas Levenson
@E.D. Kain: Nice to see you here. Don’t worry about the trash talk – or rather, sneer at McArdle if you want to get the hounds on your tail. It don’t matter…
I look forward to your next thoughts.
Tom Levenson
And now I’m really going to bed. So there.
Redshift
@thomas Levenson: Er, don’t you mean “off your tail”?
Nellcote
@Mike Kay (Team America):
Don’t we call that tornados/hurricanes?
kuvasz
When you see four different oil company gas stations on four corners of a street and they all advertise the same price, how in the fucking hell is that supposed to be considered the blessing of “choice” in the free market?
Its bad enough to have to listen to this “free market is Utopia” shit, but we don’t have it now or possibly ever had one. So what are these idiots on the Right talking about? Propaganda, to create an unsubstantiated narrative that drives right over facts and reality.
E.D. Kain
@kuvasz: The question is what the price would be absent the other three. You follow?
E.D. Kain
@thomas Levenson: Thanks.
asiangrrlMN
@MattR: I was actually thinking the former, but the latter would be fun, too. It would be the blogging form of Telephone!
Xenos
As usual I am coming in when the subject is quite exhausted, but all this fussing around about choice misses the other half of the libertarian equation, which is efficiency. Efficiency is rarely clearly evaluated, calculated, or discussed. While I am sure that economists have some sort of formula for evaluating it, these formulas and the values they calculate never enter into discussion.
Rather, efficiency is pretty much a vague principle, a moral good that is appealed to in order make an argument seem more disciplined and virtuous. But it really is a black box – nobody knows if the mathematical models involved are sound, or if any sort of careful analysis has been done. This amounts to a lack of information at least as serious as the informational assymetries that conservative and libertarian economists invariably gloss over as a matter of course.
The whole discussion, as generally created and propagated by McArdlites in the media and academia, is unserious, dishonest, and a waste of time. It is incredibly inefficient.
Roger Moore
@Nylund:
Only if the contract really is for the whole market. If the market is geographically divided- if there’s more than one city that’s contracts out its trash service- then there will be opportunities for the companies who were undercut to retaliate. As long as the barriers to entry are high enough that it’s the same small set of companies bidding every time, they’re better off colluding.
Mnemosyne
@E.D. Kain:
Choice can be important but, as others have pointed out in this thread, after a certain point you get diminishing returns from constantly having to choose from extremely similar options day after day after day after day. It takes up a lot of brainspace.
Some people love getting five bids from five different trash companies and working out spreadsheets to do a full comparison of each of their services. Most people just want the damn trash picked up at a reasonable cost and would rather spend their time making choices about things that actually interest them.
THE
@matoko_chan:
Matoko,
I have comments on an earlier thread in response to one of your comments.
Because it is a rather old thread, it is unlikely that you will see it, unless I link it and draw your attention to it.
Sorry, but we are in very different timezones. It takes me a while to catch up.
kuvasz
@E.D. Kain:
What would be the difference? In each case there would be no “choice” based upon the basest of things, i.e., cost. Free Marketeers do not talk about prices when they talk about their Utopia, they talk about “choice.” If every price is the same, there is no basic choice regardless of how many sellers there are.
Conversely, if cost is the critical factor as you seem to insinuate, then you are making a good case for a single payer health policy, in that while choices would be restricted, sheer volume drives down costs, jut as any merger lawyer would state.
Frankly, I would love a free market, but I have yet to see one over the past fifty years, except when I sold herb.
Ailuridae
For fuck’s sake in an otherwise very well-written post you have to include this:
On this more recent post: One: I think E.D. conflates unhelpfully the concept of a short term -sole provider contract with a true monopoly. It makes his argument stronger, but it misses at least one key difference, which is that a properly maintained bidding program makes it difficult for corporations to block market access to each other, but monopolies maintained by force of law aim explicitly at preserving such moats.
No, no, no. There is simply nothing monopolistic about bidding out contracts to sole providers for services the government deems necessary to request bids for. No matter how many times ED chooses to misuse the word (and the rest of the front pagers refuse to call him on it in an Atlantic circle jerk kind of way) it is simply not, in any sense, what monopoly means. There is no conflation there is clear, inexcusable abuse of the word “monopoly”.
Mnemosyne
@kuvasz:
There’s also a weird assumption that collusion doesn’t exist and there’s no possible way that those four gas stations have a tacit (or not-so-tacit) agreement not to let the prices drop below a certain level.
Pricing is not always set at the level of the free market. Oftentimes, it’s set at the point that supposedly rival companies get together and agree to, formally or informally.
MattR
@kuvasz:
I’d argue the exact opposite. The buyer is free to choose from any of the sellers without having to pay a higher price. He has the ultimate in choice.
@Mnemosyne: How do you unbold in the blockquote?
Mnemosyne
@MattR:
Two ways —
Either don’t leave a space between the blockquote and your next paragraph, or put two underscores on that blank line between the two. Taa-daa! Double underscore also works to keep blockquotes of multiple paragraphs together.
MattR
@Mnemosyne:
__
I knew this part but not about the bolding.
(Hmm. Still looks bold to me. Oh well. At least I can say I tried. The rest of you will just have to deal with it)
mclaren
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
My bad. We’re clearly better off if people spend their time gibbering about worthless pointless nonsense like libertarian choice in trash collection.
kuvasz
@MattR:
but not a lower price, which is the standard inticement conjured up when being told about choice in a free market, viz., the opportunity to haggle or shop around to get the best price.
in your case, you are just saying be thankful you’re not getting raped, in mine, I’m looking for love.
MattR
@kuvasz: The choice in a free market eventually leads to a common lowest price. Assuming this is in fact a free market, what you are seeing is the ideal end result.
SectarianSofa
@matoko_chan:
I swear I remember you used to write in English.
SectarianSofa
@Tom Levenson:
Thanks for the great post.
kuvasz
@MattR:
Matt, we don’t live a world of free markets. That was my point as well as Mnemosyne’s post 79 below:
Knowing that we don’t, it is exasperating to listen to Right Wingers and Libertarians preach on about it, and deadly still to form a political or economic philosophy based upon something that does not exist. I can go to any church for that.
MattR
@kuvasz: Well duh. And now that you are explicit I see your comments in a different light. I got confused by you using a common price as a sign that there is no choice in the market. If that common price is the result of collusion, then obviously that is true. But that common price can just as easily be explained by market forces, which is what ED was getting at with his initial response. Your response seemed to indicate that you couldn’t see how competition (even with collusion) would keep the price down over a monopoly. But if your whole point is that they are colluding so there is no choice, then sure.
aimai
@mike:
Precisely: its not as if this system hasn’t been tried. It has well known failure points. The issue for the Forest Hills people is that they had a way of deciding whether they wanted the Arizona style system ( a dump/no fines for destroying the desert/no trash pickup except private) or whether they wanted a cheap, rational, all inclusive system in which the local government did the research and handled the total garbage flow. And as has been pointed out they *democratically chose the latter.* Its not a question of choice or not choice its a system in which choice is excercised by majority rule, along a time line in which choice can be revised by the next election.
As Tom says delicately you couldn’t even get to a system of governance higher than a village–hell, you couldn’t even run a village and you would be reduced to zombie like clans and isolated families each of whom prized isolation, separation, and “choice” (the choice to die alone in the wildnerness) over co-operation and rational thought. Its the romance of the Alaskan Wildnerness writ large, with each family freely choosing to die of various diseases or of the oppression of stronger family members over the weak. Needless to say I’m not describing Native American communities but rather dysfunctional White American frontier families.
Cooperation, democratic government, anything larger than a very small congerie of people, requires co-ordination. It includes lots of choice, but the excercise of choice happens at different times than at the whim of the individual. That’s always been true for lots of kinds of people who were not fully treated as people by the larger society, btw: women, slaves, children, foreigners. Somehow its only a fetish when angry teabaggers are deprived of the choice of literally leaving their garbage out until it spoils the rest of the community?
aimai
aimai
@Mnemosyne:
I’d like to add something to Mnemosyne’s point about choice “over and over again” about “the same thing.” The whole point of the “why can’t we choose our own garbage hauler” thing is that it posits either a phony choice (because if you were choosing between four identical trash haulers with identical pricing that would be meaningless) or you aren’t really choosing the entire panoply of issues. That is, you are choosing “your” trash hauler but unless you have instituted incredibly strict rules forcing your neighbors to conform to your ideal choice you are “choosing” only part of the available total choices.
Because trash hauling includes way more than mere price differential. As ED says it includes whether the trash guys are nice to you and if they are your neighbor’s trash haulers they have no reason to be nice to you and probably won’t be. As everyone else has endlessly pointed out to ED there are tons of externalities involved: smell, danger, rot, noise, confusion, congestion. When you add in failures on the customer side (you rent the house/sell the house and forget to switch the contract) and on the purveyor side (they forget to pick up one week, they think you didn’t pay, blah blah)
There you are excercising you due diligence and your cost sensitivities and all that but you are unable to choose the system which is cost effective enough for your neighbor that he even opts into the system at all, or you are unable to choose the system which doesn’t include trash collection every day of the week for one house, or the system which doesn’t leave trash rotting on the street for half the day and rats flitting in and out. Because *those* choices are *group* choices. Forcing the choice down the level of the individual without (essentially) a mandate at the household level or an incredibly strict set of rules for minimum standards for the contract makes the contract almost worthless for preventing a very high cost in externalities. Essentially, to make the system work in a dense urban area, you would need almost as much government interference, and a higher cost to the local government in surveilling it, than you would just asking five guys on a committee to bid it out.
aimai
jfxgillis
Tom:
Correct. I was gonna leap on E.D.’s thread and point that out, but the thread got to long.
You have a right to be stupid. You do not have a right to evade the consequences, which, come to think of it, is 99% of the Tea Party agenda and 100% of the Republican party agenda.
machine
Ask your doctor about treatment options if you suffer from E.D.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@suzanne:
Fix’t. I rarely comment about our esteemed leet-y uber-intelligent super haxxor makeytokie_chan but I couldn’t let your glaring understatement stand without correction.
Your welcome. :)
matoko_chan
@E.D. Kain: wallah…..i am NEVAH kind. only sometimes less cruel.
As i recall our last convo i told you conservatism was doomed because it retained no third culture elites….only dead-white-guy philosophy like Mr. Eternally Wrong Hayek. You tried to take credit for Newton and Galileo, but those dudes are second culture- they are scientists.
Conservatism has become a philosophy of WRONG.
And you refuse to admit that, like you refuse to admit that fetii are not actually slaves.
The new arms race is human capital.
The intellectual elites and cultural elites have left the conservative building. 94% of scientists are not republican. 99% of art, music and film are not republican.
If you actually read Murray that is what he SAYS. Only business class elites remain on the right, and they are not leaders…they are superparasites……they exist to farm the marks for cash.
The core conservative memes have all FAILED.
The free market is what brought us the Econopalypse that Ate Americas Jobs. “Commonsense > intelligence” brought us the intransigent stupidity of Bush. Dr. Manzi’s “practical experience concerning the organization of human society” aka socon values lead us to mistakenly believe we could proselytize judeochristian democracy in +99% muslim nation states. The Epic Fail of the Manifest Destiny of Jesus-democracy in A-stan and Iraq, aka the Bush Doctrine or “democracy promotion”.
Those pesky muslims just wont cave in and take our Our Wunnerful Western JesusDemocracy no matter how many of them we slaughter. They would rather die, lol.
In the new arms race of human capital the US as a whole has no advantages.
But conservatives are starting out as paupers.
matoko_chan
@Odie Hugh Manatee: i am quite bright. but my main problem here is im at least two decades too young for this blog. no one can crit the substance of my comments, so they have to crit presentation.
their crits all devolve to “hey! get off our lawn!”
or ad hom.
/yawn.
matoko_chan
@thomas Levenson: Kain IS McMegan with a Y chromosome. His fetus=slave argument is an example of the hoary glibertarian inversion argument, like McMegan and Douthat blaming pro-choice liberals for Dr. Tiller’s murder or Breibart saying the NAACP are the real racists.
The reason the teatards are rioting in the street over trash pickup is that they cant bear to admit that THEY fucked up the economy, and that THEY are low IQ racists trying to headfake the hammergun of the demographic timer.
matoko_chan
Now back to my real life.
Biotribology and Social Brain Hypothesis.
a toute a l’heure, mes anciennes
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
No, the problem is the substance of your “crit” has been debunked effectively numerous times by the likes of morzer, martin, omnes omnibus, et. al., and yet you repeat the same tired “crits” time and time again, essentially ignoring any evidence to the contrary, shouting “lalalalalala, I can’t hear you ‘oldies.'”
Get off my lawn, indeed. You are no better than the conservofundamentalist WECs you routinely accuse everyone here of being.
Barb (formerly Gex)
The *most* efficient system would never be *for profit* businesses. If you want to pursue that most efficient hobby horse, government is the way to go. Both government and business have bureaucratic inefficiencies. But only business has the duty to give you less value than they charge you for. Meanwhile everyone wants to keep taxes down and public employees can be frozen out of wage increases.
But this is the point at which calls for the *most* efficient anything fall by the wayside for conservatives, libertarians, or recovering conservatives/libertarians. Profit is a known inefficiency. Markets should drive profits down. Conservatives and Libertarians tend to fetishize rent seeking.
dan
Neither brevity nor wit was promised, and neither was delivered.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@aimai: THIS is a very good point. Interesting that a lot of libertarians are white men complaining that their choices are being limited. I never viewed it that way, but that’s a fascinating perspective.
Barb (formerly Gex)
BTW I live in a community that sets the day for trash pickup but lets you choose your own provider. There is no difference in service and pricing, I’ve found. But we have 5x as many trucks on trash day for the school kids to look out for at the bus stop. Sure, it may be more dangerous for the elementary school kids, but at least my teabagger neighbors got to choose BFI over Waste Management as the logo on the truck that speeds down the street because the next stop it makes is quite a ways down.
Mary
I think I’m in love.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: oh bullshytt.
we went to Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism.
The domino theory is pretty well documented.
~60,000 american soljah deaths and 2.83 trillion dollars in today dollars later Vietnam IS A FUCKING COMMUNIST NATION.
Samesame Iraq.
a trillion dollars and 5000 american soljah deaths later, Iraq is an ISLAMIC state with shariah law in the constitution and religious political parties where the mullahs still call the shots….incidentally where a lot more muslims hate americans.
matoko_chan
this whole thing is a non-troversy.
you dumb cudlips, this is Salam-Douthat stratification in action.
couple that with the inexorable reality of the demographic tiimer and you get a conservative movement doomed to extinction.
Manzi and E.D. and McMegan and Douthat are just throwing radar chaff.
None of that bullshytt matters….the new arms is race is human capital. Conservatives are simply bankrupt.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: my crits have NEVAH been debunked, ‘sline.
you dumb bioluddites just start adhomming and whining about l33tspk.
@thomas Levenson: Kain is a nontroversy. So’s McMegan and Douthat. They are just apologists for failcake dead-white-guy philosophy…they are adding delicious new teatard frosting.
But its the same failcake that already fucked America over once.
There are amazing things happening in science world.
like…does QC require embodiment for Strong AI? Where do tardigrades stop being quantum? Holographic noise: fact or fiction?
remastiticating dead-white-guy cud like Burke and Hayek is what E.D. is all about.
Can we move on NAOW?
Xenos
@matoko_chan:
Is this your point?
We know conservatives are intellectually bankrupt. Your larger point about intellectual capital being the new arms race is rather poorly developed… and seems strange coming from a Muslim. It seems to be the flip side of the shallow and phony triumphalism that is so present in evengelical conservatives.
I would advise you to seek out some Shariati… There was some brilliant revolutionary thinking in Iran before the Mullahs took over and imposed mindless fundamentalism. It is all pretty apposite to what any person of the book faces today.
liberal
@matoko_chan:
Actually, it’s not really communist, and is geopolitically an enemy of China. Of course that makes the Indochinese War even more tragic.
liberal
Have these so-called libertarians ever heard of Coase’s The Theory of the Firm? Why aren’t they up in arms over non-market economies within firms?
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Sure, choice is why cities and towns everywhere are rushing to provide more trash pickup choice to their citizens. Who doesn’t hate the fact that they are stuck with just one garbage option?
And more importantly, who doesn’t want five, or ten, different trash companies’ trucks roaming the streets of their town, fighting over the curb space and sending drivers to knock on doors and solicit business? Those big smelly trucks are just the thing to keep your asphalt tamped down and also run over all those goddam pets and birds that are always in your roadways.
Yes, Trash Choice will always win out over ObamaTrashociaIism.
Please, somebody shoot me.
Is there a teapot small enough for this tempest?
matoko_chan
@Xenos: WTF does my PERSONAL FAITH have do with the reality of the emergent IQ gap between liberal and conservative affiliations?
You know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about al-Islam.
I’m a student of Arabi and Ghazali.
Did you know they postulated Many Worlds theory in response to Aristotle 400 years before the christians tried to burn Galileo?
Do you know anything about Sufism?
matoko_chan
@liberal: but it BECAME communist when america ran for the choppers…it has evolved.
My point: all the blood and treasure we poured into Vietnam resulted in the opposite of the stated outcome we went there for.
all the blood and treasure we poured into Iraq resulted in the opposite of the stated outcome we went there for.
We failed at being missionaries with guns.
matoko_chan
@Xenos:
I thot i made this perfectly clear, but apparently i was wrong. We muslims simply do not give a shit if christians want to believe in the Jesus godhead. We are all people of the Book. We do care, quite vehemently as it turns out, that christians want to make us believe it too.
matoko_chan
@suzanne: it is spelled krunk, old person. respect teh k.
like krumping.
liberal
@matoko_chan:
No, the puppet government of SV fell. NV was already communist. And the political division of V in the first place was basically instigated by the US.
No. While Vietnam isn’t a democracy, its economy has lots of capitalist elements, and it’s pretty opposed to China in terms of geopolitics. Which is kind of what the US wanted in the first place. Which really makes our involvement there stupid: we murdered (directly or indirectly) millions of Vietnamese, got tens of thousands of our own guys killed, and we “lost,” and things are OK there anyway (“OK” in the sense of geopolitical outcomes).
The Cake
@Face: Citation needed
matoko_chan
@liberal: AMG the STATED GOAL was to prevent Vietnam from becoming communist.
CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ?
eyelessgame
Bingo, bingo, a hundred times bingo. This gets to the central issue that, ISTM, separates libertarians from non-libertarians:
Libertarians see the difference between representative democracy and repressive autocracy as a difference only in degree, not in kind.
I really have no other explanation for them. They do not believe in democracy, except inasmuch as it limits government — not that it makes government better. I think that E.D. falls into this way of thinking too much.
THE
@matoko_chan:
I think the point is that while the communists won in South Vietnam, communism itself started to collapse worldwide some ten to fifteen years later, and started to evolve into something much closer to a mixed economy with varying degrees of democracy or authoritarianism.
Communism in the sense we fought it in the Cold War exists hardly anywhere any more, except maybe North Korea.
Chinese Communism is now “Social – ism with Chinese Characteristics”. Vietnam is a mixed economy with many capitalistic components, particularly in the former South.
I won’t say the Cold War, of which the Vietnam War was a part, was a waste of time and money and lives.
It depends on the extent to which you believe Communism collapsed under its own internal contradictions, vs. was it crushed by relentless external pressure.
For myself, I think that Communism would have probably grown significantly larger, without US resistance. But it may well have collapsed in the end anyway.
I think the Cold War cost the other side a lot too, proportionally more than it cost the USA. So perhaps it sped-up their collapse.
THE
Sorry I’m stuck in moderation Tom.
I tried to edit that forbidden “Social”
“ism” word, but too late.
EDIT: Ah thanks, I see it’s been extracted.
Nancy Irving
Here’s the way to satisfy (nearly) everybody: have a referendum so citizens can choose either 1) let the city council select a trash contractor or 2) let each household select its own trash contractor.
If citizens choose 1), problem solved.
If citizens choose 2), they will then find out that they will have to pay significantly more for their choicy, individually-wrapped trash pickup. Then,
3) Citizens will demand a second referendum, and they will choose (being a little older, and a lot wiser in this respect at least) to let the city council select a trash contractor.
Everybody gets to choose–or at least, to vote–and nearly everybody (last-ditcher libertarians excepted) will be satisfied.