Also, characterizing the libertarian answer as "shut it all down" is a strawman in its own right. I daresay one of the major ideas that prevents people from understanding libertarianism is understanding that "let the market deal with it" is not anything remotely resembling "shut it all down". The market provides very sharp constraints on what actions one may profitably take, and one of the advantages of the market system is that said constraints are much more closely connected with reality than any other commonly proposed system is. As an also-little-l libertarian I don't deny that some further regulation may be necessary, but defying the market is less like defying people and more like defying physics. You will pay the price. (In fact, we are, right now.) In particular I strongly believe in the need for regulations that ensures that the market stays free, so I'm very in favor of regulations to prevent monopolies from forming, and very hostile to government-granted market monopolies.
If you understand the market as "it's all, like, greed man, and greedy people abusing other greedy people, and, like, evil, man", you really ought to spend some time understanding the theory of the market as an actual existing entity, rather than a politically-oriented strawman designed cognitively innoculate you against ideas that may actually change your mind if you were to truly learn about them. Perhaps it won't change your mind, but I'll say that most people online's efforts to pry me away from my libertarianism fails on the grounds that almost nobody actually understands it in the first place, which puts them at a bit of a disadvantage.
(Remember, almost nobody is raised libertarian. Few libertarians hold their beliefs unexamined, the way that those who were simply raised liberal or conservative can, though of course not all do.)
The market isn't always right. Imbalances can and do occur. The effects can be devastating to nonparticipants. Cartels, monopoly rents, etc. are some other types of bad effects that markets can devolve into.
While the mortgage crisis would not have happened without market forces (+ human greed) and government involvement. The question becomes which of those factors we can alter or remove to make such an occurrence impossible in the future, rather than which factor to blame. From a pragmatic perspective, since we can't remove human greed, the other option is to not implement government programs that make it easier for millions of people who can't afford a house to get a mortgage.
So, more government might have prevented the problem, perhaps in the form of education programs for home buyers who only qualified because of the government programs. But, less government could have prevented the problem, as well, since the vast majority of those loans would have never happened without government programs to encourage them.
My instincts tell me to go the less expensive route, and let the market decide who can afford a house or not. If a bank knows the government isn't going to bail them out (as would be the case if these loans weren't government-backed), they're going to be more careful about who gets those loans.
I'm going to copy-and-paste something I said before on this topic (which was actually a reply to jerf):
I slogged through much of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (http://fcic.law.stanford.edu/). One of the conclusions was that while mandating loans didn't help, they weren't numerous enough to be a major cause. Because of the mortgage-backed securities industry, there was incentive for banks to make sub-prime loans and offload the loans (and the risk) elsewhere. Once the MBS engine got churning, there was an enormous demand for more loans to feed it. In other words, the government's requirements did not lead to the glut of sub-prime loans.
Education for the home-buyers would probably not work. I can't remember which author it was who made this point, but on reading about the crisis, someone pointed out that people will take what you give them. That's not really fixable. The fixable problem was that banks were willing to make such loans. And they were willing to make such loans not because they knew the government would bail the loans out, but because the banks would not keep the loans. They'd turn around and sell the loans to investment banks that packaged the loans up into MBSs. The banks making the sub-prime loans weren't the same banks that were on-the-hook for them.
From my point of view, this is a classic example of where government regulation not only makes sense, but keeps market participates from creating abnormal risk.
From what I've read about libertarianism (the economic principles of libertarianism) it is highly impractical. It seem like a set of principles that work at the local level provided there is plenty of competition. Libertarian principles don't scale at a macro level. Especially in the presence of cartels or monopolies. Or in an environment when risk is being transferred to parties who don't understand the risk that is being transfered to them and when this risk transfer is being done on a truly massive scale.
I assumed you were describing a recent real-world scenario where exactly this occurred. What did you have in mind, if not the recent US mortgage crisis? It seems, to me, that real examples are more useful than imagined ones. If we are using imaginary problems, we can come up with all sorts of interesting solutions, but they don't necessarily carry over to real world problems.
Thought experiments can be useful tools, but when the results conflict with reality, you have to be willing to adjust and accommodate new data.
"Especially in the presence of cartels or monopolies."
Which cartels and monopolies do you have in mind? The biggest monopolies and cartels I can think of in the US are those that have government support to protect their monopoly. Phone, cable, power, water, are the most firmly held monopolies (occasionally duopolies) in the US, for instance, and all are protected by government. Toll roads in the northeast are another good example of government-endorsed monopolies (I'm not saying the toll roads are necessarily a bad thing, just that they are solidly a monopoly; you can't really drive from NYC to anywhere without travelling on those toll roads, and they are, by far, the most expensive toll roads I've ever driven on, and I travel full-time in a motorhome, so I've seen a lot of toll roads).
Microsoft was frequently called a monopoly for several years, but the market eventually removed those monopolistic powers. Anti-trust actions barely put a dent in their power, and targeted quite small, quite unimportant elements. The market is where the real change came from. Heck, many of the remaining strongholds for Microsoft are in governments, which are unable to move as fast as private organizations. And, a not insignificant amount of Microsoft's power came from having a stranglehold on government schools, offices, etc.
I can't think of many other good monopoly examples that aren't government-backed, though I'm sure there are some examples. I'm willing to believe that anti-trust legislation has a place; but I'm also very suspicious of the argument that all government is good government because monopolies and cartels are dangerous, which seems to be the root of your bias against libertarianism or reduced government.
The exceptions that are sanctioned are examples in economic theory of "natural monopolies", typically utilities, where competition would be highly impractical. For example, it would be impractical to have many different competing networks of privately owned telephone poles, sewer lines, water lines, etc. serving the same municipality. So a natural monopoly is allowed to exist but is heavily regulated and may face price controls.
I remember anti-trust law being used against smaller companies because lawyers find it easier to persecute than fighting against bigger companies. Even anti-trust regulations can be used to decrease competition.
Sometime it's better to opt for the least worst option rather than opting for a solution that kill the patient.
Antitrust claims get tacked on to a lot of lawsuits by overzealous attorneys, but they're usually dismissed out of hand. Serious antitrust litigation is rare, and by definition targets companies that are large in their particular industries.
When the market was allowed to make decisions about who should get loans, the standards were a lot higher. But it wasn't "right" for people to have to put 20% down and have a very solid credit rating, because it discriminated against poor people (and Democratic voters), so the government fiddled until it produced the result it (thought it) wanted, forcing banks to lower mortgage standards until we eventually worked our way down to no-money down ARMs.
(BTW, the claim the government had nothing to do with it is to claim that all the regulation like the CRA and Fannie Mae and anti-discrimination all had absolutely no effect at all, in which one must answer the question, if regulations like that are so ineffectual that you can't lay any responsibility for the current crisis at their feet, then why do you think government regulations are the answer to anything? Either they are effective or they are not, but you can't flip back and forth depending on whether you like the effect or not.)
The problem is that people think of "the market" as a fundamental property, but in fact it is a derived property. The reason why the market tended to correctly allocate mortgages prior to the government's heavy-handed decades-long intervention is the incentive structure. Always look at the incentive structure. If my bank is going to issue me a mortgage, and the government leaves them alone, they are going to take a lot of steps to protect themselves, such as setting the requirements for your credit strength very high, and requiring large downpayments, and generally ensuring they aren't going to be left holding the bag when the mortgage falls through. Alternatively, if they're going to sell that risk, the receiving party is going to want the same due diligence. The government interventions basically systematically tore than incentive structure apart, by allowing them to just dump the mortgage off on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, by requiring them to make loans that they basically knew would fail but the government held guns to their head to do it, etc. If I had to pick one thing that really enabled the housing crisis, it was the ability to dump mortgages off on the FMs for what were in actuality above-market rates, then for the seller to be free-and-clear of the responsibilities. Other things may have accelerated it, but that structure guaranteed disaster on its own.
No, the market isn't "always right", but that's not really the question. Nothing is "always right". The question, which is more likely to be right, the market system or the government system? One of the big reasons I tend libertarian is that I empirically observe that the government almost inevitably creates incredibly broken incentive structures where the market tends to create ones that are much more connected to reality. In this particular case, the "reality" that the market is much more connected to is the question of "will X be able to pay their mortgage back?" I have to use the broad term "reality" when discussing it in general, but it actually comes back down to specifics like this.
One much also distinguish between "the market" being broken, and reality being "broken". Yes, mortgage requirements were quite high; that's because in reality it's a huge risk. It turns out the market wasn't broken here, and the efforts to "fix" it were the true brokenness.
Right, which is why it only happened in America, not in other places like England, and Ireland, and Spain, which had neither CRA nor Fannie nor Freddie. Oh wait...
For a different, and for my money, substantially more accurate diagnosis of the crisis, go listen to William K. Black [1]. He was one of the regulators who prosecuted many of the corrupt bankers who perpetrated the savings and loan crisis.
[1].http://dailybail.com/home/dr-william-k-black-the-great-ameri...
Also, saying that this regulation had minimal effect does not imply that all regulation will have minimal effect.
I don't think it's exactly a stretch to assume that such a (putatively) topical example was related to current events.
Besides, in the process of describing why the crisis wasn't caused by markets, I answered your objection anyhow. When the free market was making the decisions about mortgages, they did in fact make it in a sustainable way. Once the lenders were detached from the consequences of their decisions by the government, that broke. There's no better way to ensure that we don't have a housing crisis than to use those market mechanisms.
Note carefully I didn't say "if we use those mechanisms, we'll never have a housing crisis". I said there's no better way. It's basically impossible to completely prevent periodic crises.
Lenders weren't detached from the consequences of their decisions by the government. They were detached from the consequences of their decisions by selling securities based on the loans they made to dupes. That it was done at a massive scale without the dupes properly pricing in the risk caused a meltdown.
One of the core factors that drove the credit crisis was ignoring market forces. "Too big to fail" led directly and obviously to recklessness. Bankers knew that they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. In a system where a government explicitly or implicitly guarantees banks, there is little incentive for anyone involved to guard against cataclysmic failures. As we so often do, we privatised gains and nationalised losses.
The desire to fix "market imbalances" is only that, a desire. The evidence is that most attempts to fix the market only make things worse. If we merely want to be seen to be doing "the right thing", then it's reasonable to legislate and hope for the best. If we actually want to improve the world, we must recognise that the market is tantamount to a force of nature.
Decades of trying to control wildfires led only to fiercer, more devastating fires. It was only when we realised that fires are a natural part of a forest ecosystem that we began to reduce the damage caused. Attempting to prevent any negative outcomes of a free market is similarly futile.
We can't control markets. Khruschev and Breshnev couldn't, nor Greenspan or Bernanke. All we can do is nudge it a little, build a firebreak here, drop a bucket there. Until we recognise that, we're doomed to the cycle of boom and bust that has dominated post-industrial economies.
People do stuff. You can attempt to change their incentives, but they'll still do whatever makes sense to them. That's the core of libertarian thought. Accept that lack of control, accept that the drug war can't be won, accept abortion and gambling and credit default swaps, then try and work out how best to mitigate the externalities of those things. Legislate based on what is not on what we think ought to be.
And libertarians routinely forget that the unwashed masses actually want social programs and regulations, and they hate seeing people get rich off of "the market" by doing things that seem abusive. They want public services like police, fire, ambulances and schools. They want to have some assurance that when BigCo tries to get anti-competitive and monopolistic someone will step in, and they want to know that if the CEO shorts his own stock in anticipation of bad news that nobody else knows about he will be punished for it rather than profit. Libertarians may not want any of this because of their philosophical and economic leanings, but most other people do...
Why is it that the free market is such an immense force that we should uncritically accept that it is unchangeable, yet the desire of millions of people to control it, regulate it, or otherwise make it work for everyone instead of only the richest of the direct participants is somehow negotiable?
I understand that you're saying that nothing we can do will change the markets, all I'm saying is that it's just as possible that nothing we can do will make people happy about the way they function uninhibited, so maybe there's a good reason we've ended up somewhere in the middle.
That there wasn't a total collapse of the banking system in 2008 was precisely because of government intervention. Everyone would have withdrawn their funds from banks had it not been for FDIC. Imbalances can't be prevented. What can be prevented is a total collapse and the effects of imbalances can be mitigated. This is one of the main reasons for the modern interventionist view of governments with regard to market regulation.
The goal is to prevent millions of small bad decisions ending up adversely affecting the whole country. This is my problem with libertarianism. There is no mechanism for dealing with the scaling issue. Negative externalities are not dealt with.
As for the rest... Well, I've never had a problem with the idea that a properly competitive market would be far superior to where we are now, but libertarianism, at least as portrayed by professed libertarians, doesn't restrict itself to that. It seeks to completely tear down social safety nets in favor of that market and ditch environmental and safety regulations. My own experiences and those of my family are all that is necessary to convince me of the disaster that would result by going that far.
I'm the last person who's going to defend the ridiculous things cited (marijuana/tobacco, corn ethanol, patents) and many others, but if you're being intellectually honest, you also have to look at the bad things that have resulted from unbounded market forces (serious pollution/poisoning, worker deaths, building collapses, ...) until government stepped in and imposed regulations on the "free market". There are tradeoffs here.
If you don't think these things are part of libertarianism, you need a new name for your beliefs, because the existing one is too corrupted by people who either don't actually share your beliefs, or don't understand that they've done a horribly negligent job of explaining them.
There's a large subset (possibly the majority?) of libertarians who expect that monopolies are a byproduct of state intervention, and not a natural product of the free market, which is precisely why one shouldn't interfere in ways that lead to monopolies (among other ways).
Are there examples of monopolies which didn't have state support?
What about Microsoft and Facebook? Of course, it depends on your definition of monopoly - if you define it to be 100% market dominance, then almost by definition this is only possible using government intervention - but in the case of Microsoft, few people would seriously doubt that they have (or at least had) monopoly status. I don't see the state support that allowed them to get there.
More generally, a free market greatly favors monopolies whenever there are network effects involved.
Moreover, it is not only monopolies that are bad. Many markets "naturally" end up in the hands of only a few large corporations. This can sometimes (but not always) be as bad as a monopoly, e.g. electricity providers here in Germany. It is not clear to me what it is that makes some oligopolies problematic, while others (e.g. processor manufacturers) appear to be more benign.
Can a business get to 100% of a market, or nearly so, without state help? I think they often can. Can they hold that position in the face of better and/or cheaper startup competition, without state help? I think that's an open question, and I lean toward thinking that they can't.
The other major question is so-called "natural monopolies", such as infrastructural service provision (phone, power, cable, etc). The fact that there are communities which have multiple competing firms in some of these seems to show that they aren't natural in the sense that they will arise unless prevented. While most communities in the US have a legislated monopoly on, for example, cable service, those that do not often have competing cable services, which is exactly what we are told won't happen. (My father lives in a place with three overlapping cable companies, as it happens, and he's tried all of them at one time or another). I've seen people in some of those communities who are arguing for a city-granted franchise switch seamlessly from arguing that regulation is needed to keep monopolies in check to arguing that such regulation is needed to prevent the wasteful laying of lines that duplicate existing lines. I guess that's neither here nor there, just a pet peeve. :)
Anyway, searching on Rothbard and monopoly will turn up more rigorous arguments against the idea of free market monopolies than I've given here.
Edit: Maybe Somalia is an example, I remember a few years ago people touting the proliferation of Somalian cell phone companies. But the instability there doesn't seem like something we should try to emulate.
In my experience, this is quite a mischaracterization. The position isn't that monopolies are 'natural' and 'not a problem'. On the contrary, monopolies are seen as being extremely harmful, but also as products of government intervention and barriers to entry, not the market.
Which makes me particularly skeptical of "the market just works" type analysis, which claims that this particular complex dynamical system does not have all those pathologies, and in fact can be analyzed with fairly high-level, aggregate laws like the classical economics analysis of supply/demand adjustment. Heck, even fluid dynamics (another complex system) doesn't work that way--- all our general laws about how pressure/flow/velocity/etc. relate only apply to specific flow regimes, and can have different or even opposite-of-normal relationships in different flow regimes (especially anything turbulent).
One argument for why there should be some intervention would be: the classical-economics analysis of how economies should work is an appealing one, but is not in fact how they always work, so the government's job should be to dampen out the pathologies and turbulence that would take us out of the "normal" regime where the classical laws do apply. That's sort of the line taken by ordoliberalism. The question would be whether it can, on the whole, do more good than harm. But I wouldn't start from the assumption that what you get without government intervention operates "well" or "ideally".
These concerns are of the utmost priority in most fields that involve complex systems, especially processes that we have a hand in influencing, except for economics and politics, where everyone's pet arguments are balls to the wall, and tend to either imply that we should be living with full blown communism or complete unregulated anarchy (okay, I suppose contract law and the military are typically carved out as the exceptions). It's one of the few areas I've ever seen where none of the popular arguments seem to have any sort of balance - and I'm not talking "balance" as in fairness, I'm talking about "balance" as in trivial idea that if both extremes suck (which they usually do, whatever particular idea or disagreement you're arguing over), and something in between is better, then there exists some optimum between the extremes. Step one involves admitting that either extreme has a problem, but instead everyone seems to keep arguing that the whole problem is just that we're not actually at that extreme, 100%.
I am always so frustrated by the notion of "the market is always right". As if a system with billions of complex actors could somehow be described like a first order linear system, that will always find a stable equilibrium.
I'll profess historical ignorance here, though from my knowledge I believe that most instances of government change to a better government (and there have of course been changes to a worse government) have come through sudden revolutions that upset much of the previously existing power hierarchy. Additionally, to me it seems like government is naturally against any change at all, which precludes it from being improved easily. Eliezer has written numerous times elsewhere: "Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change." So I don't think a "scrap the current system" is necessarily a bad idea, though I don't want bloody revolution.
So, any harmful incremental change would be eventually selected out of the gene pool (or at least won't spread). Neutral changes are unlikely to become universal. Therefore, only improvements can be universal enough to be build upon.
I'm not sure that the programming metaphor here fits, considering languages like Haskell et al. that do box you in have had tremendous success. There are also programs that have been 'running things' just fine for 10+ years unchanged. I'm not aware of any government that could claim that, though with the former I think one of the motivators for having a constitutional government in the first place is to box-in the government. The merits of that vs. having a "Lispy" government that does what it pleases can be argued some other time. (Separately, there is an argument of "premature boxing in" that I have used to argue against full-fledged unit tests early on, but that's getting even further off-topic.)
Constitutions can (usually) be amended. The US Constitution in particular has essentially no restrictions on what can be done by amendment (and it's pretty obvious that the one operative restriction can be dealt with if necessary). This is done out of knowledge of our own ignorance -- we cannot possibly conceive of every situation society will face, nor how our governance models will interact with those situations.
This is why libertarianism irritates me. It comes across as such an absolute. Few things are absolutes, and when you're talking about something that will affect millions of people, you can't realistically expect to arrive at an absolutely right solution that will work for everybody every time.