Hacker News Reader

Comment by flycaliguy | Hacker News Reader

Buddy just asked a question that solicited an informative answer for all of us to read. Not sad.

The general "sad" for me is that HN has so many strong libertarian types who start from an assumption that government regulation is practically always wrong and done for corrupt purposes. Learning that this is not the case is a lesson one could easily pick up much earlier in life, so it's sad that they made it this far without understanding that.

I put it down to the poor state of our mathematical education. The naive understanding of economic systems libertarians display is actually fairly similar to what you see in introductory dynamical-systems courses. You can, with great care, construct some "well-behaved" systems where you present a set of rules, and the expected thing happens: you push lever X and Y happens. Raise the minimum wage and unemployment rises!

But of course, most systems are not so well-behaved, so that is only a lead-in to the real examples, where you change the setup slightly and suddenly analysis grows more complex. Now what happens when you push lever X depends on what region of the state-space you're in! And sometimes pushing lever X can change the region of the state-space you're in, too! There is feedback and internal dynamics. I see very little libertarian economics that displays even a 101-level understanding of any of that.

If you keep treating your intellectual opponents like this, you're going to get trounced the next time you run into a smart one.

To be very brief, you seem to think that libertarians believe, roughly,

(1) "the world is simple, so we should have simple rules."

Instead, you suggest:

(2) "the world is complicated, so we should have complicated rules."

But this claim is entirely unresponsive to:

(3) "the world is complicated, so we should have simple rules."

which is what most libertarians I know actually think. If you respond to (1) when your opponents are arguing for (3), you will not have productive conversations.

Our attitude towards any law really should be a presumption of doubt, especially laws that interfere with consensual activities. Laws are blunt objects that come with their own enforcement costs and unintended consequences. We should be especially wary about regulations whose benefits are sharply concentrated among a small group (say, hotel owners), and whose drawbacks (say, slightly higher hotel costs for everyone else) are widely dispersed. That's standard public choice theory. That doesn't mean that no regulations are ever justifiable (far from it!), but it does suggest that we not favor regulation for the sake of regulation.

I don't like to psychologize people, but I wonder whether this attitude is a sort of mental heuristic on the left, which often finds itself fighting with folks on the right who seem to believe, roughly, that regulation is intrinsically bad, and should be abolished. This has encouraged the counter-formation of the view that regulation is intrinsically good, and should be preserved. I guess that's a little easier to remember than the subtler view that regulation is intrinsically bad, but should sometimes be preserved when it can still improve outcomes over the status quo.

It's almost as though you have to examine things case by case and decide whether a dangerous tool should be applied, instead of just forming a mental affiliation with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com