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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Free markets are pretty neat! They solve a whole host of problems quite elegantly. I'm pretty sure they don't solve all problems, though, and it seems to me that for some problems, they only offer a solution if the whole system is free-market end-to-end. It is not obvious to me that each incremental freeing of a market has a linearly-positive effect. I think it is obvious that a market can get "more free" in specific ways that benefit some and not others, such that the system ends up worse-off on average when that "freedom" does not actually generalize across the whole system.

More generally, there's a thing I've observed where people argue that people should apply policy X in one specific area, where it will be to their short-term advantage, while absolutely stonewalling such policies everywhere else, where the people on the other side would derive advantage from them. Call it "policy arbitrage". I prefer specific policies because I think they will have good effects, not because they have a specific label on them. If there's a label I like, but it seems both that the policy it's applied to will have bad effects on net, and also that it won't do much to actually advance other policies that seem better, even ones with the same label, I'm not going to support it.

The market, as a whole is not actually free. It's somewhat plausible to me that an actual free market would be better than what we have, but this change would not actually make the market as a whole free, does not seem likely to even measurably help in making the whole market free, and does seem likely to cause immediate, highly significant harms. If you tell me that I should support such policies because "free markets", I'm going to tell you to come back when you've actually got the market free elsewhere. What I'm not going to do is embrace immediate, obvious harms in the hope that nebulous, uncertain benefits materialize, someday, at some unspecified date in the future.

TL;DR - Free markets != Free(er) markets, so arguments for the one don't generalize to the other.