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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Do you mean antitrust? I don't see how that's relevant to my comments, and I don't see how it can possibly make me a hypocrite.

I don't want monopolies for the same reason I don't want foreigners: it's bad for me. No hypocrisy needed.

"I support everyone else following principles that benefit me, but I don’t want to follow those principles myself because they dont benefit me" is like the definition of hypocrisy.

What principles? What are you talking about?

I don't want monopolies (i.e. I think that people should be prohibited by law from colluding with other providers to increase the market prices) of goods that I buy, but for I want other people selling the same thing I sell (labor) to be forced by law to collude with me to raise the market prices.

Fair markets for thee but not for me.

I'm not KMC but this objection is farcical.

Monopolies and flooding the labour market with low-skilled workers are both activities that generate significant harmful externalities. That's the principle motivating my support for both positions and I don't see any conflicts or contradictions there at all (it also motivates my support for a lot of environmental regulations like not dumping toxic waste into local drinking supplies even if that would give a moderate boost to GDP). I'm not even against monopolies on an existential basis - some industries lead to natural monopolies, and in those cases I want them regulated to reduce those externalities rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Externalities are a very valid point, and one I am sympathetic to in some cases, if the case is actually made that the externalities exist and are not being addressed. However, KMC's statement was

I don't want monopolies for the same reason I don't want foreigners: it's bad for me. No hypocrisy needed.

That does not sound to me like an argument about societal costs and benefits.

I assumed that KMC was actually a member of society and that the "bad for me" part was referring to him taking on his share of the societal consequences, as the pain and externalities aren't evenly distributed (if you're the person who gets to pay slave wages and ignore worker protection laws you don't really notice the costs that you're imposing on other people).

Ah, I read it as "bad for me (personally, because it will lower my wage personally)".

if you're the person who gets to pay slave wages and ignore worker protection laws you don't really notice the costs that you're imposing on other people

And likewise if you buy products where part of the supply chain of that product involved the labor of people who do not receive the pay or worker protections that American workers receive, you don't notice those costs, but you do benefit from the reduced prices. And if the labor involved was voluntary, I think that's basically fine.

Ah, I read it as "bad for me (personally, because it will lower my wage personally)".

That is in fact one of the ways in which those externalities manifest in daily life, and an extremely objectionable one too. It also impacts housing costs, infrastructure maintenance (and hence either increased taxes or degradations in service), etc. I don't think there's any real incompatibilities here - these things are bad for him personally because the costs are spread across the entirety of society while the benefits largely accrue to an already privileged(in the actual sense of the word, not the woke one) few.

you don't notice those costs,

Actually, in a lot of cases, you do. There's a very strong cultural perception (and one that matches to my lived experience) that a lot of items manufactured in China are substantially inferior in quality to (more expensive) equivalents that were made locally in the past. But at the same time I think your argument here has some extremely nasty consequences. To take the same principles and apply them at a different scale...

"If you smoke heroin then you're probably not going to notice the costs associated with becoming a heroin addict, but you do benefit from the reduced anxiety and increased happiness."

Ignoring long-term consequences of your actions because the immediate payoff is big and the negative consequences are small and gradual is not, in my opinion at least, a worthwhile strategy. Did you notice how much of Trump's rhetoric focused on these particular issues? Those policies, despite allowing people to benefit from the price-savings associated with labour conditions so bad that the factories have to install anti-suicide nets, have had such a dramatic hollowing-out effect on the economy that Donald Trump was able to ride the resulting resentment all the way to the white house. You can draw an incredibly direct line from the encouragement of outsourcing and illegal immigration to the Trump presidency, and that line also passes through the current (and in my opinion dysfunctional) levels of political polarisation in American society.

Protectionism applied to different areas of the economy is going to have different results. It's probably always going to lead to a reduction in total economic growth, but that doesn't mean it won't have other effects. They will have different externalities.

If your goal is something other than total economic growth or strict economic fairness - then I don't see how it's hypocritical to want to put your thumb on some areas and not others. He hasn't stated that his driving principle is maximum economic freedom for everyone.

Pure economic growth and strict fairness are pretty thin "neoliberal" goals. I think there are better things to set your political compass towards.

I think if people choose their preferred policies purely on the basis of whether or not those policies personally benefit them, and choose whether to advocate for those policies based on how much they personally will be helped or hurt by those policies, we'll end up with some pretty bad protectionist policies (e.g. the Jones Act, rent-seeking licensing regimes, and other ways of burning the commons for personal gain).

If that makes me a neoliberal, well then I guess I'm a neoliberal.

Wasn't the example earlier in the thread someone wishing an illegal immigrant well because he personally felt sympathy for the immigrant and immigration personally benefitted the immigrant?

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