Hold On Tight to Your Burgers, or At Least Chew Fast

William Saletan is on the case in the new "War On Junk Food". I'd like to point out that, while I was aiming at humor with Cheeseburger in Purgatory (and note that the pictured food in Saletan's article is a cheeseburer), my tone was light, but the substance was heavy. That is, I was really serious about the threat. Given their druthers, the nanny-staters will ban junk food, and the comparison to drugs will fuel the fire. At least some of the folks over at Reason are fairly sanguine about all this (Nick Gillespie, I believe, among them). Their point being that this will amount to overreach, i.e. people will revolt when they come for our cheeseburgers. I hope they are right, but I am personally a bit more antsy. In spite of ample evidence that marijuana is no worse than, and quite likely more benign than, alcohol, it remains banned and people are being locked up every day for possession. If evidence doesn't really matter, then even specious evidence, such as some of this speculation about "food addiction" can be a powerful weapon in the hands of the demagogues.

The "Tyranny" of Scale?

I really do love Slate. Generally excellent writing, a decent ideological balance (or at least intellectual honesty), and a fascinating array of topics. But there is the occasional clunker, such as this piece of pseudo-economic "thinking" on "The Tyranny of the Market." by Joel Waldfogel. I could not refrain from jumping into the Fray, here is my post from that forum:

Lord, what dreck. So there is a minimum necessary size of a market for some product before it becomes profitable to make that product. Hallelujah, Mr. Waldfogel has discovered economies of scale, thanks for sharing that with us! Somehow I suspect that Friedman, Hayek, and von Mises (with a couple of Nobel prizes between them) had actually heard of this concept.

Heavy sigh. No, free markets are not, in fact, magical fairy gum-drop land, where all is a happiness and light. They're just (almost always) better than the alternative. Setting aside the hard-core free market question of whether it is appropriate to take from the majority to benefit the minority (or vice versa!), Native Americans have not, generally speaking, had to go barefoot up until now, I suspect. Aside from making do with ill-fitting mass produced (and therefore inexpensive) shoes, I don't doubt that many purchased specially made shoes--when they could afford them. And there's the crux, to the extent that Native Americans had trouble finding shoes to fit them (as opposed to Nikes, which is not the same thing) it was almost certainly a matter of money. Another news flash: poverty causes deprivation. While generally libertarian, I am not religiously so, and so I am not opposed to any and all welfare spending. The best way to help people with little money, in the short run, is to give them money. With money, they can get shoes, or food, or medicine or whatever the hell they need, and the government doesn't need to enforce an arcane list of requirements on businesses in order to force them to make specific products. In the LONG run, the best way to help poor people is economic growth, and here the record is unequivocal: capitalism beats the pants off socialism.

What the modern shoe industry (and economic activity in general) has accomplished is to continually provided better and better products at better and better prices. Those people who had the most common feet shapes and sizes benefited before those with atypical feet. What is gratifying about Nike's decision is that they are now giving a new group of consumers access to the same superior products, in terms of price to performance, that others with more typical feet have been enjoying for some time. The fact that Nike doesn't see a lot of direct profit in this line of shoes, but is doing it anyway for goodwill and good PR, is ALSO a sign of market economics at work. Good PR is good marketing, just to restate yet another observation that should be obvious, but apparently doesn't occur to Waldfogel.

The good news is that the march of technology and entrepreneurial innovation is pushing economies of scale lower and lower. A prime example being the "long tail" of Chris Anderson fame. Without the same physical limitations of a traditional bookstore, Amazon is able to offer something like a bajillion times more titles (forgive the technical lingo, I've been reading too much economics), because low inventory and other overhead means it needs to sell fewer and fewer of any given title to make money. Similarly, technology has changed the profitability scale at the publisher level as well; digital presses have lowered the cost of printing dramatically, so that books become profitable at much lower production numbers, and many more titles with smaller market potential can now be published.

Much the same can be said for vast swaths of products in many different markets, including pharmaceuticals, another topic touched on here. But it should not escape notice that one of the major contributors to the $1 billion price tag on getting a drug to market is... (anyone?) government regulation. This is not to say we should have no oversight of the industry, but the cost of getting FDA approval is huge, and makes the bar ever higher for the marketability of any given drug. Allowing greater flexibility in approval for smaller niche-market drugs would almost certainly work better than some hypothetical mandate to force researchers to work on some particular drug type.

A final note: Since the market allegedly "tyrannized" them, why don't we ask Native Americans just how well the U.S. government has taken care of them over the years? Any takers?

Girl Scout Death Squads

Another front in the war to ensure you eat virtuously: Girl Scout Cookies. As the author, Katherine Mangu-Ward, points out, at least this particular campaign isn't advocating a government ban--yet. But the same puritanical impulse drives this as the trans fat ban, and this sounds like busybody meddling to me. I hope the Girl Scouts resist the pressure. I think I'll buy an extra box or two this year.

More IATF RFC

Kling follows up and, among other things, defends the link between libertarians and "conservatives" by arguing that the Left is "religiously" worse than the Right. I'd say he's right about the Left's ideological religiosity, but wrong that it is worse than the Right's. As long as placating the Republican base means visiting Bob Jones University and paying respects to the likes of Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson, the GOP can never really be the party of liberty.

The term "social engineering" is often used sneeringly by "conservatives" to dismiss "liberal" programs aimed at, say, ending poverty. But "engineering" really just refers to a teleological enterprise, i.e. trying to shape or build a structure (or other artifact) with a specific goal or vision in mind, and this can be accomplished by proscriptions as well as prescriptions. What are prohibitions against all manner of individual choices, such as with whom we may enter into life partner relationships, and what sort of chemicals win intake in private, if not "social engineering?" Maybe we don't see these restrictions as such because we are accustomed to them, but those sorts of limits are certainly designed to make our society "better" by constraining our individual choices. Just because something is traditional doesn't make it right. Like Kling and his "liberal" friends, I myself lead a pretty traditional or "conservative" lifestyle, but living conservatively either brings its own rewards or it doesn't. If it does (and I find that it does), then the government need not enforce it; if it does not, then government sanction is unjustified and counterproductive.

In proving my libertarian bona fides, let me take just a moment to vent at the Left again. Just as Kling decries how the GOP Right has betrayed small government conservatives in the arena of fiscal responsibility, so to has the Democratic Left stomped all over small government ideals in the domain of personal liberty. Just to cite a couple of examples, they want to essentially expand the drug war to include tobacco, and they also seem hell-bent on legislating the foods we are allowed to purchase and eat. And there are at least a couple of dimensions to these prohibitionist impulses. One of their big justifications is that because society is on the hook for medical expenses incurred by poor lifestyle choices, society is thereby empowered to prohibit those choices. This is, indeed, Hayek's road to serfdom in spades, look no further. If the government is daddy when it's time to pay the bills, then you have to live by daddy's rules… But while fiscal responsibility is the enabling tool for government expansion in this scheme, it is hardly the ultimate impetus; the driving force of the Left's vision of the nanny state is plain old unadulterated Puritanism. Junk food and tobacco simply do not fit into the moral standards of today's so-called "progressives," and they are going to take them from you by force, if need be.

No, I cannot abide the Right's Bible-thumping moralizing, but I can only occasionally barely tolerate the Left's preachy paternalism—just long enough to vote for divided government, which I did. Principled non-voting increasingly looks like my preferred approach, in general, with a vote for the Democrats if divided government is at stake.

Kling's IATF RFC

I set out to respond to Arnold Kling's interesting "IATF RFC" article at TCS, but realized as I digested his piece that I might well fall outside the scope of his intended audience. Kling has described his own journey as that from the "far left" to a libertarian right, and his RFC suggests to me that he may be a bit more of a neocon than I had realized. However, let me hasten to add that while I don't exactly share their worldview, I don't use the term "neocon" as a slur, and indeed see some valid points in their program. I would further hazard a guess that I have moved along a similar ideological evolutionary path as Kling, but perhaps not as far. I neither would have describe myself as initially "far left," nor would I choose the term "conservative" to attach to my current libertarianism. I side with Friedman (and according to Friedman, Hayek as well) in preferring the term "liberal." As an acknowledgement to modern usage, it is possible we have to accept "libertarian," but it seems to put us into a political/linguistic ghetto.

I continue to adamantly reject the GOP as the proper home of a (classic) liberal or libertarian. It also occurs to me that I see a revision to a classic libertarian metaphor which helps explain why. I would argue that there are at least two roads to serfdom. There is the road of creeping statist economic encroachment which concerned Hayek as he coined the phrase, and his intellectual heirs, Friedman chief among them, have focused their efforts there. It does seem that we have slid further along this road in recent decades, but this "progress" always seems to come in fits and starts, and, significantly, there are occasional "setbacks" to this march, where economic freedom ekes out an actual victory. (Think of both welfare reform and the expansion of the earned income tax credit under (gasp!) Clinton.)

But the other road to serfdom is even more direct, and progress can move swiftly. I refer to the expansion of an ever-grasping, preening, imperious, and unaccountable executive. As has been a recurring theme ever since I started this blog, the current administration has engaged in not merely an aggressive advance of executive power, but a breathtaking disregard for the rule of law. In a particularly revealing profile of Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington at the New Yorker, we can see that this executive power grab was really in the "master plan" all along, and that 9/11 was opportunistically seized upon to advance the agenda. To be fair, I would note that 9/11 was more than mere pretext, since Cheney and Addington surely genuinely believe in this mission, and that the attacks not only advanced but also justified their cause. (I found the Addington piece via an excellent overview of the Addington/Cheney/Bush power grab by Dahlia Lithwick.) But this vastly expanded vision of Presidential power is still a fundamentally bad idea. As important as our Constitution was, the Magna Carta was probably even more fundamental, as the notion of codified law and limited powers owes its modern incarnation to that document. Secret executive detention without independent judicial and legislative oversight is precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to stop. We proceed down this road at great peril to our freedom. Surely, the Star Chamber is another form of serfdom.

On social issues, Kling also surprised me a bit. I agree with him and many, many others, so-called "conservatives" and "liberals" alike, that the family is an institution of great importance, even primacy. While his passing mention of gay rights seems tolerant, it is a bit less so than I would have expected. I see no particular reason for a "profound" skepticism regarding gay families and their role in strengthening (or weakening) families overall. I also raise an eyebrow when I note that Judeo-Christian values are singled out by Kling for mention when discussing religious foundations of our modern moral values. I do not subscribe to the notion that, say, Islam in inherently less tolerant and peaceful. Yes, yes, I have heard ad nauseum about Mohammed and the other Caliphs' roles as simultaneous political and religious leaders, as well as the warlike passages of the Koran. But you really do not have to spend much time with the Old Testament before you run across barbarity on an epic scale. The Israelites were told by God to exterminate all sorts of heathens (and apparently often did as they were told), and separation of church and state is nowhere to be found! History and cultural evolution have produced a (generally) more benign religious tradition in the modern West. The problem with large swaths of the Muslim world is precisely that-cultural and historical, both India and Indonesia represent relatively healthy and open societies with large numbers of Muslims. I do NOT accept that violence and intolerance is "baked into" Islam in some way. As a secular person (but with a religious upbringing), I think that while all of the major religions are potentially intolerant and dangerous, they can also be instruments of positive change.

Most of the rest of Kling's libertarianism I can heartily endorse. He has written numerous articles advocating effectively for reduced government interference in health care, for example. And I have almost come 'round to endorsing vouchers for education, thanks to the writings of Friedman, Kling, and others, but I still have a cavil or two about how it can be done constitutionally and fairly. I'll leave those for another time.