This post is mainly a rant1, but it might find itself informative. The chart above is the percentage of a given word found in books throughout time, as provided by “Google Ngrams”.
Rent-Seeking
I write this to mainly just say the “ROI” on “rent-seeking” is too high. It makes perfect economic sense. The problem is people would call it “laissez-faire free-market capitalism”. Personally, I think it is BS. I would call it a “mixed economy”, with legislation favoring a certain class interest.
To continue calling it a “free-market”, is to continue allowing rent-seeking behaviour from people that can convince our politicians to do them “small favors” while reaping massive rewards from legislation. And I’m also not saying that “capitalism” isn’t a bad thing. I think it can be a very efficient system to exchange information and achieve utlity for each other, but it shouldn’t be self-serving.
No More Democracy?
The problem is, rent-seeking behaviour doesn’t mean we should stop democracy all together. I see and hear too much of the talking point that because there is political power that can be bought, we should just get rid of it. Lets go towards completely and really free and just markets. This line is dubious to me because it’s not like the power that existed in politics goes away, it just goes back to the same people with capital.
The whole point of the picture above is to say that we need to consider how politics and economics are dependent on the other. I don’t know, but it seems that if we don’t do that work we end up in a place that’s more wacko bizzaro than the Twilight Zone.
Nozick
I don’t have much to say on Nozick, but everything he does say follows if you accept his definition of “entitlement” and “voluntary”. I just don’t think markets are absolutely just either and won’t meet the same problems of power. I also don’t think you would have “efficient” “public goods”? nor would the notion of “voting with your wallet” play out well.
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.
Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard, with abhorrence, the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment, than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.
But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”
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I don’t like political discourse online, I want to discuss in good-faith about what works for humanity and how I’d be fine whatever form it is. It doesn’t seem the case from my perspective. ↩