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That's because the laissez-faire market forces you invoke are not the core of our prosperity, just one of the factors leading to it, so your comment did sound a
by TuringTest 11y ago
That's because the laissez-faire market forces you invoke are not the core of our prosperity, just one of the factors leading to it, so your comment did sound as an extreme parody of a right wing position (which may be more or less reasonable depending on how strongly you support it).
Friedman and Hayek wrote their work before we had a thorough understanding of how complex systems are optimized. Thanks to more powerful computers, we now know that search guided by purely local improvements gets stuck in local minimum (in Economics, those are the Pareto points). Those local minima can be incredibly far away from a true global optimum, but can't be improved by "consensual and mutually beneficial transactions".
Sometimes you do need to take actions that temporarily inconvenience one actor to achieve a point that will benefit all them in the long term; see the prisoner's dilemma for a simple example. The GP post mentioned 40-hours work weeks; those weren't brought by laissez-faire economics nor individual negotiation either, 60 or 80 hours a week were the norm before socialism.
Capitalism tends to create immense concentrations of power without checks and balances on the hands of tycoons, of the kind that should make any true libertarian be very afraid of those holding it. The system that really works best is one where wealth is created for a few years through capitalism, and then that wealth is redistributed by government's welfare politics to the wider population. This is what has been going on in Western countries in the last century, bringing us stability and
avoiding the frequent revolutions that plagued Europe and the Americas in all its previous history.
- marcoperaza 11y agoInterestingly, Friedman, and I think Hayek as well, supported a universal basic income. Friedman called it a negative income tax, but its the same premise. I think a lot of laissez-faire capitalists would get behind that idea, if it was coupled by the permanent abolition of all other welfare programs and most labor regulations. It's definitely an idea I can get behind. It would require some constitutional amendment for both sides to trust each other enough.
- jessaustin 11y agoOne reason why many such characters would support basic income is that it would ostensibly remove the provision of benefits from the overview of the bureaucracy. That's the same reason that many others would not support it. I'm very tempted to throw in with the former, except that I worry about the follow-on effects of basic income. Would a basic income just be a windfall for landlords, as they all increased rents by some large percentage of the average basic income? Or would the formerly-urban formerly-poor head for the hills, now that they could budget over the long term without relying on urban amenities? This would be a windfall for a different set of landlords and real estate investors, but it would drastically change the nature of 80% of the communities in the nation. That's not even to consider the wealth effects on markets more elastic than housing. It would be a grand experiment, but somebody would start crying.
- marcoperaza 11y agoI think a gradual phase-in of the basic income, and a corresponding phase-out of existing programs, would avoid the pains of a sudden change.
- mike429 11y agoGreat string of comments, interesting that Friedman supports basic income. If anyone wants to read my comment far down below and answer any points you disagree with that'd be super welcome! (it starts with "With this comment I'm answering both PG's post and an answer to his post that can be read here: http://cryoshon.co/2016/01/02/a-response-to-paul-grahams-art..." http://cryoshon.co/2016/01/02/a-response-to-paul-grahams-art...)