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How Inequality Shapes Our Lives, Part 2

By on September 22, 2010 13

My friend Bryan Caplan has a response to my recent post about inequality. I’m preparing to leave town for the Alabama Philosophical Society and so probably won’t have a chance to reply in detail until I get back. (This also applies to the comments section of my previous post, which I haven’t had a chance to look at.) But three short points just for now:

Organize and Take the Big Bag

a) Bryan’s response focuses on the ways in which free markets would solve the problems I point to if they were really problems. But the whole point of my position is that we don’t have a free market! Left-libertarians have pointed out in detail the ways in which the housing and labour markets, for example, are skewed in ologopolistic and oligopsonistic directions respectively. By ignoring these analyses rather than refuting them, Bryan in effect assumes the problems out of existence; he might just as well say “taxes can’t really be too high, because if they were, consumers would just switch to a rival protection agency with lower fees.”

b) The fact that workers can shirk, that tenants can be delinquent, etc., is beside the point. We already know upfront that each party to a contract can potentially screw over the other. The point is that, given that context, the contracts are then skewed to favour one side. That skewing isn’t counterbalanced by the other side’s capacity for delinquency, because each side has that capacity, and one side has the favourable contract in addition.

c) Yes, there are various regulations that purport to help the weaker party to the contract; but left-libertarians have argued in detail that those regulations in practice actually tend to help the stronger party instead. Maybe we’re right about that and maybe we’re wrong, but as far as I know, Bryan hasn’t addressed those arguments, and we can hardly be expected to pretend we haven’t made them.

How Inequality Shapes Our Lives

By on September 17, 2010 126

Those of us who regard socioeconomic inequality as a serious problem are often accused of “envy,” as though such concerns were simply a matter of begrudging someone else’s having more cookies than we do.

I think this reaction misses the point in a number of ways; let me say just a bit about just one of those ways:

stupid "class envy" ad

Suppose you forget to pay your power bill (or your phone bill, or your cable tv bill, or your internet access bill, or your credit card bill, or whatever). What happens? Your provider disconnects you, and you’ll probably have to pay an extra fee to get service reestablished. You also get a frowny face on your credit report.

On the other hand, suppose that, for whatever reason (internet glitches, downed power lines after a storm, or who knows), you suffer a temporary interruption of service from your provider. Do they offer to reimburse you? Hell no. And there’s no easy way for you to put a frowny face on their credit report.

Now, if you rent your home, take a look at your lease. Did you write it? Of course not. Did you and your landlord write it together? Again, of course not. It was written by your landlord (or by your landlord’s lawyer), and is filled with far more stipulations of your obligations to her than of her obligations to you. It may even contain such ominously sweeping language as “lessee agrees to abide by all such additional instructions and regulations as the lessor may from time to time provide” (which, if taken literally, would be not far shy of a slavery contract). If you’re late in paying your rent, can the landlord assess a punitive fee? You betcha. By contrast, if she’s late in fixing the toilet, can you withhold a portion of the rent? Just try it.

Now think about your relationship with your employer. In theory, you and she are free and equal individuals entering into a contract for mutual benefit. In practice, she most likely orders the hours and minutes of your day in exacting detail. As with the landlord case, the contract is provided by her and is designed to benefit her. She also undertakes to interpret it; and you will find yourself subjected to loads of regulations and directives that you never consented to. And if you try inventing new obligations for her as she does for you, I predict you will be, shall we say, disappointed.

These aren’t merely cases of some people having more stuff than you do. They’re cases in which some people are systematically empowered to dictate the terms on which other people live, work, and trade. And we generally take it for granted. But it’s not obvious that things have to be that way.

When it comes to diagnosis and prescription, those of us who worry about socioeconomic inequality go in two different directions. Some identify the free market as the cause of such inequality, and government regulation as the cure; for others, it’s precisely the other way around. I’m obviously with the latter group; all the phenomena I mentioned are made possible by systematic restrictions on competition. Libertarians need to spend more time focusing on liberty as the solution to these pervasive asymmetries of power, rather than giving the impression that they find them unproblematic.

No Place to Hyde

By on September 7, 2010 6

Since I like what I’ve seen of Steven Moffat’s work (Doctor Who, Coupling, Sherlock), I thought I’d check out Jekyll. The two clips below are all I’ve seen so far (and probably all I’ll have time to see this week, since I leave for a Liberty Fund conference in Virginia on Thursday), but it looks promising:

(I’m pretty sure that what the second clip calls “Episode Two, Scene One” is actually Episode One, Scene Two.) If the actress in these opening scenes looks familiar, that may be because she was the star of the short-lived Bionic Woman reboot. Those who’ve seen the third episode of Sherlock may notice a similarity in characterisation between Moffat’s Hyde and Moffat’s Moriarty.

Addendum:

Oh okay, one more:

Fun stuff, except for Joseph Paterson’s painfully fake American accent. (I didn’t even realise he was supposed to be American until he made the crack about British people being funny.)

Under the Hood

By on September 2, 2010 11

Novelisations tend to be kind of crappy, but I quite liked this passage (well, apart from “That burns hotter than the lava had”):

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:

The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.

The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.

You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.

early Vader sketch by Ralph McQuarrie

You don’t even have lungs anymore.

Mechanism hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.

Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?

And you can’t, not in the way you once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your brain.

You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you.

Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous.

Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right? you try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for burned-away lips and tongue and throat.

“Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right?

I’m very sorry, Lord Vader. I’m afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her.

That burns hotter than the lava had.

“No … no, it is not possible!”

You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death.

Never.

But you remember ….

 

You did it.

You killed her.

You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking of her, you were thinking of yourself…

It is this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith —

Because now your self is all you will ever have.

And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only the droids around you that you implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.

In the end, you do not even want to.

(from Matthew Stover’s novelisation of Revenge of the Sith)

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