Markets want to be conservative?

The other day I said something that should strike a reader as odd: Markets want to be conservative. And in that, I did not mean "conservative" as a collection of political positions that some pundit might want to assign to the term; I mean the much older and more literal meaning of the term. The sort of market economy we have today resists some types of change.

It's not an inherent property of the market itself. It's a product of social influence. With the creation of each market, each service, each industry, a special-interest group is created. The invention of the personal automobile lead to the automotive industry - and all those involved in the manufacture, sale, and maintenance of the automobile have a vested interest in consumers using cars, and will try to influence policy to fit.

The only change that the market embraces is one that makes someone more money; privatizing prisons, for example, has backfired by creating a lobby - one with, in many cases, pre-existing ties to state legislators that landed them the contracts in the first place - with a vested interest in increasing the prison population. Insurance companies have a vested interest in preventing health care reform - because successful reforms would obliterate their bottom line.

In a land where everything is for sale - including legislative access and the publicity needed to get into office - the market provides incentives for parties to fight against change. We've seen it with the tobacco industry; we've seen it with state-run lotteries; we're seeing it now, once again, with health care. In each case, the profit motive of the private sector puts the brakes on changes in public policy.

When I look at the privatization of prisons, I am not surprised that some states may achieve short-term savings in higher efficiency operations; I am also not surprised that in the long term, it comes back to bite them in the tail, as suddenly there's a group that benefits if recidivism rises, if indeed crime rates rise, and fundamentally if prison populations rise - a motive that does not exist in a publicly run prison.

Slavery

Today was Juneteenth, and so the historical ending point of slavery in the US has passed through more minds than it usually does this week. And yet, archaic institution or not, slavery captures a lot of creative thought.

There are several modern arguments hidden in the corners of the moral and ethical spectrum of opinions that favor slavery. All - well, almost all - are unwilling to say that the institution of slavery as practiced in the US was a-OK. Hereditary racially-based lifelong slavery in which the owners have unlimited rights to dispose of their property as they see fit? Certainly not!

But while I think that the wrong was in the humans-owning-other-humans part, others would suggest it is in the other details. Why, if it is entered into with agreement by the party being enslaved, appropriate rights left to the slave, has nothing to do with racial oppression, what of it? Shouldn't people be free to enter into such a contract?

It is a perfectly libertarian turn of phrase. If slavery is a transferable contract, shouldn't it be legal? Leaving aside the sticky issue of people being pressed into slavery under duress, false pretenses, et cetera. There is a subtle point in the works. While undoubtedly there are those foolish enough to sign themselves onto an open-ended transferable contract - and some of the more clever transferable labor contracts look something like that - there remains the freedom to walk away from a contract at any time - throw up your hands and walk off the job. You may be out money; you may even be liable for financial penalties; but you retain that liberty.

Perhaps most importantly, it retains a sharp distinction between people and property, which is a dangerous line to blur. And perhaps we should carefully look at the things that look like slavery - prison labor to fill pockets, transferable contracts, and the penalty clauses allowed to labor contracts - and ask ourselves "What is the difference between this, and some nicely cleaned-up version of slavery?"

And those of you in the BDSM crowd who are into the master-slave relationships and roleplay on a purely consensual basis, who can end it at any time? You can ignore all that.

Measuring a libertarian

I've been thinking about this one for a while. There are social libertarians; there are economic libertarians; the idea is less government. And at the end of the day, I think that this might be the best way of all to measure whether or not someone really is a libertarian:

What is out there, that you think is wrong, but nevertheless believe should be legal?

For example, as I mentioned the other day, I think prostitution should be legal - carefully regulated in the public interest, but legal; however, I do think there's something terribly wrong with selling sex services. I'm even bothered by the overly mercantile nature of much dating, by mothers who tell their daughters they should judge a man by the price on the ring he brings them, by the high class escort services that carefully step around prostitution laws, by gold diggers, and by "Who wants to marry a millionaire?"

I am at least a little bit of a libertarian in that way. I want the government to step in because there is a compelling public interest - not because my personal sense of right and wrong is affronted.