Economist’s View is becoming my one-stop shop for economics—Brad DeLong without the rants, Greg Mankiew without the catty asides, EconLog or Marginal Revolution without the wingnuttery. Today again, a nifty little item I wouldn’t have spotted otherwise—libertarian Jeff Miron with a gentle skewering of those who think the academy is run by lefties. I won’t repeat Miron (or EV) here, except for this final paragraph:
Perhaps the truth is that many conservatives do not really believe in competition; instead they want conservative ideas imposed because these ideas are not doing well in the marketplace.
Say, what? You’re just figuring that out? Listen very carefully: competition is for thee but not for me. Everybody wants free markets for the other guy, and nobody wants them for themselves. Why would they? By definition, a free market is one where everyone is running as fast as they can, and nobody makes it a profit.
Sheesh, there are grownup “libertarians” who are just figuring that out? This ought to be old news. But to remove any doubt, we turn to Albert O. Hirschmann. The “model of perfect competition,” he says, “contains [a] basic paradox:”
[S]ociety as a whole produces a comfortable and perhaps steadily increasing surplus, but every individual firm considered in isolation is barely getting by, so that a single false step will be its undoing. As a result, everyone is constantly made to perform at the top of his form and society as a whole is operating on its –forever expanding—“production frontier,” with economically useful resources fully occupied.
So Exit, Voice, and Loyalty 15 (1970). Or as Hirschmann continues (in a triumph of concision) “There’s a slacker born every minute.”
This is news to anybody? It needs to be a meme.
Fn:Only two Amazon reviews? Two? This is a classic. But then, Amazon...
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