in defense of seasonal giving and observance

We're in the thick of the holiday season which seems to translate to folks typically most aligned ideologically with myself as a time of stress/sugar/familial pressure/rampant, vulgar and unsustainable displays of consumerism/misplaced religious fervor/pointless, overdone and tacky decorating.

For the most part, I fully recognize and relate to my people reacting with a high level of vitriol and venom to the season. It is, for the largest part, a grotesque, painfully consumerist-based time coated with thick, misplaced doses of Jesus and sparkles. But really, I feel like all our american seasons are somehow this way.

A note before continuing: this post is based on my own pop-philosophy that should one choose to live in a community, thoughtful participation and deliberate choices of non-participation are mandatory and must be communicated to sustain the health of the community. If you choose to not maintain a community (and get all hermitized and make trees/squirrels/squid/ferns your exclusive community) then none of the following is AT ALL relevant to you!

So I'm going to address a few things about xmas and will begin with one thing that drives me crazy which is the attitude, growing in cultural acceptance, that I often hear this time of year: "I don't have to care about seasonal compassion because, as an authentic person, I care and am demonstrative about how I care all year round" or, as a writer from exit 133 put it:

"I’ve never been a big fan of gift giving. It’s a lot of pressure. I’m uncomfortable accepting gifts and I don’t like the obligation I feel to give them. I much prefer to give things to people as I come across them throughout the year, not on prescribed holidays. And I prefer to give what I want to give because I want to give it, not because I’m told to give it. Often there is an expectation to just give something, but I can’t resolve to give something that doesn’t have meaning. And I don’t like to give things that someone could have just bought themselves. That’s not a gift, that’s a favor.

For me, without some meaning behind a gift, the giving is a shallow exercise in responsibility. The best gifts are able to capture something unique about the relationship between giver and receiver; they create a union between creativity and intention, somehow holding the promise of a new start while expressing an appreciation for the blessings of the past."

Okay; I gave the writer more space than deserved in this post but I feel like this is such a quintessential "individualistic/non-consumer/sustainably" minded statement that so many of my peers identify with that I have to point at it and say: quiet you, with all your excuses!

I think the idea of utilizing a season as an excuse to reflect, think about the kind things people have done for you and choose to deliberately reciprocate is not a "shallow exercise in responsibility," it is instead a deep and often vital exercise in responsibility. I absolutely feel like you can identify ANY season for this exercise--it doesn't have to be xmas--but if you aspire to be a mindful, compassionate, responsive, loving and considerate friend, well then, you absolutely should pick your freaking season to give.

I know not everyone is motivated conscientiously when giving at Christmas but really, it’s not your place to say who is or is not. This whiney feeling of discomfort because of the "pressure" surrounding gift-giving; being "uncomfortable" with receiving gifts; and the idea that you should be able to give what you want, when you want to give it versus giving what someone may actually want and when are all just excuses for insecurity and laziness; so you:

-- deflect the pressure you may feel to be and/or show that you are thankful by making others uncomfortable when they put forth effort to show they care ;
-- put off digging in and finding your own meaning and impetus for giving; and
-- label other's efforts as "favors" vs gifts, drawing a completely arbitrary line for which only you control the definition.

I know a lot of people who harness this idea that meaningful giving cannot truly be seasonally-motivated and throw it back in the faces of those who do give seasonally(which is rude and mean); and I also know a lot of people who meaningfully give all year round (which is considerate and kind!).

I guess my secret to relative comfort in giving during the holiday season is that I am blessed with incredibly reciprocal and thoughtful friends who show they care year-round so I don't have expectations that people will give me shit. But for me, holidays help because consideration is a responsibility that shouldn’t be neglected: holidays force me to pull some time out of my schedule to think about whom I love, why I love them and how I can show them.

I feel like specially-designated days hold power: whether birthdays or holidays, I think it's important to allow certain days to hold greater significance because we can all use some outside motivation every once in a while; it's really hard to endow every day with significance (though we should! Must stay conscientious/conscious/considerate at all times!). If xmas didn't happen, I would never make cookies and then what sort of world would this be?

I also consider holidays to have huge communal impact that magically motivates emergence.* We all experience a holiday if we live in a community. We all feel some sort of pressure to observe even if that observation is as a spectator and not a participant. Either role is ok; it's ok to observe and make choices about catalytic occurrences but, like most things, it's not so helpful to jump up on a tall horse, point to everyone with a different method of observation/participation than your own, whine and loudly judge them.

The true challenge with a day that has been arbitrarily defined as significant is to make a choice about your response to the significance, to either find a method to make this significance inclusive or find a way to stay out of it without blaming/judging others for their choices. The search for inclusive practices is the true work of those of us who choose to participate. I think it's hard to feel included in christmas but if you can find what it is that makes you feel that you are, it can make all the difference. And this doesn't really have anything to do with presents.

Ways I find to include myself in xmas:

Singing/ reading out loud with my family/ baking/ walking in winter weather/ watching an insane amount of seasonal movies/ listening to xmas music incessantly/ searching for new and stirring xmas music incessantly/ drinking mulled wine/ drinking toddies/ drinking silk nog/ writing xmas cards and forgetting to send them/ communing silently with my xmas tree/ progressively rearranging all my xmas ornaments/ inserting secret, seasonal accessories into my wardrobe that only I would care about or notice/ collecting vintage ornaments and décor/ reading old xmas cards/ buying holiday books at Kings Books/ making mixed xmas cds/ giving gifts of all sorts all through december.

Fonts

I am noticing an increasingly alarming trend which falls in direct opposition of my concepts of branding and font identification. Some background:

First: I believe that fonts are dramatically important. They are an essential accessory and means of expression. They can convey all sorts of important and eye-opening leanings in a person both professionally and personally. For example: as a grant writer, I have recently realized the deeper and reactive importance of serifs.

Second: I believe that consistency in fonts is important within a single work. I am not saying you have to limit your font choices to one (although that is preferable) but should you choose to mix it up your motivation behind that choice should be evident, readable and utilitarian. Because really, when you're trying to convey knowledge, what is more important?? I know I may have some font-consistency opponents out there but I am getting more and more vehement on the topic so I suggest you rally and deliver your opposing thoughts soon.

So, to get to the meat here: In much television and film, I have noticed a high and inappropriate level of attention being played to fonts that identify locations and places, the most laughable being that awful new show starring Pacey, "Fringe" and the most recent being the new James Bond " Quantum of Solace."

In Fringe, the fonts float in ridiculous ways, in ridiculous places and interact subtly and ridiculously with the locations they are identifying. It is hugely distracting and clearly a strange and misplaced allocation of creativity. It's like they have a whole team dedicated to font selection/placement/interaction/size which is insane when it's such a bad show and clearly needs creative work in other, more critical areas. It got to a point (and granted my household only made it all the way through one episode) where we were MUCH more excited about the next opportunity to spot the outrageous fonts and committed to their zany adventures than we were to the actual storyline and/or characters.

In Quantum of Solace, fonts are, again also used to identify setting and are nearly as distracting, irrelevant and ridiculous. Although Quantum of Solace is actually a good and fun movie which takes the pressure off the creative font choice team on having to carry the entire project. also, thankfully, the setting identification is much less prevalent than it is in Fringe.

Point: Hey, entertainment folk! Less creative energy expelled on font choices. It's real stupid. May I suggest identifying a signature font per project, make an executive decision about screen placement/size/color and then stick to it. It's better branding and, even more important, it will quell my wrath/ridicule!

off-topic FYI: the AMC movie theater in Tacoma (on Mildred) offers FOUR DOLLAR AM movies! They start showing films at 10am and, until noon, the shows only cost $4 a ticket. These are first run too! Neat! Cheap!

pots and pans

I was too excited to sleep and all the reports from the BBC, interviewing regular, incredibly excited and inspired americans was just too much for me to stay in bed anymore. It's so strange. I don't have high hopes for the obama administration, I am simply inspired by the movement of the people.

Americans have chosen to come together in one important respect: we will not be represented by people of questionable integrity and intellect motivated only by the interest of a few. And I know so much of this "change" is impressively powerful propaganda and spin but, goddamit, it was the right spin, the spin that I was looking for and clearly what the majority of americans were seeking. Obama has managed to harness the mistrust, the cynicism and suspicion of progressively-minded people and link it simply to a need for change and to himself as a catalyst, the first, on a national level, to crest the coming wave of new political leadership.

I don't believe that racism and bigotry and hate based on ignorance have been blasted from this country by electing a black president but it is heartening to hear so many people of different backgrounds and ethnicities sharing their own inspired and excited feelings regarding the significance of this change. I believe america is a country founded on opportunism, greed, dominance, and fierce and unyielding autonomy. None of these forces come together to foster any level of compassion or openmindedness but from it's inception, due to it's rampaging pace and growth, america has been in discussion with a strong and tempering force for reflection and compassion that at key moments has found footing and a voice, inciting change for the good of the people.

America's history has nurtured the debate between these two forces and for the first real time in my life, I feel that america is maturing: remembering this discussion, collectively leaning towards cooperation, towards community, striving towards some common ground where we can just begin to consider that we all may have more in common than not. I keep thinking on the words of the poem by Emma Lazarus, carved at the Statue of Liberty monument and I feel that today they ring a little truer:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Fiasco

I really like that Lupe Fiasco doesn't edit out his breathing.

Came across this...

So I'm reprinting it; I am finding it useful:

This is the html version of the file http://fluff.info/blog/argue.pdf.
Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.

Page 1

How to argue with a conservative

∗

B Klemens

July 7, 2004

Here are a few notes on what I feel are the best arguments to use when debating with a con-

servative. It covers that narrow slice of argumentation that is both a valid counterargument

to the average conservative’s claims and is also comprehensible to a conservative. There are

a multitude of other means of debate, but I feel that those discussed here are the most likely

to succeed.

I self-identify as an economist, meaning that most of the discussion here will be economic

[even including a few technical notes from basic economic theory in square brackets]. For

the social issues, however, have a look at Section 1 on externalities; if I had to oversimplify

and point to a single characteristic that distinguishes the liberal from the conservative, it

would be that liberals are more able or willing to internalize externalities, which affects both

economic and social issues.

As a final caveat, no two conservatives are the same, and it would be overblown to the point

of silliness to claim that a 6,000 word essay covers everything every conservative believes.

Having said that, I will spend the rest of the paper debating the imaginary conservative in

my head and pretending he represents all conservatives, without plastering the essay with

little ‘some conservatives believe that...’ warnings.

Uncle Milt It all began in the fifties or so, with a Mr. Milton Friedman, herein ‘Uncle

Milt’, which is what U of Chicago professors really called him when I was a student there.

Uncle Milt wrote this little book called Free to Choose, and the name basically describes

everything there is to know about the theory. If you have to choose among a few options,

an unconstrained choice is always better than a constrained choice. It’s almost a tautology.

Therefore, government restrictions on the choices available to people, be they consumers or

managers of businesses, are bad.

[This is often called the Neoclassical school, since it’s a reinvention of Adam Smith’s work.

∗

This paper is currently available at http://fluff.info/blog/argue.pdf

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You know Adam Smith: he wrote A Theory of Moral Sentiment, which explained how a

market requires good will among its members in order to properly function. He also wrote

something about an invisible hand moving the market to an optimal state.]

Free to Choose is basically the Republican position on all economic (but not social) issues.

It’s appealing because it’s so simple: restrictions bad. But economics since the dominance

of Uncle Milt and the Chicago School has been all about the exceptional situations where

the simple logic of constrained vs unconstrained choice is too oversimplified to do reality

justice. Generally, regarding any issue where we in the modern day consider government

to be potentially relevant, one of these exceptional cases will come up. Pointing out the

appropriate exception is often enough to get a free marketeer to stop smirking.

1 Externalities

The biggest problem with the neoclassical view espoused by so many conservatives is that

it forgets about externalities. This is huge.

An externality is the effect you have on others that doesn’t directly affect you. When you

drive, every pedestrian has a little more trouble breathing. When you eat a hamburger, a

cow had to be killed. When you wear a low-cut dress, the boys who pass you on the street

feel a little bit better. [I swear, every econ class I’ve ever had used an example about cute

girls.]

From the economist side of things, there is no real solution to the externality problem, in

the sense that it’s supremely difficult to work out what the optimal behavior is, and how

you should go about getting people to engage in that behavior. Basically, if an agent can do

something that benefits it but causes a negative externality on others, then you’re guaranteed

that the agent will do too much (a suboptimal amount) of that activity.

If we could find a way to have people internalize their externalities, so that they simultane-

ously feel both the benefit they experience and the displeasure that others experience, then

the market mechanism would work just fine. Too bad that’s impossible.

Which is where government comes in. As a first approximation, there are taxes on ac-

tivities which produce negative externalities: gas consumption pollutes, and so is taxed;

alcohol consumption leads to some number of annoying drunkards, and so is taxed; cigarette

consumption makes other people’s clothes stink and leads to a rise in public health expen-

ditures.

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All of these taxes proxy for the displeasure that the buyer is causing everybody

1

Taxes don’t have a will, so ascribing a motivation to a tax is a fallacy, but notice how far we can go in

justifying these taxes without describing any of them as ‘sin taxes’. After all, if taxes really were a puritanical

attempt to change people’s behavior, the puritans would also be taxing condoms—but the externalities from

condom usage are all positive, so you’ll only find no taxes or occasional subsidies on them.

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else.

Barring a tax, the other means of internalizing the externality is making the activity illegal—

think of the fine from breaking the law as another form of tax. A good law curtails those

activities which have negative externalities and thus makes the world a better place. Exam-

ples: don’t litter because it’s easy for you but makes other people’s lives worse; don’t drive

drunk because it’s easy for you but makes other people’s lives worse; you can’t buy a car

with certain types of dirty engine because it’s cheap for you but makes other people’s lives

worse, et cetera.

The problem comes in when working out how much curtailing to do. When people say that

their lives are worse off because of somebody’s actions, they have absolutely no incentive

to tone down the whining. I think you’ve all been there—especially if you’ve ever had a

roommate. Back when I was a bike messenger, my roommate borrowed my bike for a stroll

along the lakeshore, and got a flat tire. He didn’t quite patch it right, and it went flat a few

more times over the course of the day. I lost work as a result, and by the time I got home,

I had prepared an extensive bitchy commentary for him about how his actions had ruined

my life. Yet he started yelling first, about how I’d left a nubbin of pasta at the bottom of a

pot, and now it was really stuck, and how I had thus totally ruined his life. He made it very

clear that losing business, patching an expanding hole, and walking part of the way home

was nothing compared to what he’d suffered at the hands of that blob of pasta.

It wasn’t the best roommate situation, but it mirrors legislative lobbying and debate pretty

well. Imagine the whining when the problem is bigger than pasta stuck to the pot, like

an issue of education and property taxes, or pollution. It basically becomes guesswork as

to what damage one person suffers from somebody else’s actions. The conservatives of the

world often latch on to this, and conclude that everybody is just lying all the time, and there

really are no externalities, or if there are, they aren’t nearly as bad as everybody makes them

out to be, so we should ignore them. ‘Buck up and stop whining,’ the conservative would

politely explain.

Anyway, behind a huge number of government activity and restrictions upon behavior, there

is an externality involved. It’s a fun exercise to ask yourself, for any law that comes to mind,

what harmful externalities that law is preventing; you’ll find something for almost all of ‘em.

For example, laws curtailing pollution exist because pollution damages property which is

either in the public trust or is intimately the property of a non-polluter (like the air in my

lungs). When people don’t get an education, studies show, they’re more likely to wind up

poor, annoying, and a criminal, which are all things that affect the other people that interact

with the uneducated. On the positive side: when you take public transportation instead of

driving, other people have clearer roads and lungs. When people tell you that government

should get out of these fields and the market will provide the optimal levels of pollution,

education, and public transport, tell them that they’re entirely wrong, because the market

can not accommodate the effects of the externalities.

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Also, when the privatization people tell you that the bus system is losing money, and there-

fore needs to be severely cut and/or privatized, you should tell that that because of the

externalities, the system isn’t behaving optimally unless it is losing money. See also the

section on cost minimization below.

Law is often a blunt instrument, so if the optimal amount of an activity is less than current,

the law often simply makes it entirely illegal. But the optimum is probably not at zero

activity either. People often latch on to this, pointing to cases where somebody really needed

to do something which had a negative externality attached, and couldn’t do it because of

some law. But the question of degree is more subtle than that: zero is not optimal, but

neither is the amount you’d get if everyone were free to do all they wanted; which is less

suboptimal?

1.1 The choice of externalities

Both sides of the political fence complain about externalities, but different ones. For example,

social conservatives have lately taken to griping about how their marriages will be less

sanctimonious or something if gay marriages are allowed.

Externality arguments are usually made by social conservatives and economic liberals. Con-

versely, social liberals and economic conservatives (both of these categories include libertar-

ians) tend to ignore or belittle externalities. The asymmetry here is that economic external-

ities, which the liberals gripe about and the conservatives ignore, are about the things that

actually affect people’s lives; the social externalities, which the conservatives are up in arms

about, are typically aesthetic. In an ideal world, you could call a conservative on the relative

triviality of the externalities s/he chooses to care about. E.g., why are you bothered about

how your kids are harmed by gays, but aren’t bothered by how many kids are killed by guns

every year? Why do you think the market should be free to decide on whether to drill for

oil in Alaska, but don’t think the market can work out the optimal exposure of boobies on

TV without government oversight?

Another asymmetry is the exaggeration issue: when people suffer externalities such as job

loss, crime, disease or death (or even environmental damage), there’s something physical

that can be measured and compared to any hypothetical benefits, albeit imperfectly. But

when somebody says that they suffer because gays are getting married or because they were

subjected to the sight of female nipples, there is simply no way to measure the aesthetic

damage that the person is internally suffering. I’m not exactly sure how you can use this for

rebutting a fanatic conservative, but it gives some idea of how fanaticism can come about:

there’s nothing keeping anyone from the extreme position, because there are never facts that

get in the way of the claims of endless damage.

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1.2 How not to argue: equality and fairness arguments

Here are some things which are generally true and often important, but which are simply

non-starters in debate with conservatives. They’ll never get it, so don’t waste your time

trying. In some ways, this is the most important section. A bad argument is worse than

no argument at all, and I’ve often been vicariously embarrassed by fellow liberals (Ralph

Nader) who argue the points below as if they’re persuasive.

Equality is, to many conservatives, just not important. There’s nothing much in the Bible

about it, and humankind got along just fine without it for centuries and centuries. Similarly,

many conservatives define fairness endogenously, so any outcome is always tautologically

fair: if you can grab more for yourself, then you deserve more and that’s fair.

A desire for fairness requires internalizing all externalities, which many people either have

trouble doing or explicitly don’t want to do. As such, I don’t think there’s any way to

convince somebody that equality in treatment or outcomes is a good thing. So don’t argue

that a certain rule or structure is fair; instead, consider the ways that it appeals to the

principles that our conservative pals find appealing, like efficiency (everybody likes efficiency)

or pro-U.S. nationalism.

For example, redistributive taxation. By keeping the poorer folks fed, the likelihood of

crime is lower, and kids are better fed and are more likely to be healthy and smarter and

more productive in the future. You could provide certain goods/services via inefficient social

services, or via the market by undertaxing the poor who are most likely to use those social

services. You can get pretty far without ever using the word ‘fairness’.

To give another example, the Unified School Districts of various areas insist that all schools

in a wide area (like LA) must get the same level of funding. Again, this improves efficiency:

another dollar to a school which needs to buy textbooks will go a lot further than a dollar

to a school which wants to fund one more field trip.

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And why is it so easy to talk about

optimality when we want to talk about fairness? Because fairness is optimal. Another

dollar given to a wealthier person just isn’t as useful as another dollar given to a starving

person, so all else equal, the best allocation of a given dollar is to the starving guy. [Technical

version: Although not universally true, people are generally risk averse, meaning that we can

describe their preferences using a concave utility function. If everybody has equal weight in

our objective function and has the same private utility function, then the optimal allocation

is the perfectly equitable one.]

To summarize the section, fairness is an idea you learn as a kid, and if somebody doesn’t get

it by now, they never will. But you can argue for efficiency almost anywhere you’d prefer to

2

So why do LA’s schools suck so badly? Because property taxes in California are so low that they’re

effectively nil, so every school in LA is equally underfunded. It’s a paragon of where the conservative drive

for lower taxes at all costs will get you: the fastest drop in school quality you’ve ever seen.

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discuss fairness, and you won’t have to ask the person you’re debating to make the mental

leap of internalizing the situation of other people.

The more hard-core libertarians take it all a step further, though, and believe that not only

is the empathetic desire for fairness a weakness (as Ayn Rand teaches), but the world would

be better off if we all went out of our way to eliminate empathy (i.e., the internalization of

externalities, which are assumed away in the free market model). By this point, it becomes

a religious issue (sometimes literally), so debating is useless; cut your losses and just don’t

bother associating with the person.

2 Public goods

Another common divide along the liberal-conservative spectrum is that liberals want more

goods provided by government and conservatives want fewer goods.

2.1 The fallacy of the self-made conservative

Many a conservative shoots for an individualistic character. Some take it to the extreme

of insisting that they are entirely self-made: their family did all the work of raising them

and sending them to a private school, then they paid for college themselves, never took a

handout, et cetera. They conclude from these broad strokes that government was unnecessary

in getting them to where they are today. Other conservatives don’t go this far, but are still

willfully blind to their reliance on public goods.

Direct benefits Part of the problem is that the government services that most people

enjoy are so fundamental that they’re invisible. If the water is clean, and you don’t get sick

when you go out to eat, and the gas lines under the street don’t erupt in flames too often,

then you don’t notice the inspectors, engineers, and bureaucrats on the government payroll

who made such a halcyon existence possible. The best government is one which is involved

in dozens of fields and yet is entirely unnoticeable.

Indirect benefits Leaving aside the person’s health and general well-being, there are also

indirect benefits to government spending which our conservative friends enjoyed, whether by

their choosing or not. They worked through school? There’s a good chance that they were

able to find a job because the federal Work Study program provides subsidies to make sure

that every campus has a larger supply of jobs. Even if our conservative friend eschewed such

handouts, the non-handout jobs had much less competition.

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Our Conservative Hero doesn’t have any diseases, and is healthy and fit thanks to 100%

private health insurance? It’s also because of massive public health campaigns, both direct

(closing sewers and other basics that the U.S.A. worked out a century ago) and indirect, in

the form of taking care of the impoverished ill and advising them on how to get better so

they don’t cough up an infected lung on any conservatives.

Our Conservative Hero isn’t mugged every day? This is partly thanks to the fact that the

poor in the neighboring communities have government support that lowers their need to get

resources by illicit means.

The list goes on, but the gist is the same: by stabilizing and taking care of those parts of our

surroundings that are most at risk, those parts stay invisible to those who can take care of

themselves. But if those supports disappeared, then the at-risk may not remain so invisible.

2.2 Limited rationality and informational asymmetry

This is a bit of a digression, but it’s a good place to mention regulations requiring labeling,

full disclosure, and licensing.

Trademark laws are all about minimizing confusion in the marketplace: if your logo looks

too much like the other guy’s logo, then dumb people will get confused and buy the wrong

thing. There are loads of other truth-in-advertising laws, such as how stock brokers can not

guarantee that a plan will make money. And indeed, there are enough dumb people and

enough slimy stock brokers that laws like this have to exist.

In LA county (among others), all restaurants are inspected and must post signs giving

their inspection grade. Similarly, food manufacturers have to tell you basic nutritional info

and what’s in their food. Publicly traded companies have immense reporting requirements,

which keep many a lawyer and accountant employed full time. Generally, any sort of licensing

requirement is a requirement for full disclosure of important information.

All this seems fair enough to me: trade on equal grounds requires equal information. And

yet, there are loads of conservatives (not all, but a few) who think these are invasive laws

that condescend to the buyer. The emptor should caveat for his or her own darn self. Again,

all of these rules are based on hope for a ‘fair market’, which differs from the concept of

a ‘free market’. As above, you can’t argue fairness to a conservative who doesn’t already

believe it’s worth striving for.

Part of this is the Lake Woebegone effect, that everybody thinks ‘I’m smarter than aver-

age, so this law isn’t protecting me; it’s protecting the dumb people whom I don’t know.’

From my own experience, self-made conservatives are especially prone to this, which makes

any argument about how information is not perfectly disseminated at all times supremely

frustrating. I think your best bet is to either argue the extreme cases [should out-and-out

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scams be legal? When does hiding information become substantively different from lying?]

or use the grandmother argument [Would you want your grandma to have to sift through

this?]

3

However, my experience is that the Lake Woebegone effect combined with a refusal

or inability to internalize the difficulties of others makes this class of issues almost impossible

to debate.

The self-made conservative believes that he (and it is usually a boy) can fend for himself, so

everyone else is obliged to as well. But the self-fending is a delusion, because he is already

surrounded by a wealth of services which he directly and indirectly benefits. He doesn’t get

lied to not because he’s so supremely savvy, but (at least in part) because those he deals

with have laws they must comply with.

The question, then, is how these services which the self-made conservative takes for granted

should be provided, and the conservative always prefers private provision over public.

2.3 The fallacy that a profit motive means efficiency

Conservatives often work from the premise that if an organization has no profit motive, then

it will be inefficient. A business has a simple directive—maximize sales minus costs—and a

business which fails in that directive will lose out to other businesses which do a better job

of it. This logic is false in two ways.

Cost minimization The first part of the argument, that an organization which isn’t

maximizing profits has no motivation to be efficient, is simply false. The reason is that

profit maximization is equivalent to cost minimization. We could cast the problem of the

business as finding the cheapest way of producing its product; similarly, we could characterize

the goal of the bureaucracy’s manager as finding the cheapest way to achieve whatever its

goals may be. If the manager isn’t minimizing costs, then there’s something s/he could do

to save a few bucks and then apply that toward achieving the bureau’s goals. Why would

the manager of a government department pass up such a savings, while a business manager

wouldn’t?

Of course, there’s still the problem of defining the goals of the organization, and here gov-

ernment excels in the provision of things where the goal is ambiguous. The goal of a public

energy utility is to provide citizens with reliable and cheap power, while the goal of a private

company is to maximize profit for the owners of the company by providing citizens with

power. It’d be nice if these incentives aligned perfectly, but they clearly don’t, which means

that privatization often leads to disasters in the provision of public goods (e.g., everything

3

I don’t know why grandparents are always considered to be so dumb, but this debate is probably not

the time to work on dispelling stereotypes.

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associated with Enron). Externalities matter here too: the profit-maximizing fee schedule

ignores externalities, and will therefore lead to a suboptimal level of service.

This may seem easy and obvious, but the privatization harpies forget all the time, and need

reminding: profit maximization and cost minimization both encourage efficiency, and neither

magically produces efficiency.

Zero profits The second part of the fallacy, the Darwinian part, assumes that if you’re not

perfectly optimal, you’ll lose money and will go out of business. But anyone who has ever

worked in a company’s office will attest that abject, persistent inefficiencies happen every

day throughout the business world, and yet these companies continue to keep their heads

above water. Liberals and conservatives alike agree that ‘big government’ in the sense of

‘over-bureaucratic’ government is a bad thing, and if there’s a more efficient way to achieve

existing goals, then that’s a good thing. But the same could be said of IBM.

Some folks used to tell me that zero-profits-plus-efficient-market means that racist hiring

would eventually disappear, since a racist manager is imposing a restriction on his choices,

which will therefore lead to suboptimal hiring on a regular basis, which will lead the com-

pany to go out of business. Maybe racist businesses go under more frequently than non-racist

businesses, but a few centuries have shown us that no, having racist policies does not imme-

diately condemn a company to bankruptcy. Similarly with any of a number of other mean,

irrational, and destructive policies that the businesses of today engage in all the time. Con-

versely, laws that force people to not be racist also don’t lead to businesses closing down all

over.

Theoretical economists assume that all businesses are on the verge of bankruptcy at all times

because they always assume that firms are all competing to produce widgets that are exactly

alike in every way—and there are often an infinite number of firms. But the assumption of

zero profits really doesn’t work in real life, as you can see by the fact that businesses exist,

and this means that any reasonably healthy business can afford to operate in a manner

that society deems acceptable, and can conform with laws about accounting, treatment of

workers, or environmental care.

Yet when a new regulation is put in place, the chorus of capitalists all shout out in unison,

‘I’m barely making ends meet and will go out of business.’ Sometimes the response is a bit

more moderate: ‘I’ll have to lay a few people off and reduce production,’ or ‘If you pass

regulations that I don’t like, I’ll just take my ball home and pout.’ After all, they’re right

on the verge of bankruptcy, so any new costs will put them under.

The reality of the situation is much more complicated. For example, New Jersey raised its

minimum wage one year, while Pennsylvania didn’t. Card, Katz, and Krueger took this to

be as good a natural experiment as you’ll ever get in the social sciences: the economies are

closely linked, the passage of the new law was quick and sort of a surprise, and C, K & K

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managed to get a good picture of fast food joints on both sides before and after the law took

effect. The end result: there were more jobs created in New Jersey after the law was passed

than in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t much (and I don’t recall if it was statistically significant),

but it was definitely not a loss of jobs.

4

Why were there more jobs in NJ? Maybe people spent all their new minimum wage earnings

on fast food, or maybe more people entered the labor market, or maybe all those truckers

carting in goods which used to be produced in NJ factories needed a place to eat. Regardless,

the moral is that a new rule can often change all sorts of things in the economy, some good

some bad, so reducing it to a simplistic one-liner like ‘a higher minimum wage means less jobs’

is stating a falsehood. [For the theorists, here’s the moral: never trust a partial equilibrium

model.]

Regulations can be burdensome and annoying, just like not being able to pee in the street

is often burdensome and annoying, but somehow, we all manage it. However, not all bur-

densome regulations are destructive regulations, and if a conservative forgets that there’s a

distinction, be sure to remind him/her/it.

3 Monopolies and market power

With monopolies, two mantras of conservative economics collide. One says ‘competitive

markets are good’ and the other says ‘government intervention is bad’. So what do you do

when the only way to have a competitive market is through government intervention?

One of the main money-makers for the working economist are anti-trust proceedings, in which

one set of well-paid economists proves that a merger will allow a company to ‘unfairly’ use

its expanded market share, while another set of well-paid economist proves that this won’t

happen. Many a conservative I have met believes that this is all silly, and that if a monopolist

can find a price at which people will buy their goods, then the monopolist is clearly still

providing something valuable, so why is the government being all pissy about it? Leave the

companies to merge to their hearts’ content.

More generally, the idea of a monopoly gets to the concept of market power: the ability of

a single player in the market to influence the market itself. Most of neoclassical economics

assumes that every agent has zero market power, and is thus a price taker—they can’t

influence prices at all, just take them from the market.

4

CK & K’s arch-nemeses, Neumark & Wascher, wrote a reply in which they got another data set for

the NJ/Pennsylvania experiment, from the NRA—the National Restaurant Association. Their data set

conclusively found that the passage of the minimum wage law caused New Jersey to fall into the ocean. C

K & K asked to see the data so they could verify the results, and N & W refused, citing a non-disclosure

agreement with the NRA.

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First, there aren’t any theorems about the optimality and welfare-maximizing properties of

monopolists (that I know of). If the company can set prices, instead of just take them,

then all the Econ 101 proofs about optimality [not including Pareto optimality, which is

not really optimality in any human sense] are out the window. You can have a government

that doesn’t try to prevent monopolies, but then all the arguments about the virtues and

automatic optimality of the market are thrown out of the debate.

For example, say that there are only two or three media conglomerates, who offer cheap

television, radio, and print to every person in the world. Since there are only a few, a

documentary producer who wants his or her work to be seen has to get one or two of these

conglomerates to distribute the documentary. If all three offer the producer too little money

for the film, since they know the producer will have no one to make a lower bid, then the

documentary will never be seen. With more competition among the buyers and distributors

of media, there would be more variety in public debate, and content providers would make

more money, instead of having to accept whatever sum the distributors see fit to offer.

In short, the quantity and variety of content is larger in a competitive market than in a

monopsonistic one.

Another example of the sorts of problems market power produces: products often interoper-

ate with other products, meaning that a company which is doing wonderful market-pleasing

things in one field can exert its power to sell crappy goods in another market where it’s not

necessarily the best. I am thinking, of course, of Microsoft. The company, at this point, is

built entirely on the concept of lock-in, and spends most of its marketing budget trying to

convince consumers of two things: you should upgrade your existing Microsoft product, and

you shouldn’t switch to something else. Not much in the way of innovation going on here.

This is not the place to go into the computer geek details, but there are a wealth of alterna-

tives to the desktop-with-word-processor paradigm we all work in now. Sun Microsystems,

for example, had the idea of letting users run their word processor via their web browser.

But for this to work, everyone needed a web browser that would be technically compatible

with such a setup.

When it was being investigated for monopolistic practices, Microsoft’s argument to the

Justice department was that anti-monopoly regulations hinder their ability to innovate by

making incremental improvements and additions to Windows. But at the same time, Mi-

crosoft used its market power to ensure that innovation in the form of fundamental paradigm

shifts wouldn’t happen.

So what can you tell your conservative pals? That incremental innovation isn’t necessarily

a problem when there are monopolists involved, but innovation on a larger scale are blocked

when there are monopolists who can use their influence on standards and the basic operation

of the market to prevent that innovation.

With a few players, the market is no longer a clean, optimal environment, but a tangled

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mess where customers are not free to choose (outside of the ‘my way or the highway’ option)

and those with market power can use that lack of choice to their advantage.

Employers as monopsonists Large companies are clearly not price takers, and conser-

vatives frequently need to be reminded of this. For example, Wal Mart negotiates the price

it pays on most (maybe all) of the items it sells. There is one Wal Mart, and dozens of

pretzel vendors, so Wal Mart can use this asymmetry to negotiate down the price it pays

for pretzels. The most important price for Wal Mart it the price of labor, and the market is

again clearly asymmetric: one Wal Mart, and millions of potential employees.

Setting a price is a negotiation over how surplus should be divided. If an hour of work is

worth $6 to Wal-Mart, and a person is willing to work for $4, then any wage between the

two would work, in the sense that the person would work the hour and Wal Mart would pay

the person and both would walk away better off. Uncle Milt stops here, content in the belief

that even if Wal Mart stands firm at $4.01, the employee is still better off.

The main problem with this is that the lowest wage a person will accept depends on the

conditions. Notably, because of what I will call the ‘food constraint’, any job is better than

no job at all. Our conservative pals forget the food constraint all the time, since it’s hard

to work in to a simple model of agents [discontinuity and/or nondifferentiable kink in the

utility function at zero], and it’s easy to forget that ‘agents’ means ‘people’.

Also, the wage Wal Mart sets is interdependent with any of a number of other things, such

as the wage the company next door sets. In the theory, there’s a menu of wages available,

so if you don’t like Wal Mart’s wage, you go next door to Sam’s Club and take the wage

they offer. But if Wal Mart and Sam’s Club set their wages in concert, and Sears and

K-Mart follow Wal Mart’s lead in price-setting, then the model falls apart again, because

it is impossible for people to negotiate the price of their labor by threatening to go next

door. This is not necessarily overt collusion; it is simply the ease with which a small group

of actors can imitate each other and wind up at a very stable equilibrium. The minimum

wage, ironically, helps immensely with this by providing a focal point for all employers to

set their wages against.

The solution to the asymmetry of the market, by the way, is unionization. One Wal Mart

and one worker’s union is a symmetric market, which has some hope of working as it should.

Conservatives often miss this, and only see that the union is a restriction on the behavior

of its workers and the employer. That it is, but it is a restriction that allows negotiation of

prices to work. Many conservatives have great difficulty wrapping their brains around the

idea that restricting a market can cause it to work better, so be patient in explaining this.

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3.1 How not to argue with conservatives: corporate conspiracies

Many liberals argue from the basic premise that small businesses are better than large

corporations, and that companies which are big enough to be international are especially

bad. The issue needs to be disaggregated into parts which can and can’t be argued with a

conservative:

Personalization and diversity Just as conservatives like smaller government which is

more representative of the people, we want smaller businesses which don’t force corporate

HQ’s worldview on its patrons. But conservatives will dismiss this by saying ‘if they don’t

like the bigger store, they’ll shop at the smaller, spunkier store next door’ and will dismiss

any further debate on this point. In other words, the cultural issue is a total non-starter.

Market imperfections As above, there is a natural asymmetry between labor and cap-

ital (many workers, few employers), and this distorts the market in favor of the few, the

monopsonists. As corporations grow and consolidate, the problem only gets worse. Some

conservatives get this, and will acknowledge that reduced competition is bad. The more

libertarian conservatives will abjectly refuse to accept this, and will cling to the idea that a

firm that abuses its market power will be deposed by a spunky startup.

The Spunky Startup argument is impossible to argue with, kind of like the ‘tomorrow will

be sunnier’ argument: there are enough examples where it’s been true that people can

say it with a straight face and be happy ignoring the fact that there are so many cases

where it was entirely not true. On the perfectly level imaginary playing field, the spunky

startup can definitely win—but in the real world, the profit-per-unit only goes up as a

company gets larger, network effects and lock-in make people more likely to buy the old thing

instead of the new, and if all else fails, the big and lumbering corporation can keep serving

Spunky the Startup with lawsuits for trespassing on Lumbering Corporation’s trademarks

and intellectual property until Spunky’s supply of optimism is entirely depleted.

To summarize, your best replies to arguments about Spunky the Startup are about the

market imperfections discussed above, most of which help companies which survived at the

start keep new competition out of play. But my personal experience is that it’s an uphill

battle, and an irrational faith in Spunky the Startup’s abilities is hard to dispel.

Competition with sovereigns A company which exists in multiple states will be able to

find the state with the least restrictive laws and register there. When ‘state’ means portion

of the U.S.A., this is Delaware; when ‘state’ means sovereign nation, this is any of a number

of islands in the Caribbean. Whether this is a problem to the conservative you have before

you depends on how much contempt the conservative has for the concept of a government.

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Some enthuse at the idea of a lawless world; others are a bit concerned by the prospect. As

with any issue involving sovereigns, there are enough thorny philosophical issues that you

have no chance of selling somebody if they disagree with you. But if you find that they do

believe some laws are worth having, then take advantage of that and ask how that law is

going to be maintained in a world where corporations get to pick the set of laws they are

beholden to.

In short, be sure to focus on the specific things that large firms can do that small firms can’t.

‘Bullying’ is too vague—stick with the specific mechanisms by which firms with market power

can unfairly use that power. There are abundant options to choose from.

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