Or, to put it another way: markets certainly aren't perfect, but they're a great deal less imperfect than central planning.
At some point, I have to wonder whether simple ignorance can explain why such articulate writers can get it so wrong. A part of me wants to suppress the desire to say, "Because they are evil", since that clearly is not quite right.
"Because they are thick" isn't right either, but it's closer.
"parts of 18th and 19th Century Britain"
As the left-libertarian Kevin Carson has pointed out even the age of laissez-faire was not quite so, featuring patents, transport subsidies, state-backed enclosures etc. It may of course be that these didn't actually have that much impact. However, I don't think (and correct me if I'm wrong) there has ever been an economy based on a libertarian law code with zero government intervention. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive for it though.
The way I see it, it all boils down to basic psychology. We humans want to control our environment, and if we can't/won't for whatever reason, then we want someone else to control it. It's like that magnificent cliff somewhere in Northern Europe that has no fence (my mind is blank now as to location). It's scary. Who is in charge? What if someone falls down? No matter that most people are actually careful and are not falling down, and if someone is stupid/crazy enough, they will find a way, fence or not. It's genuine fear with most people, while with some it is an actual desire to control others. The latter feed off the former. The rest is nothing but rationalizing, for both groups, just like junkies are prone to rationalizing their addiction, facts and common sense be damned.
Why do they believe what they do? Because it's a belief. That may sound circular, but that's all there is. They want to believe, so they do. They read the equivalent of religious apologetics, and it confirms their belief. Just as a christian doesn't read apologetics as a means of questioning their religion, socialists read their apologetics (e.g. Klein) to confirm what they already believe. Just as the Resurrection has to be true to remain a christian, planned economics has to be right to remain a socialist.
Their goal is not fairness, equality, a better world or any of their other moral claims, although they think that's what they're after. Their goal is to continue believing in socialism and they will cling to each and every threadbare argument that supports that. They will accept the contradictions, ignore whatever evidence is presented to them, read whatever it takes to rationalise the cognitive dissonance, and discuss, debate and argue only to confirm, not to understand. They are not on a quest for knowledge, they are on a quest for confirmation.
Johann Hari starts today's Indie opinion with "In the smoking rubble of market fundamentalism"....
He's the worst of a bad bunch at the Independent if you ask me. Someone you can really rely on to say something stupid every time you read it. His ongoing employment as a journalist is proof to me that "the market" doesn't work effectively (indeed, it's baffling how the Independent has lasted as long as it has; how many global warming-obsessed jihadists actually buy newspapers anyway?).
"Perfectionist" is daft, belief in [free] markets is about "least bad", like democracy being awful but it's not as bad as everything else.
I tend to view the free market/command economy debate in much the same way as the evolution/creationism debate.
Nobody would claim that evolution creates progress because it is tidy or perfectly organised. In fact, it is the absence of those factors which is key to its success. The same applies to genuine free markets.
On the other hand, both the command economy and creationism make the achievement of satisfactory results dependent upon having faith in an omniscient, benevolent being that knows us better than we know ourselves and can always be relied upon to act in everybody's best interest. One group calls that being God, the other calls it government.
Andrew Sullivan can get stuffed. When the budget deficit is four times as high as the previous, already mind-boggling record, and the government doesn't even know why it's spending this money or on what, I think it's really OK if people take to the streets without a point-by-point alternative. The only issue for Sullivan is that his feelings are hurt because not everyone is as enamored of Obama as he is. Thank God.
Kinda OT, Ron Paul offers free market solution to Somali pirates:
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and a growing number of national security experts are calling on Congress to consider using letters of marque and reprisal, a power written into the Constitution that allows the United States to hire private citizens to keep international waters safe.Used heavily during the Revolution and the War of 1812, letters of marque serve as official warrants from the government, allowing privateers to seize or destroy enemies, their loot and their vessels in exchange for bounty money.
Sullivan demands that the protesters, and one presumes, their supporters, come up with some kind of coherent policy statement declaring what their alternative is. I guess that at that point, Sullivan will provide an objective critique the alternatives proposed, and issue some kind of encyclical to his regular reader.
He seems to forget that most of his critiques of the prior administration's policies were equally devoid of constructive alternative suggestions (with the possible exception of his own personal hobby-horse, gay rights), and where these rare suggestions were made, they were frequently fisked in a thouroughly workmanlike manner by all and sundry.
Would it be great if the Tea Party Movement could arise, with a rational, coherent policy statement? IMHO, probably not, and I would be less supportive of it if it did, because they'd already be out there picking their own least-bad political hacks to stand on a podium and demogogue.
Sometimes, the solution to a train wreck is as simple stopping the trains in time.
Sullivan's a mewling irrelevance, whose only claim to fame is that to the media, he looks like a 'moderate conservative'.
John_R
(Equally OT) The Somali pirates don't have anything we want to pirate in return. I don't see any need to do anything other than encourage the ship owners to defend their own property.
It's in their own interests to put barbed wire around the gunwhales and mount a couple of Bofors guns on the deck.
Alisa,
I suspect you're thinking of the pulpit rock at Stavanger in Norway:
http://www.stavangerpark.com/pulpit_rock.jpg
C
Bod, I have it on reasonable (FOAF) authority that some ships are already doing this, since a while before this Somali pirate thing became big news a friend was recounting to me with some glee his evening in a pub with a relative who works marine security, and horrifying some leftie teacher types about what his job entailed, including a video on his phone of them making a pirate they'd captured walk the plank.
This is friend of a friend, so have no proof, but my friend is a close one and generally honest, and as I said described this before Somalis were big news. As he reported it,basically his relative's job is to shoot pirates. So, so far as I know, there are already some ships protecting themselves. The Somalis are easily outgunned, though they have been known to launch the occasional antiquated shoulder-launched missile, and one boat they machine gunned went up with a surprisingly collosal explosion; they had no idea why but it suggested they'd got something rather explosive on board.
Rationalist delusion? What, is that like the opposite of "irrational truth"?
Markets are a human institution? In socialist-world, where humanity is a shipwreck waiting to happen, and everyone needs to be saved from themselves because we're too stupid to know any different, nothing is spontaneous or organic, according to the great and the good.
Markets are the spontaneous result of free-market capitalism, or would be if it were ever allowed to happen.
Capitalism, the only rational and free system for human exchange, creates markets because some have values to sell to others in free, volontary, mutual exchange, not because some corrupt bureaucrat decided to invent the "market".
How do these people get any credibility...?
adding to Alisa- also because they're conservative- their parents/friends/teachers taught this so it must be OK.
There are three key divides between those who favor capitalism and those who favor, well, any form of tyranny:
1. The former group knows that at any given moment total wealth within any given area is absolute, cannot change, and any tax, subsidy, entitlement program, tariff, etc is theft.
2. The former group knows that in the infinite long run, infinite wealth is theoretically attainable because wealth can be created. If those of the latter group could realize that wealth can be created, they would recognize how it is done - by individuals and businesses in the private sector - and favor smaller government. But they cannot so they do not.
3. Information can never be known perfectly. Human preferences, which constitute a key part of the information for controlling an economy from a central power, change overtime, for example.
One system uses force to STOP people from imposing their will on others and the other system uses force to IMPOSE its will on others.
It's about setting aside force until it is necessary. Walking softly and carrying a big stick. About tolerating other people and their irrationalities and not living in fear that others actions will be harmful to you unless there is a clear and present danger.
At the end of the day Central Planners are simply those who are convinced that their infinitesimally small data collection they've made - in all those extra hours in a day and extra days in a week they somehow have - versus the rest of us. Statists come on a lot of forms, from the left and the right and from the secular and theocratic, but the one element they ALL share is being so firmly convince that they have tapped into the Ether that they can use force against others.
May be a too bit relativist for the average samizdatista, but we're all destined to be worm food, so all the grand designs in the world are ultimately fruitless. The question is do we live in fear and endless coercion until we join the eternally horizontal or can we steer our own lives as best we can until then. So start the system there and work UP, not have a coterie of boobs who've convinced themselves of their superiority working from the top DOWN.
But of course trying to tell he who is endeavoring to work form the top down doesn't compute. You are striking both at their "religion" and striking at them as a person.
"The Somali pirates don't have anything we want to pirate in return."
Not quite true: Their lives. ;-)
The US Government is controlled by Goldman Sachs.
Maybe government would stay out of business if BUSINESS STAYED OUT OF GOVERNMENT.
Why are bankers allowed to handle taxpayers money?
Thats like putting a fox in charge of a henhouse.
Kick all these bankers out of government NOW.
No, the Goldman Sachs people think they control the govenrment (and get indirect subsidies from the AIG bailout and so on) but it is a matter of "riding a tiger" - the person on the tiger's back does not really control the tiger.
And is liable to find out this fact - in a terminal way.
People like Barack Obama laugh (in private) at corporate managers who think they can make long term deals with the government. Sure he will support subsidies and so on in the short term - but only to get the bankers (and other such) in a position where they can be turned on. And have no public support when they are turned on.
As for J.P.s actual post:
First F.A. Hayek was not a market fundementalist - far from it. He was not even a minimal state man, let alone a anarcho capitialist or anything like that (by the way the person J.P. quotes clearly has not carefully read the Road to Serfdom - as it is not mainly about economics).
As for Oakeshott - I once wrote an essay on his opinions in this area, but I will not repeat it all here.
"A plan to end planning" is a correct quote - but this anti "Rationalism in Politics" line does not cover all of Oakeshott's thought.
His real problem with an economist defence of freedom is not he sees a bigger role for government - no, Oakeshott's problem is the objective of the economist.
The telos of higher material living standards.
To Oakeshott the umpire government is not because we will get more stuff that way.
To Oakeshott the debate between Civil Association and Enterprise Association is not about which can produce more stuff at all.
As for the "market fundementalist" line in general.
Methinks this is connected to the blatent lie (and it is a blatent lie) that the economic crises was caused by "lack of regulation" or other such.
The vast increase in the credit money supply (year after year) by the Fed was hardly "market fundementalism" and nor were the speific interventions such as creating and pushing on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the insane "afordable housing" policy (or the Community Reinvestment Act or the regulations that actually created the bonus structures, or the .....).
A "market" is the civil (property respecting) interactions of human beings.
Of course human beings are going to make mistakes - but government (i.e. violent) intervention makes things worse - not better.
