What About Free Market Inefficiency?

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Friday May 09, 2014 · 2:57 PM PDT

2014/05/09 · 14:57

I just wish that people would hold the free market to the same standard of efficiency they expect from government. When government is anything less than 100% efficient, there's endless moaning and gnashing of teeth about wasting taxpayer dollars and calls to privatize government functions, even though the US government generally has a pretty good record of accomplishing its goals for its legislation. However, when the free market blows billions on salaries for CEOs who are losing money for their companies and hedge fund managers who create no wealth, has a new small-business failure rate of 50% to 75% within the first couple of years, throws 10-15% of the work force out of work for months or years on end, lurches through boom and bust cycles that destroy countless lives and savings, focuses on short-term profits rather than long-term abundance, tolerates ever-widening income inequality that holds back economic growth, and ignores the destructive impact of unpaid-for environmental, health, and social costs, free-market enthusiasts call it "creative destruction" and chalk it up to the cost of doing business. Talk about a double standard!

Climate Change Thought Experiment

fiddlecraig

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Friday January 10, 2014 · 9:37 AM PST

2014/01/10 · 09:37

If I were suddenly to be convinced that the human contribution to climate change is negligible, I know how I, as a progressive/liberal, would respond. I'd still be concerned about the impact of various kinds of pollution on human and environmental health (e.g., even if the air pollution in China wasn't contributing to climate change, it still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year and its reduction would remain a worthy goal). I'd still want laws in place restricting pollution sources rather than relying entirely on the free market to shut them down.

But I'd be happy to rely far more on market forces to produce more energy-efficient vehicles, and I'd remain confident that sustainable sources of energy such as solar, wind, and tide would increasingly compete with fossil fuels as the technology improves simply because sunlight, wind, and tide are essentially free and renewable (at least compared to fossil fuels) and don't have the drawbacks of nuclear waste storage and potential meltdowns at nuke plants. I'd also be much readier to take into account any economic hardship caused by anti-pollution laws when considering government policies.

I've noticed that denial of the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding the human causes of accelerated climate change is largely confined to (and almost universal among) political conservatives and particularly to those with a libertarian bent. I'd like to challenge any self-identified libertarian/conservative to imagine that they've been presented with evidence and arguments that thoroughly convince them that human activity is indeed a major factor accelerating climate change. Assume that without change in human activity the consequences will be felt within the next few decades in the form of such things as sea level rise engulfing large coastal and island areas with dense human populations, temperature rises in currently fertile areas such as the Great Plains that render them unsuitable for agriculture, melting ice caps at the poles, rapid extinction of numerous species and disruption of ecosystems, and the concomitant violence and turmoil as people vie for shrinking resources and habitable areas. What would be an appropriate response in the present that, while measurably reducing or changing the human activities that contribute to climate change, remains in accord with the core principles of libertarian/conservative thought?

My hypothesis is that there are, in fact, no effective responses to human causes of climate change consistent with libertarian principles, that without organized, concerted policies and efforts by governments and international organizations, there are no market mechanisms that would reliably reduce human impact on climate change. In the absence of a believable set of conservative ideas for effectively reducing the human contribution to climate change, the obvious conclusion is that the reasons for climate change denial among conservatives are entirely based in ideology- hence the skepticism towards the scientific consensus.

The motivation for the ludicrous assertions that academic scientists and research scientists employed by non-profit organizations are somehow motivated by access to personal gain through grants and government funding, rife among conservative media and internet pundits, becomes clear. If the world is in fact in a situation that requires concerted national and international efforts to avert impending environmental disaster, the fundamental assumptions of conservative and libertarian ideology are demonstrably inadequate to the task. The increasing rigidity of "conservative" thought in the last forty years renders it incapable of grappling with complexity when the market is simplistically seen as the default solution to any complex problem. Hence, conspiracy theory and irrationality form the response, since the alternative is recognizing the limitations of the ideology.

Accurately Comparing Death Rates from Motor Vehicle and Firearm Use

fiddlecraig

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Monday February 18, 2013 · 10:02 AM PST

2013/02/18 · 10:02

I put the following statistics together because gun advocates I discuss Second Amendment issues with kept bringing up two things: first, the fact that a gun is an object and requires human agency to be used, and second, that other objects that also require human agency are also used to commit murder and cause accidental death. Both those things are true. So just how dangerous is it to use a gun versus a car?
Accurately Comparing Death Rates from Motor Vehicle and Firearm Use

All vehicle statistics obtained from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Center for Disease Control. Firearms statistics obtained from CDC, except for number of rounds fired, which is estimated at the high end from a variety of sources based on estimates of the number of rounds sold (high estimate reduces the rate shown of death through gun use).

Vehicles:
Number of registered motor vehicles in U.S. (cars, trucks, and buses): 300 million

Total number of miles driven in U. S. per year: approximately 3 trillion

Number of vehicular homicides annually: 300

Number of suicides committed with cars annually: approximately 20,000 (mostly through carbon monoxide poisoning)

Number of accidental vehicle deaths annually: approximately 30,000

Total number of annual deaths involving the use of motor vehicles: approximately 50,000

Deaths per mile of motor vehicle travel- 1 per 60 million (60,000,000)

Firearms:
Number of privately owned firearms in U.S: 270 million

Number of rounds fired per year: 12-15 billion

Number of homicides committed annually with firearms: approximately 11,000

Number of suicides committed annually with firearms: approximately 20,000

Number of deaths caused annually by accidental gun discharge: 500-1000

Total number of annual deaths involving the use of firearms: approximately 32,000

Deaths per round fired- 1 per 475 thousand (475,000)

Guns are far more dangerous to use than cars- by several orders of magnitude. They’re also far more dangerous to use than hands, feet, clubs, knives, hammers, or blunt objects, all of which are used many trillions of times a year to do all sorts of things, the least frequent of which is to kill people.

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