Unhappy childhoods

Here's Bryan Caplan complaining that liberals try to keep the masses in blissful ignorance of 19th century French economics pundit Frederic Bastiat (the broken windows fallacy guy). Bastiat was apparently a revelation to the teenaged Caplan, and he posits that if the rubes ever got wind of the stuff that blew his mind in high school, they would all need economics degrees before they ever consented to support stuff like Social Security which currently owes existence to a thin gruel of naivete and greed.

Every teacher and book I ever encountered treated naive populism like the Law of Gravitation.  Evil businesses aren't paying workers enough?  Raise the minimum wage; problem solved.  The elderly are poor?  Increase Social Security payments; problem solved.  Evil businesses are selling people bad drugs?  Impose more government regulation; problem solved. 

If you favor these programs, you can call these arguments straw men.  But I assure you: These "straw men" were never presented by opponents of these policies.  On the contrary, these "straw men" were invariably presented by people who favored these policies.  How is that possible?  Because during my first 17 years of life, I never encountered an opponent of any of these policies!  You might assume I was grew up in a weird Berkeley-esque leftist enclave, but bland Northridge, California hardly qualifies. 

What was going on?  The best explanation is pretty simple: I only heard straw man arguments in favor of populist policies because virtually everyone finds these straw man arguments pleasantly convincing.  Regardless of the merits of the minimum wage, Social Security, and the FDA, economic illiteracy is the reason for their popularity.  If someone like Bastiat convinced people that the pleasantly convincing arguments are inane, proponents would have to fall back on arguments that are intellectually better yet rhetorically inferior.

Boy, conservatives really do have different childhoods than the rest of us, don't they? What kind of stuff do you have to be into at 16 so that your big revelation about how everyone is a phony and the world is rigged against you has to do with Social Security perverting market forces? Is this just another case of uncorrected Randism?

Take the minimum wage.  Normal people like it because the government waves a magic wand and makes mean employers give helpless workers extra money, with zero blowback.  So inane, yet so convincing to a psychologically normal human.  An intellectually serious argument, in contrast, begins by conceding the theoretical possibility of a disemployment effect, then defends low estimates of labor demand elasticity.  This is a huge improvement in intellectual substance, yet persuades only wonks.

Yeah. The real problem here isn't that people are greedy and economically illiterate. It's that age-old problem of conservatives thinking equations from freshman economics should be our first order concern in making policy decisions that affect the welfare of millions of real human beings. I actually think "normal people" are doing just fine as far as "conceding the theoretical possibility of a dis-employment effect" goes. PhDs or no, "normal people" get that McDonald's business model doesn't really permit them to pay burger assemblers $50/hr, hence the conspicuous absence of a widespread movement to raise the minimum wage to untenable heights.