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.
