Echidne, I’m familiar with the theory of perfect competition. When I say “free markets,” I don’t mean markets in a state of perfect competition. A free market is a condition that can exist in reality; a perfectly competitive market is an idealized model that cannot. If you’re familiar with Austrian theories of entrepreneurship — a la Israel Kirzner — then that may help explain why I don’t hang that much on theories of perfect competition. Economically, I’m far more interested in the dynamic processes by which real-life markets move towards equilibrium than I am interested in behavior of fictional markets that have reached that idealized state.

So I don’t think the question “Would a free market in X lead to better results than government intervention?” should be answered by appeal to whether or not the market in X will be perfectly competitive. No markets ever are. The question should be whether real people’s efforts to muddle through, facing an uncertain future, are going to be most productive when their arrangements about X are voluntary, or when they are constrained by government coercion.

In real-world markets, some externalities need to be internalized and others do not. When they do, there are lots of ways to do this that are consistent with a free market. One way is to change your business model; radio broadcasters provide a non-rivalrous, non-excludable service to their listeners, gratis, but they make money by using that service to provide a rivalrous and exludable service to advertisers. Private lighthouse operators in 19th century England made their money by charging the nearby port merchants rather than the passing ships. When the externalities are significant and negative, one way to address it is to recognize it as a property rights issue; which is why many radical free marketeers (not Chicago privateers) favor restoring a robust version of nuisance tort law in order to address issues like air pollution.

As for barriers to entry, they are certainly a real issue, but natural barriers to entry are far less common than is often suggested. As a rule, government regimentation of markets creates far higher barriers to entry than would exist under a free market, because compliance with the bureaucracy takes a lot of time, money, and lawyers, and because incumbents can often capture agencies and effectively use them to stifle competition.

The Leftist historian Gabriel Kolko has a very good book, called The Triumph of Conservatism, which discusses the ways in which the Progressive Era regulatory state created and sustained robber baron capitalism, more or less at the behest of Morgan, Rockefeller, and the rest, which reversed the previous decades’ progress towards smaller, decentralized outfits. Without government intervention, free markets very often exert a centrifugal force; they usually start concentrating wealth only once the kleptocrats step in and force competitors out of the market.

Anyway, it does seem to me that all this is well within the realm of economic theorizing, so it seems to me that the concept of a “free market” has got a meaningful role in economic theory. Even if the meaning of the term is often perverted or concealed by hypocritical plutocrats who claim to be acting in its name.

swampcracker, I’m glad that your volunteer emergency services provided so well for your town’s needs. I am all for that kind of face-to-face mutual aid. But I don’t see what it has to do with Firebreak or with my comments.

Firebreak is not a public service. It is a private service operated by insurance companies, mostly because those companies can protect expensive houses for less than it would cost to rebuild them.

They are providing a benefit over and above what is provided by the government and the volunteer services. They are not stopping the government from providing similar services to everybody. They are not stopping you or your fellow citizens from volunteering your own money or labor to provide similar services to everybody. If you think that the level of fire protection available through government and volunteer services is inadequate, then that’s a damn shame, and you ought to try to do something about it. But it does not mean that there is anything wrong with Firebreak for continuing to provide the higher level of service to those who pay them to do so.

If your rich neighbor decides to hire some bodyguards, do you expect them to protect you, too, for free?

echidne: The book is so chock-full of stuff that a review can’t give examples of all of them.

Well, fair enough. But the examples given so far lead me to think that the book has a lot more to do with government-backed corporate kleptocracy than it has to do with free markets.

For example, I’m also passingly familiar with the forced retirement savings system that Pinochet instituted, as well as the Yet Another Damn Account plans that American right-wingers have introduced along similar lines. I don’t consider these free market reforms, or even transitional reforms toward a free market. They are just a different kind of state interventionism, hypocritically advanced by the kleptocrats and their hirelings under the name of the free market. A free market reform of a conventional government Social Security system would simply be to make contributions voluntary, and let people sock money away where they will. In a free market, the government does not force you to put away savings for retirement, and it does not force you to put those savings in a limited number of government-approved plans offered by an uncompetitive cartel of government-approved financial corporations.

Similarly, the crony-capitalist government auctions that often pose as “privatization” (they would more accurately be described as “privateering”) are, as you yourself mention, not good examples of free market processes. A free market way to turn a nationalized industry over into private hands would be simply to convert the government’s seized title into joint ownership by the people at large (as happened in Czechoslovakia), or by the users of a resource, or by the workers at a shop.

Of course, I haven’t yet given any argument as to whether truly free market reforms — rather than the kind of cock-eyed schemes that keep coming from the Chicago Boys, the IMF, and other professional privateers — would be workable, or whether they would be preferable to the existing governmental schemes. But whether workable or unworkable, they are what they are, and shouldn’t be confused with the pro-corporate interventionism promoted by “pro-business” economists.

echidne: But note that the concept of a “free market” is an ideological conservative one. It has no real meaning in economic theory.

I don’t think that the term is especially “conservative;” in the National Assembly, the advocates of laissez-faire sat on the Left, not on the Right.

I’m also not sure what you mean when you say that “free market” has no real meaning in economic theory. Could you explain some more?

swampcracker,

Would you rather that everybody’s house got equally devoured by the wildfires, just to be fair?

Firebreak is not going around forcing the government firefighters to provide a lower level of service than they were providing. Rather, they are voluntarily offering protection above and beyond what the government offers.

They’re not much different from private firms that sell electronic security or emergency-response systems to homeowners, elderly people, etc. All these goods and services cost money, and they’re usually only sold to people who have the bread to pay for them. It would be a fine thing if everyone could get valuable services regardless of their income level, and it would be noble either for the company or for conscientious people like you to launch a mutual aid or charity campaign to cover the costs of those services for those who cannot pay. But if there is no such effort, and the company does not provide its services gratis to people who do not or cannot pay, that hardly means that the company is actively injuring people, or that it’s imposing unequal burdens on folks.

echidne: I would love to learn more about the long-run effects of the free-market shock treatments.

What free-market shock treatments?

I can’t find one example of a free market reform in the cases you list. Rigged government auctions, subcontracting of nationalized monopolies out to privileged firms, and infusions of government cash from the IMF are certainly not examples of free markets. Let alone bringing in the government goon squad to crack unionists’ and dissidents’ heads. This sort of crap is often misrepresented as “free market” reforms by opportunistic advocates of it, but all these measures would more accurately be described as neo-mercantilism than as free market reforms.

Have you seen Jackson Katz’s documentary Tough Guise? He has a really powerful scene about this, with a big patchwork of professional blowhards from the TV news shows talking about how there’s “no pattern” to who does the shootings. Meanwhile photos of each of the teenage males behind the major school shooting incidents (as of 1999) stare out at the audience.

I’m not a fan of Galbraith’s, but he and you are spot on about the mathematization of economics.

Penis envy towards the “hard” sciences is an important part of the explanation; I think the professional interests of planning bureaucrats (a common destination, or aspiration, for institutionalized economists) are another; a lot of economists have, after all, a professional interest in justifying their positions as number-compilers, number-crunchers, and number-fudgers to the powers that be.

Personally, I think the best critique of the tendency was actually published several years back, in the form of a parable, in a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

bellatrys: ‘“X entails Y” if you find Y in places where there is no X – it’s called “necessary and sufficient” in formal logic. Chauvinism exists without Bibles; therefore “biblical” is neither necessary nor sufficient for the patriarchy.’

You’re committing a formal fallacy.

Entailment is not the same as equivalence; “p entails q” means that p is a sufficient condition for q (and q a necessary condition for p), not that p is necessary and sufficient for q. Because of the difference, you can’t safely infer “not-p entails not-q” from “p entails q” (that’d be a fallacy of denying the antecedent).

Applying this to the case at hand, you can’t safely infer (as you try to) “No acceptance of Hebrew scriptures entails no patriarchy” from Athana’s claim that “Acceptance of Hebrew scriptures entails patriarchy.” It could be true both that acceptance of Hebrew scriptures is the main or even the sole factor behind patriarchy here, and that something else entirely is what produced patriarchy in other historical societies.

This is not to say whether Athana or you is right about causes and effects here. But you are supporting your claims with a fallacy on this point.

H.B.: They had several booths set up celebrating this most important of anatomical objects. Well, until the last one which was about the horrors of sexual assualt.

Well, how dare they. Didn’t those crazy feminists know that the point of feminism is to make you feel comfortable and pleased with the world?

Tony: Hate to break it to Maureen and all her soul sisters, but powerful men are not interested in women who behave like men. They are interested in women. Feminine women. Women who make them feel like men, not geldings. Women they can protect. Women for whom they can open doors. Women who specifically need what men can and want to provide.

Please don’t presume to speak for the desires, interests, and beliefs of men you have never met. Some men aren’t dependent on overt rituals of vulnerability, dependence, and machismo to make them feel good about themselves. Some men don’t even think that feeling “like men” specifically is all that important to living a good life. I don’t know whether this is true of “powerful men” specifically, but I don’t have much reason to think that their desires, interests, and beliefs are any less diverse than those of the men that I do know. Do you?

Echidne: But it is odd that some take advantage of the gains while doing their utmost to make sure that there will be no more gains in the future, or for other women even today. I think that is what some of us find a little upsetting, because it looks two-faced.

Sure, and it is two-faced, and it is maddeningly frustrating. Just to be clear, I wasn’t objecting to anything you said in your post along these lines. I think you’re completely right. What I was objecting to is the way that some of the things comments that other people made, which seemed to go from making that point, to making the vindictive claim that some women don’t have a right to complain about sexism, or deserve to benefit from feminist achievements, because they are on the wrong side of the political line.

Echidne: I am not sure what you are referring to here. Dowd was criticized for doing sloppy research for an article. Maybe you are talking about something else.

Nancy was referring to specific post at Bitch Ph.D., where Bitch Ph.D. objected to the sexism that she saw in some of the common criticisms of Dowd. Nancy seems to be suggesting that this was foolish or wrong because of Dowd’s role in attacking or undermining feminism. (As it happens, I think a lot of other comments in this thread also expressed similarly vindictive attitudes towards the appallingly sexist assaults on Ann Althouse.) Nancy said that Bitch Ph.D.’s position was hard to understand; I think it’s easy to understand: she objected to rhetoric that she saw as sexist because sexism is wrong, even if the woman targeted by that rhetoric isn’t an objective ally of feminism and even if the position she has taken really is mistaken or weakly argued. That’s not to take any particular stance on whether or not Bitch Ph.D. was right to think that the criticism of Dowd was tinged by sexism. It’s just to say that she’s pretty clear about her reasons, and if you accept that the attacks are sexist, they’re pretty good ones, even if the target of those attacks is Maureen Dowd. And there are similarly good reasons to object to the way that Ann Althouse was treated at LGF (where there just isn’t any quesiton at all that the attacks were sexist). Broadly speaking, sexist attacks are wrong no matter who the victim is, and we shouldn’t be telling women “You’re on your own, sister” out of partisan spite.

vulture: “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s women who don’t identify with feminism at all — and who, indeed, will grab any opportunity to dump on it — yet will eagerly take advantage of all the gains feminism has won for them.”

Shouldn’t all women be able to take advantage of all the gains feminism has won for them? Wasn’t that the point?

Nancy: “You guys are exactly right. Which is why I don’t understand why feminist bloggers like BitchPhD defend Dowd. Clearly Dowd is no sister.”

I think it’s because sexism is wrong. Even when the woman suffering from it also happens to be a bad person.