As long as we’re discussing Libertarianism, I was struck today by a bit from one of Kevin Drum’s posts:
And the second piece of TV news? Something that’s close to my heart: broadcasters have promised Congress that by September they will have standards in place that prevent commercials from being wildly louder than the TV programs they’re embedded in. Hooray! It’s only taken them 40 years to finally address this. “We get it,” an industry flack told Congress about loud ad complaints. “As a matter of pure economics, we do not want to lose viewers.”
The bad news, however, is that the industry’s sweet talk has convinced Congress to halt work on legislation to force broadcasters to address this. Too bad. Like the Do Not Call list, this is one of those things where ideology plays no role for me. I don’t care if this is liberal, conservative, libertarian, or anything else. I just want it to stop, and I don’t care a whit whether or not it’s a justified interference in the free market. JUST MAKE IT STOP!
I think that, in broad terms, this is how most people think about politics. It’s not about whether a certain action is libertarian/socialist/whatever/etc, it’s about, “I want X.” In as much as the free market provides X (quieter commercials, safer food, telemarketers leaving me the fuck alone), they’re happy to go with the free market.
When the free market fails to provide, though, as it can arguably be said to have failed in those examples, I think most people have no problem with compelling action through government means.
An essential part of free market ideology is the idea that, left to its own devices, the market will give customers what they want. So this then, to me, is the ultimate rebuke: the reason why the huge regulatory framework has grown up around certain issues is because the free market explicitly did not give customers what they wanted, and they turned elsewhere. They didn’t turn elsewhere because they love regulation … they just want the effect.
Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.
About a decade ago, I played a couple of seasons of Rotisserie League baseball. For those of you unfamiliar with it, this is where, before the real baseball season begins, you gather with the rest of your friends and pick the baseball players you want on your team. Then, your team gets points based on how well the players you have do in the real life major leagues. (Yes, I do have the right post; this is all relevant; I’ll get there.) There are all sorts of rules about how to trade ‘your’ players, how much you had to ‘pay’ them, bringing up people from the minor leagues, etc.
Now, all of the team owners were white males in their 20s to 40s and I’m pretty sure most were suburban. Politics wasn’t really talked about much, but there was the occasional comment/joke made about current events. I’m pretty sure I was the only democratic socialist in the bunch. There was one guy I knew from work who was a bedrock conservative Christian Bush supporter. Another guy came across as something of a moderate liberal, judging from his occasional sarcastic rebuttals of right wing jokes. Most of the rest came across in their comments as your typical collection of tax- and regulation-hating Republican and/or libertarian types. I doubt if Gore picked up more than three votes of the ten in the room, if that.
Now, a situation developed where there was concern about how trades were handled towards the latter part of the season. A team that was clearly out of the running could basically give away their high priced talent in one-sided trades and practically dictate who the eventual winner would be. So there were all sorts of rules discussed about how to prevent this (the point of the game being who best understood major league baseball, not who had the best buddies in the league), and eventually it was decided that there would be a committee of a few team owners (democratically elected) who would have to approve any trade after a certain date.
The approach worked well enough as I recall, but my point is this: here were a bunch of pretty strong Republican/libertarian types, engaged in an activity they were doing for fun and that activity consisted of … creating and abiding by regulations, setting up a bureaucracy, and even assessing and collecting taxes (certain transactions required the team owner to pay additional money into the kitty). And there was very little complaint or frustration with any of it, because everybody pretty much agreed the rules devised worked pretty well. Which is just my long-winded way of echoing the point in the OP: that for all their professed ideological values, Americans* will readily switch to a different approach if they can see that the other approach works better.
*My impression is that this ‘non-ideological ideology’ is more prevalent in America than elsewhere — I’ve seen a number of writers make the same point — but if someone wants to make the argument that this is just a flattering story we tell ourselves, I wouldn’t be able to rebut them.
ballgame,
What were the penalties for someone’s refusing to participate in this system?
If society was run more like a sports league, we’d all be better off. There’s no piece of practical liberalism better than the sports draft, which essentially rewards the worst team in the league for sucking – but with the benefit of keeping competition vibrant, forcing maximum achievement from the champions rather than letting them sit on their laurels, letting each team in the league feel like they’re being given a fair shot, etc. Not to mention, you know, revenue sharing between big and small market teams and all that.
On the other hand, though, ballgame, why didn’t your league just impose a trade deadline?
Well, PG, your trade wouldn’t ‘go through’ for example. We had a commissioner who was officially in charge of tracking all the stats and assigning points, etc., so if you tried to make an unapproved trade, the players would still be stuck with their old teams.
It’s been a long time, sylphhead, so I don’t remember for sure, but I think the reasoning had something to do with keeping the owners of the out-of-the-running teams interested in the league (since jockeying for position for the following season was the only interesting activity left to those teams at that point).