DISQUS

I think you can cut through some of the fog surrounding "harms" vs "externalities" if you try to look at the symmetry of the situation, or lack thereof. Some examples:

* You have a hot dog stand. Your neighbor opens one across the street. He should not be taxed because he could just as easily argue that the presence of your hot dog stand harmed him by forcing him to open his at prices lower than yours. The situation is symmetric, therefore there is no taxable externality.

* Andrew Carnegie opens a steel mill across the street from your house. Fumes from the furnaces enter your house and make you sick. This situation is asymmetric - your presence does not harm the steel mill, but its presence harms you.

* Joe and Sam want to get married. You feel threatened by this, and contend that their marriage harms you thereby. But they can just as easily claim that they are threatened by your marriage.

* Here's a less straightforward example. Nigel wants the right to carry a handgun for personal protection. You would prefer that the number of handguns circulating be kept to an absolute minimum to minimize your risk of being hit by a stray bullet, or being near Nigel when he experiences a sudden psychotic break due his prescription having been filled incorrectly. Can you claim that his owning a handgun exposes you to a certain probability of being shot, and thus he must not own a handgun? Can he claim that being prevented from owning a handgun exposes him to greater risk of being a victim of violent crime? I'm not sure how this example sorts out.

* Continuing with the idea of probabilistic harm: You want to drive your car at 90mph. If you aren't allowed to do this, you waste time on the road, which harms you. But driving faster increases the risk that you will maim or kill someone along your way. Their only recourse would be to stay off the roads while you are driving. It seems that the harm they suffer (not being able to use roads at all without risk of being struck by a maniac) outweighs the harm you claim (having to take slightly longer to get to work), and indeed that squares with our intuition that people shouldn't be allowed to drive at any speed they wish on public roads. But how do we *know* that this situation is asymmetric?

Also, when was the republican party last the party of "community and civic order"? To me that sounds like code for "the party that keeps weird scary people away from your family."

I think by "weird", I meant "showing a failure of self-awareness" rather "rare or uncommon".

And I _don't_ think one should expect proponents (effective ones, anyway) of new ideas to complain about this, because it is stupid and pointless to complain that people don't agree with you. If they don't agree with the ideas, it must be because the proponents _haven't convinced them yet_, and the burden is not by any means on them to recognize the alleged superiority of the proponents ideas...

There is something just a bit weird about someone writing from an intellectual minority position bemoaning the fact that the only thing preventing their ideas from becoming mainstream is the fact that large segments of the population disagree with their ideas.

I know this wasn't supposed to be a post about the happiness effect of having children, but isn't all such research utterly useless, since it can only do retrospective analysis on self-selected samples?

Actually he quite clearly states that individuals must be held responsible for their crimes: "There could be no law, and so no civilization, absent the imputation to persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts."

The point is, if all we're doing is holding individuals responsible for their wrongful acts, why do we have the highest incarceration rate among developed countries by such a huge margin?

Among the answers that Loury proposes, I think the least controversial is that we are focused on punitive, rather than instrumental measures. What end is served by taking the perpetrator of a victimless or even a non-violent but victimed crime, throwing him in a hellhole for several years, and then denying him decent employment opportunities for much if not all of his life after release? Is it possible that such a person might be more, rather than less, likely to commit further and more violent crimes as an ex-con?

Sure, you can say that "justice" demands that people be punished, but one of Loury's key points is that excessive or counter-productive punishment is a punishment not born by the criminal alone, but, in fact, by everyone. You can never buy any of the goods or services the convict might have produced had he had reasonable employment opportunities after release. Any time an opportunity for rehabilitation is forgone in the name of "just" punishment, you will be forced to live in a society with one more criminal in it than there would have been otherwise.

I'm sorry, what law forced banks to write loans that could never be payed off? Clearly no one, since a few smart banks actually didn't make stupid loans.

Um, you are not describing a voucher system. You're describing a system in which the rich have choices, and the poor don't.

Oh, come on. Corrupt purchase of political or judicial favors is the classic example of a good that is priced in terms of relative wealth. Even if the poor become twice as rich, materially, they will still not be able to buy their way out of prosecution for offenses against socially-conservative laws. Has everybody in Singapore bought their way out of censorship laws?

Besides which, I have yet to hear an articulation of the whole economic vs. social freedom concept that makes it clear which side of the fence prostitution falls on. Why is a law against prostitution an assault on social liberty, while a law against (say) hairdressing is an assault on economic liberty? (Because conservatives aren't made uncomfortable by hairdressers, that's why.)

Also: I have met plenty of people who call themselves libertarians who in fact are actually conservatives, in that the only libertarian position they support is that of lower taxes. Self-labeling is always going to be a bit inaccurate, when judged against one's own conception of what those labels mean.

Why is this argument always "poor people should be able to work in sweatshops" vs. "sweatshops should be illegal", instead of "people working in sweatshops should have 30 minute lunch breaks" vs. "people working in sweatshops should have 10 minute lunch breaks"?

Oh, wait, I know. It's because the latter argument, which could actually have some effect on the world, would be really difficult and would require both sides to develop arguments somewhat more subtle than the whole exploitation vs. free-choice ideas that dominate this debate.

Nick Szabo had a great critique of the Coase theorem, http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/05/coase-..., which has made me really skeptical anytime I hear someone start a sentence with "according to the Coase theorem".

(e) is irrelevant to your point. We need to know whether it is _likely_ in absolute terms that growth will result in good environmental quality, not whether it is the _most likely_ cause of good environmental quality

should have been "cars emit less carbon than bikes"

The whole "cars emit less carbon than cars" thing is bunk anyway, unless you get %100 of your calories from factory-farmed meat, and wouldn't replace biking with any other form of physical exercise (such as going to the gym... in your car). It's doubly bunk if you buy groceries with your bike, since _all_ transportation, including that from the store to your house, is included in the food carbon footprint figures.