Lies Economists Told Us

It does one good to get up early on an autumn morning, have a good breakfast, then go sit in the shooting blind with a thermos filled with hot coffee and bag a brace of nonsensical ideas. I consider myself conservative. However, this does not mean stupid or credulous. I wuz reading (sorry about that slip.) the Ludwig von Mieses Institute site and came across an article http://www.mises.org/story/2358 which is entitled Congress Forces Gambling Off Line. Why? This article references a book that can sum this all up: Power and Market author: Rothbard The book is sold on site and is introduced by: What can government do to enhance social and economic well being? Nothing, says Murray N. Rothbard. Power and Market contains the proof. It will inoculate the reader against the even the slightest temptation to invoke the state as a solution to any social or economic problem. Now as a Conservative I should be taking this bait hook, line, and sinker. Right? Well, my initial problem with the arguments about "intervention" is that the same arguments which apply to on-line gambling apply to child pornography. If one truly believed these notions, one should argue for the restoration of child pornography on the internet using the exact same arguments. Perhaps it is a quaint Victorian reticence that holds them back. All societies establish norms for right and wrong. If your take an immediate confrontational view of government ( and - in truth - the government is very confrontational ) then we feel we must resist its intrusion. However, if we conceive of government as the will of the governed, we have a slightly different outlook. If the common good is administered to by our government which we have freely elected and if that government has expressed our will in the form of laws banning on-line gambling and child pornography, then the fact that a group of low-lives will have recourse to a black-market in such items does not constitute an intelligent reason for us to re-consider our actions. And stop talking about Prohibition. The problem with Prohibition is that we were a society in which a majority of people abused alcohol. If - at some point in the future - the majority of society were to clamor for the legitimization of child pornography, would that mean we should restore free market kiddy porn - just as we restored booze to the households of America? Consider this quote: A government measure that might induce more saving and less consumption is then no less subject to criticism than one that would lead to more consumption and less saving. To say differently is to criticize free-market choices and implicitly to advocate governmental measures to force more savings upon the public. This type of analysis commingles moral acts with acts which are not subject to morality per se. Believe it or not, I consider gambling to be immoral and do not see why I would mix it up in a discussion about household savings and consumption. This analysis sets up a criterion of value which supersedes all other criteria, including your precious religious beliefs. Those religious trinkets will hold only so long as the free market allows. To bring this to its utterly stupid conclusion, if the free market were to choose illegal immigrants, slave labor, indenture, etc. then who are we to quibble? If free markets were to choose goods and services outrageous to social mores, shall we accept them? I do not believe the proponents of such arguments are stupid. Therefore, they must be pernicious and desirous of destroying morality. By their very nature, these arguments deny the existence of anything beyond the free market structure; morality is some vague, never-never-land idea that is the stuff of children. Free Markets are mindless automata which function as the servants of the society in which they exist. The men and women of that society set the standards and ethics and morality by which those markets must function, not the other way round. To believe otherwise is to deny our political and religious heritage going back thousands of years.