November 30, 2012
Libertarian Bait: Rent Seeking Edition

A recent NYT article discusses the plight of users of an online crowd-sourced room rental service called Airbnb, which allows users to offer their rooms for rent for travelers looking to avoid paying exorbitant hotel fees.  The problem?  In many cities, such as New York City, people offering their rooms for rent to travelers are breaking local laws:

Back in September, Nigel Warren rented out his bedroom in the apartment where he lives for $100 a night on Airbnb, the fast-growing Web site for short-term home and apartment stays. His roommate was cool with it, and his guests behaved themselves during their stay in the East Village building where he is a renter.

But when he returned from a three-night trip to Colorado, he heard from his landlord. Special enforcement officers from the city showed up while he was gone, and the landlord received five violations for running afoul of rules related to illegal transient hotels. Added together, the potential fines looked as if they could reach over $40,000.

New York City ordinances outlaw this sort of “crowd-sourced” approach to offering lodging for travelers:

 local laws may prohibit most or all short-term rentals under many circumstances, though enforcement can be sporadic and you have no way of knowing how tough your local authorities will be. Your landlord may not allow such rentals in your lease or your condominium board may not look kindly on it … [NYC law] says you cannot rent out single-family homes or apartments, or rooms in them, for less than 30 days unless you are living in the home at the same time.

The NYCRR is a labrynthine mess that even lawyers have trouble navigating.  Needless to say, though I’ve worked with the NYC regs before, I was unaware of this particular restriction.  

What struck me about these ordinances, however, is that it appears to be a textbook definition of rent-seeking by hotel concerns when I read it.  Indeed, after reading further, the justification for these laws seem flimsy at best:

New York City officials don’t come looking for you unless your neighbor, doorman or janitor has complained to the authorities about the strangers traipsing around.

“It’s not the bargain that somebody who bought or rented an apartment struck, that their neighbors could change by the day,” said John Feinblatt, the chief adviser to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for policy and strategic planning and the criminal justice coordinator. The city is also concerned with fire safety and maintaining at least some availability of rental inventory for people who live there.

These justifications don’t hold up upon interrogation.  The “bargain” in question is one governed by the terms of the lease, and landlords are generally free to dictate the terms of that lease as they please.  Landlords could, for example, place a restriction on this sort of short-term room rental if they wanted to.  The fact that the landlord at issue in this case did not only proves further that this isn’t really a concern that comes up that often.  If it was, you can bet the landlord would have a section in their lease devoted to banning this practice, so as to ensure they don’t get held liable for their tenants’ violation of the ordinance in question.  

Second, the fire safety concern is related to the number of people in the building at any given time.  That would be controlled by placing restrictions on maximum occupancy, which already exist.  Notably, the fire hazard concern would also be implicated where people simply allowed friends to sleep over in their apartments, which a ban on individual room rentals would not prevent.

Third, the idea of “maintaining at least some available rental inventory for the people who live there” doesn’t even make sense.  The only way these rooms get rented out is by someone who already occupies them.  There’s no way that crowding out of rental space could occur here.  The room is already “unavailable” to the other residents of the city because somebody already lives there.

So all we are really left with in this case is a law that represents rent-seeking by hotel businesses in New York City.  There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to place a per se restriction on this sort of transaction where other laws already account for the justifications given.  Which makes this whole thing a shame, because people clearly benefit from having this option available to them.  Particularly in New York City, where reasonably safe and clean hotel rooms are notoriously expensive.  

This is a good example of an instance where we really should just let the market (and the wonders of the internet) do its thing.  For the reasons cited above, I can see no legitimate reason for this type of ordinance other than fattening the pockets of both hotel concerns and city governments, who get to impose fines every time a violation occurs.  Regulations that attempt to solve legitimate problems with land use in a heavily populated suburban area are one thing.  Regulations that serve merely as revenue-raising and rent-seeking provisions for the city—and its attendant private beneficiaries—are another thing entirely.

h/t Matt Yglesias

8:41pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxYOW2Ri
(Notes: 11)
  
Filed under: politics libertarianism new york city economics 
May 2, 2012
The Truth About Diocletian and Inflation

laliberty:

… Currency reforms of the sort Diocletian undertook still happen sometimes in the modern era, but they almost always go in the other direction. When a country has in the recent past suffered a bout of serious inflation that’s just come to an end, sometimes the government will choose to put an asterix on the new regime by basically striking a zero or two off the old currency. So in 1960, France introduced a New Franc and announced that one New Franc was worth 100 Old Francs, and that 1 Franc Coin of the old vintage could stay in circulation as one New Centime. You could describe the impact of that switch as a giant one-off deflation, but that’s a pretty misleading way to think about it.

Yeah, that is a pretty misleading way to think about it. So why suggest it as “going in the other direction”? Coming up with a “new” currency with new denominations is not necessarily any less inflationary if the effect is still the same. If the U.S. government prints brand new money out of thin air, it doesn’t matter if they print five Dollarinos worth $1,000 each or simply five thousand dollars.

Read more

I’m not sure I follow your objection.  The French monetary exchange didn’t involve just printing new money per se.  Under the traditional definition of inflation (an increase in the money supply), the French deflated their currency.  The old centime pieces were never circulated widely, and fell out of use under the new system.  So under the exchange that took place, the total amount of practically usable legal tender was reduced.

Now if you click on the link above, you’ll see in the relevant Wikipedia entry that “Inflation continued to erode the [new Franc’s] value, but much more slowly than that of some other countries.”  Fair enough.  But as Tyler Cowen noted the other day, “I don’t see that two to four percent inflation has unacceptable costs,” and “The decline in the value of the dollar since 1913, or whenever, has not been a major economic cost.”  I suspect that the counter-point to this would be something along the lines of Robert Wenzel’s parade of horribles, e.g., since the start of the Federal Reserve, “the money supply has increased 12,230%,” and “prices have increased at the consumer level by 2,241%.”  These numbers look scary.  But again, there is zero evidence that this has had any impact on the actual ability of Americans to thrive.  As Phil Horwitz likes to note, “the real income of poor Americans today is higher than it used to be, even though their share of total income is somewhat lower.”  So even Libertarian economists like Horwitz are claiming that Americans are prospering under the Federal Reserve, despite the fact that the dollar has seemingly lost 98% of its value since the Fed was created.  It seems to me that this statistic had far more shock value than analytical value.  And I understand that the orthodox Libertarian tradition interprets inflation (as does Ron Paul) as nothing short of theft.  But even if we assume this arguendo to be true, there’s nothing indicating that inflation wouldn’t occur under a Gold Standard (see links below).  Under this theory, whenever new Gold is discovered, or the real price of gold decreases, a theft has occurred.  The only way to prevent this is to peg the currency, which would return us to Milton Friedman’s objection.

Oddly enough, however, this is all somewhat besides the point.  I linked to Yglesias’s article because Ron Paul accused Krugman of supporting the economic policies of Emperor Diocletian.  Krugman rejected that accusation, and I think the article demonstrates that Paul was being overwrought: I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Krugman calling for an overnight 100% doubling of the exchange value of the currency, which is what Diocletian did when he issued his final currency Edict.  I think we can both agree that such a policy decision would be catastrophic and ruinous.  And Keynes certainly agreed as well:

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. 

I suspect that we disagree on what the definition of “debauch” is.  I would measure it not only as against the expansion of money, but also of relative purchasing power.  If Horwitz is right that the real purchasing power of the poorest Americans has increased over time, then that means Americans have prospered under the Fed’s ostensibly ruinous policies.  Futhermore, if we were to do what Ron Paul wants us to do and return American currency to the Gold Standard, the economic consequences would be dire: there is currently not enough Gold in the world to facilitate international trade.  I understand that advocates of the Gold Standard, such as Gary North, feel that the dearth of Gold is a myth, and market forces will simply adjust.  But in North’s case, he offers zero empirical evidence to support that proposition (Ford’s price decreases were in no way motivated by monetary policy, and he knows that).  Nor does he reckon with the Private/Public Financial Liability Problem: ”the US alone is running liabilities in excess of $55 trillion. That’s well over 10 times the value of all gold and its just the US. There is an entire rest of the world we’d have to split the gold with..”  North also completely misconstrued Ellen Hodgson’s argument, which was that the late 19th — early 20th century Gold Standard was bad for poor workers, because they had zero access to credit.  The Gold Standard of yesteryear regulated credit markets at the expense of poor workers.  To requote the relevant passage from Hodgson:

The bankers made loans in notes backed by gold and required repayment in notes backed by gold; but the bankers controlled the gold, and its price was subject to manipulation by speculators. Gold’s price had increased over the course of the century, while the prices laborers got for their wares had dropped. People short of gold had to borrow from the bankers, who periodically contracted the money supply by calling in loans and raising interest rates. The result was “tight” money — insufficient money to go around.  

None of this means that many of the perennial objections to the Fed’s policies don’t have merit.  I personally have noted the disastrous oversights of Alan Greenspan’s Fed in the 90’s.  But to return to the original point: Krugman’s assertion that he doesn’t support the policies of Diocletian is correct.  He has never supported an overnight doubling of the exchange value of the currency coupled with price controls intended to increase the purchasing power of the United States military; which is what Diocletian did.  With all due respect, I think it’s fair to call Paul’s assertion a mischaracterization of Krugman’s position.  Is Krugman an Inflation advocate?  Under current circumstances, certainly.  Keynesian?  New Keynesian, actually.  Diocletian?  I don’t think the evidence bears out that proposition.

3:01pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxKlB-_i
(Notes: 16)
  
Filed under: politics the fed economics libertarianism krugman monetary policy 
April 19, 2012
"There are probably many flaws to libertarianism as a political philosophy, but it’s the ultimate excuse when one wishes to end a stupid political conversation."

—

Patrick@popehat

I lol’d.

10:53pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxJycjvi
(Notes: 10)
  
Filed under: politics libertarianism 
April 5, 2012
Wilkinson’s Folly

via huskerred, I encountered this 2005 article from American Prospect article discussing Obama’s criticism of the GOP’s “Ownership Society” rhetoric.  The following quote was selected for praise:

Modern market societies — ownership societies — are the paradigm of interdependent, mutually advantageous cooperation, and are as far as can be imagined from the society of atomistic predators Obama invokes to stir the disdain of the fresh-faced graduates of Knox. Market societies — ownership societies — are wealthy because they rely on and reinforce a high level of social trust and norms of cooperation.

I’m generally a fan of Will Wilkinson, but the article from which this quote is taken is so full of holes it would serve better as a drain cover than a cri de coeur for market enthusiasts.  It’s also clearly written for a particular audience (American Spectator’s readers).  Wilkinson’s writing is usually more careful and nuanced than it was here.

The quote ascribed above is problematic because it is a collage of vague buzz words whose net effect is, inter alia, to misrepresent Obama’s actual position with respect to market-based solutions, which is far more centrist than Wilkinson implies.  In fact, of all the things Obama has ever said, I think this is by far my favorite quotation:

Our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited.

Wilkinson’s dialectic framework of “marketeer v. redistributionist” thus demonstrates laziness at best.  It also betrays a complete failure to capture the nuanced nature of mixed economies; and the idea that “ownership societies” reinforce a high level of social trust and cooperation is betrayed by the shocking frequency and gravity of labor violence that defined late 19th and early 20th century America, when the government took a far less active role in regulating the marketplace.  Far from making people trust each other more, the failure of government to intervene with the “leavening hand of wise policy” resulted in far more strife than occurs today in virtually any economic transaction.

Yet this is, in part, why Wilkinson’s appeal to vague ideals of “ownership” is so lacking: for all of the colorful phrasings that populate his prose, nowhere does he set meaningful goalposts for what his definition “ownership society” is.  By neglecting to doing so, he can easily rely on it for the purpose of making rhetorical flourishes his readers will define for themselves.  How much mileage any individual reader gets out of the phrase “ownership society” is going to change depending on your personal preference.  It’s closer to rhetorical prestidigitation than a concrete ideological framework.

But what is perhaps most surprising to me about this article is just how unkempt it is.  There are huge unaddressed objections that he’s smart enough to understand.  Indeed, his skepticism of a “pattern of coercive government transfers” reminds me of Jim Henley’s exegesis on why he abandoned Libertarianism as a political philosophy:

I think my real *flip* was the Bush Administration’s social-security privatization proposal in 2005-6, and the enthusiastic advocacy for it by libertarians like my, well, young friend Will Wilkinson. As long as privatized social security was abstract, I was all for it. But when it became, seemingly, a real possibility, I looked at the law, and I looked at the Henley-family finances, and I knew fear. Real “maybe I won’t sleep; maybe I’ll just stare at the ceiling all night” terror. Somewhere in there, I recovered enough other-directedness to recall that we are very far from the worst-off household I know. And I realized that my stated beliefs were a sham. A luxury. I leapt, at least in my secret heart, into one of the available cups.

Nowhere in Wilkinson’s article do we see him address why modern 1st-world mixed economies are rife with redistribution programs. These “patterns of coercive government transfers” arise in advanced societies because the “immensely complex voluntary networks of interdependence and cooperation” that comprise a modern economy are complex enough to create systemic feedback loops wherein certain classes of citizens fall through the cracks, as the result of an even more complex panoply of economic incentives that don’t always resolve in neat, mutually beneficial relationships.  When that happens, the government steps in to provide the service that voluntary transfers were incapable of adequately providing. Dan Drezner’s remarks from January complete the rebuttal:

Frequently, demand for government services emerges because of the perception that the private sector has fallen down on the job in that area. This means that the government has been tasked with doing the things that are difficult and unprofitable to do. It is precisely because these government outputs are often so hard to measure that  [e.g.] Newt Gingrich’s claims about Six Sigma [were] pretty laughable.  Even libertarians who want the government to reduce its operations drastically will acknowledge the political risks and costs of trying to execute this plan.

Those political risks exist because so many people rely on the “coercive transfers” that Wilkinson abhors.  If he truly wants to understand why people continue to rely on and advocate for government transfers, perhaps he should ask Jon Henley why he feels that “coercive transfers” are a better guarantor of his family’s welfare than the “immensely complex voluntary networks of interdependence and cooperation” he refers to.  He’ll probably discover that he’s on far more shaky ground than he once believed.

7:38pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxJ98Se-
(Notes: 9)
  
Filed under: politics libertarianism will wilkinson 
February 16, 2012
"The very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism."

—

Ronald Reagan, Reason Magazine, 1975.

So the question is: why does Rick Santorum hate Ronald Reagan so much?

h/t Sullivan

8:06pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxGXOFfw
(Notes: 8)
  
Filed under: politics libertarianism ronald reagan rick santorum 
February 15, 2012
Fractional Reserve Banking, etc.

anticapitalist:

baseballlibertarian:

Even more reason why we need a currency backed by gold, silver, or at the very least something tangible.

Something tangible, like the sweat and blood of child laborers right?

How about we use Letterstomycountry’s idea: Use a currency backed by…

LTMC: I reblog only to make clear that I was joking, and that I do not hold Anarcho-Capitalists in quite that much contempt.  My penchant for risqué humor gets me in trouble sometimes ;)

(Source: moralanarchism)

11:44pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxGUvO3K
(Notes: 28)
  
Filed under: libertarianism anarchism 
February 8, 2012
On Ayn Rand

As I spotted JoeMcCarthyBlues discussing Ayn Rand with spry interlocutors, I was reminded of an article that Whittaker Chambers wrote for National Review in 1957, in which he essentially decimated Ayn Rand’s philosophy and literary bona fides.  It is worth quoting Chambers at length.  Here, he analyzes Rand’s use of the dollar sign as a symbol of her liberation ideology, one which, in the end, is simply Marxism turned inside out:

[Ayn Rand’s] Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which “has resolved personal worth into exchange value,” “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash-payment.’” The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: “And I mean it.” But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired “naked self-interest” (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.

The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world. 

I quote this simply to remind people that even conservative contemporaries of Rand did not like her.  They appreciated her anti-government stance, but conservatism was traditionally, above all things, an ideology of homeostasis.  Rand was essentially calling for social upheaval and revolution; which are two things that traditional conservatism opposes because existing political systems and traditions often serve invisible needs that are undetectable by external reformers.  Hence the reason why, e.g., Edmund Burke was critical of the French Revolution (whose controversial, bloody aftermath vindicated him).

With that said, I am in 100% agreement with Chambers’ critique: Rand was scarred by Communism when she was young, and as a result, developed a political ideology that was so superlative in its elevation of opposing principles that her philosophy essentially occupied the opposite side of the same coin.  Objectivism is essentially dialectical materialism and LTV (“are you not entitled to the sweat of your brow?”) dressed up in private property rights and Nietzchean ubermensch pathology.

6:55pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxG6UGuF
(Notes: 26)
  
Filed under: politics ayn rand libertarianism 
February 3, 2012

jgreendc asked: With all due respect, I'd always prefer to err on the side of too much liberty than too little. For instance, while pro-choice, I would rather be too cautious with religious liberty and let Catholics make choices for their own businesses than central bureaucrats. Unless the right to contraception becomes a constitutional amendment, government should leave enough be.

(forgive the lengthy response, read at your leisure).

It is probably no secret, based on the tenor of my posting here, that I am sympathetic to the idea of erring on the side of liberty.  However, I submit that liberty should not be a shibboleth that is only defined by the action or inaction of government institutions.  As you know, positive liberty is a real thing, and government action, under certain circumstances, can enhance rather than subtract from the real, aggregate liberty of the population writ large.

Keep in mind why erring on the side of liberty (with respect to government) is so often the desired option: because in most cases, erring on the side of liberty results in greater human flourishing.  Yet the human experience is rich, diverse and complex enough to include situations where that is not the case.  Indeed, classical Libertarianism maintains that government should not err on the side of liberty in enforcing strict property rights (including crimes against the person).  Most libertarians and supporters of limited government would argue that failing to do so would inure to the collective disadvantage of large groups of people.  I therefore submit that a liberty which is construed so as to collectively disadvantage large groups of people is not a liberty worth defending.  

In the present case: when a Catholic hospital (for example) sets up shop, it necessarily displaces property and resources that might be utilized by a secular hospital who would provide services that the Catholic hospital refuses to provide.  This is a concept our Founders were quite aware of, as evidenced by Thomas Paine, whose writings have not infrequently been used by Conservative writers to support limited government:

There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue…

Paine’s answer was practically a proto-communist primer:

[we should therefore] create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.

So the idea that private actors displace property and resources by occupying them is not new.  Utilizing that property to provide a necessary service in a limited way necessarily places the people in that community at a disadvantage.  Market theory suggests that another hospital would spring up to compete.  But there are natural barriers to entry that can easily prevent that from occuring.  Indeed, it seems fanciful to suggest that, given the enormous overhead and massive initial investment necessary to construct a modern hospital, one will spring up upon the whim of an enterprising entrepreneur.  And this is separate from the question of whether there’s even adequate property available in a location near enough to the population being served by the Catholic hospital to serve as a realistic alternative.  

What is more likely to happen is that women who want contraceptive or abortive care, 9 times out of 10, will have to engage in significant personal expense and travel to locate another hospital, in another geographic location, that serves their needs.  As in the abortion case, this means that some womens’ lives will be put in danger.  When a person’s life is in danger, they don’t have the liberty of taking the 30-minute drive to the next city.  A rational market doesn’t exist for people who are in immediate danger of their lives.  Either they seek care from the hospital nearest to them, or they die.  When that space is occupied by a Catholic hospital that refuses to offer certain medical services due to their religious convictions, it puts a large group of people at a disadvantage.  Namely, women, and any family member who might be affected by their injury or death.

Now erring on the side of liberty, we might simply suggest that women are free to refuse to live in places that are served by Catholic hospitals.  But it is here that we see a limitation on the woman’s freedom: allowing the Catholic hospital to exercise its freedom, within the significant space it occupies both in real and economic terms, forces women to choose between putting their lives at risk, or abandoning the economic opportunities and/or social benefits that exist within the community being served by the Catholic hospital.  The choice is not between the Catholic hospital’s freedom and government-imposed tyranny.  The choice is between the Catholic hospital’s freedom and the woman’s freedom.  In that scenario, a positive liberty may be affected by the government, to the spiritual detriment of the Catholic hospital, and the medical, economic and social benefit of the woman.

As I’ve said before, I believe that all laws should be analyzed on the basis of the benefit received vs. freedom lost.  Whether erring on the side of liberty would be of more benefit is of course part of that analysis.  In this case, the freedom lost by requiring Catholic hospitals to serve women is clearly (imo) subordinate to the gain in freedom that inures to women by not granting religious exemptions to conscientious objectors in the realm of healthcare.  That calculus might change in a different context, of course.  But under the circumstances as they stand, the answer seems relatively clear: there’s a lot more freedom to be gained in this situation by forcing Catholic hospitals to offer a full range of services than by granting them a secular privilege based on their religious beliefs.  Erring on the side of liberty in this case, it seems to me, means supporting the substance of the rule in question, so that women (i.e. 51% of the population) are not limited in their life choices by virtue of allowing Catholic hospitals to decline offering certain medical services, at least one of which is not infrequently medically necessary to prevent imminent harm.

12:09pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxFq5GXf
(Notes: 12)
  
Filed under: healthcare healthcare reform libertarianism politics women's rights womens rights 
January 17, 2012
"[T]he alternative to government coercion is not a coercion-less state of happy autonomy; it’s coercion by unconstrained private actors. Libertarian-inspired thinkers are obstinately closed off to the idea that government is not the only entity capable of infringing on human rights, including but not limited to free expression, physical safety, and property ownership. When government steps out, some form of manorialism steps in (sharecropping, “company store”-models)…it’s in no way a better model for society than a representative, constitutionally-restrained government."

— Nathan Nicholson, comments, “Capitalism and Freedom” by Matthew Yglesias

12:35pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxEwRJuT
(Notes: 12)
  
Filed under: politics libertarianism 
January 16, 2012
"[P]olitical libertarianism is not much of a guide to real-world politics. Modern history has shown that activist democratic governments, ones that provide public goods and help for the poor, do not really threaten liberty. In Scandinavia, for example, where the governments are much more activist than in the United States, democracy is very vibrant and far less corrupt than in the U.S. In fact, by keeping mega-income under control, the Scandinavian countries have avoided the kind of plutocracy — government by the rich — that has engulfed Washington."

—

Jeffrey Sachs

I would frame it in terms of practical liberty.  Freedom is of little use to a person whose practical liberty is constrained by necessity.  No reasonable person would say that an impoverished knave is as free as a wealthy plutocrat in terms of their range of available actions.  The benefits to society at large of freeing people from the bonds of poverty are great indeed.

2:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxErvRtZ
(Notes: 29)
  
Filed under: politics libertarianism 
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