Monthly Archives: May 2013

Unwise Actions

This week I am setting aside the usual politically inspired thoughts. Frankly my heart just isn’t in it. My wife and I (along with thousands of others) have been vicarious witnesses to every parent’s worst nightmare: the death of a child. A close friend, teammate and classmate of our son’s took his own life last week. There were no warning signs. To say we are all shocked would be a gross understatement. This tragedy has reminded us all how quickly that which we take for granted can vanish in an instant. The pain and anguish we have experienced have been but mere shadows of what his family has endured. I am humbled by their strength of character for I doubt I could muster the strength to get out of bed. Many ask “why” in these situations but it may be the most pointless question of all. There is no answer that could ever be given that would make any sense or console anyone. We hope an answer might help us prevent others from doing the same. But every situation is unique. Following our hindsight leaves us blind to what is before us. The challenge is not in addressing every potential scenario that might lead a teen down this path but rather in making sure they understand there does not exist even the possibility that any event or situation in their life could ever justify such a course of action.

As parents we face a real challenge. We wish to set standards while simultaneously not undermining those standards through the moral hazard of our love. I think we are all often guilty (myself included) of saying “Do this, don’t do that” and leaving the “but if you fail it’s ok, we’ll still love you” as an unspoken sentiment. We know we’ll love them no matter what but we have to be mindful of how when we were teens we felt like our parent’s love (respect, approval, etc.) for us was conditional upon our meeting their standards. As a parent don’t assume anything – tell your kids you set standards because you love them but if they fail it will not affect your feelings in any way. Tell them that you don’t expect perfection, that none of us are perfect least of all ourselves. Children instinctively place their parents on a pedestal as paragons of perfection. It’s ok to let them know that is not the case, that we are human and make mistakes just like they do. I think taking ourselves down a notch in their eyes may often help to lift them up a notch so that in their eyes the gap between us is much smaller – perhaps small enough to maintain communication (a real challenge in the teen years).

And to any teen or young person reading this, please understand there is NOTHING that you could do or experience that would warrant taking your own life. Grades, relationships, drugs, life goals – problems in these areas are nothing more than pebbles underfoot on the journey of a thousand miles that will be your life experience. Don’t let a few pebbles stop you now. If you feel you can’t talk to your parents then talk to anybody, a friend, a teacher, a stranger, anybody. And if that doesn’t help, just wait 24 hours before doing anything you can’t undo. Emotions are fleeting and mercurial; it is unwise to act based on your emotional weather vane. Whatever pain or fear you are experiencing will be magnified a billion fold in the family and friends you leave behind.

 

if you would like to learn more about the events that inspired this column, please see this page here.

Perverse Incentives Promote Disasters

In the wake of any industrial accident there follows a predictable chorus of pundits lamenting “market failure” in order to justify further interference of the state into every facet of business function. On the surface this might sound plausible, surely we need Big Brother looking over our employer’s shoulder to make sure everything is safe, right? The only problem with this narrative is that the pundits tend to conveniently omit the crucial fact that such disasters happened on the watch of government. There is no place in the world immune to at least some level of government oversight related to safety. Even in Bangladesh where there has been a recent spate of factory fires and building collapses they at least had building codes even if they weren’t followed. And there in lies the rub. The people entrust their government with the task of ensuring their safety (a dubious decision at best) but when that same government fails to adequately carry out that mandate and such failure is the proximate cause of some disaster oddly blame is 100% shouldered by the regulated entity rather than the regulator. If you had a jail in your community that routinely had prisoners escaping and killing people it seems like at some point the people running the prison should share in the culpability.

So whether it is financial misdeeds on Wallstreet, a factory explosion in West Texas, or a building collapse in Bangladesh, we see the same failure of the state regulators to do their job. But the regulators are just employees, they can’t be held personally liable. And their employer is the state, and the state can’t be held liable. So where does that leave us? No one is responsible. What is the solution? Rub some bacon on it – err I mean throw some more money at it.

If regulators fail, then they just get more money and scribble down yet more regulations based on their clairvoyant 20/20 hindsight; more words on paper that will be ignored by more regulators in the future. The perverse incentive of this system should be obvious and yet it continues. The perverse incentive is that (a) failure is rewarded with (b) more resources; therefore failure is what is incentivized. Now that is not to say that all the regulators individually are these evil monsters failing on purpose in hopes of one day obtaining a raise. But what it does mean is that the system itself cannot cure itself. A market system is self-regulating in that failing firms (assuming they are not bailed out by the government) disappear into the graveyard of failed businesses. In a market based regulatory system failure means you lose all your money and go out of business. Success means you make money and you stay in business. Competition among the successful firms drives further improvements. There is no competition in the monopolistic government run regulatory system; Soviet style stagnation reigns supreme. A successful private regulator (e.g. Underwriter’s Laboratories, Consumer Reports, etc) prevents harm and is rewarded for successfully doing so. Government can’t go “out of business” and so the same old failing system stays in place, at least until we vote in illusory “change” only to discover nothing has changed at all.

Bangladesh Robber Baron fallacy

Just read this article about the Bangladesh factory disaster this morning. Truly terrible what happened, however the usual progressive/statist smugness comes to the surface pretty quick in the comments “oh see what the free market causes, we need government to save us from these evil people.” Here’s my response on the board to that sentiment (longer article coming this weekend):

Except that the “Robber Barons” is a progressive statist myth. Please see Tom Woods on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbIIPtLEVbA

Basically those that compare working conditions of the late 19th and early 20th century or those in emerging 3rd world countries to those today in the US are guilty of a “ceteris paribus” fallacy, that is, you are making a comparison and drawing a conclusion that is flawed because not all of variables are held constant, namely the variables wealth and technology in a given society. Do people value safety? Sure, but value is subjective and we arrange things on our value scale ordinally (we rank them in order of preference). Do we value safety MORE than we value not starving to death? I think not. So if our choice is a) not starving to death or b)comfortable/100% certainty of safe working conditions we will choose (a) every time. We will work so that we can buy food and not starve to death and we will do so in an environment that while not ideal is the only option available and in fact is the better of all other options available.

Now I’m not excusing the owners of that building/business for building an unsafe building, but consider the alternative proposed by progressives. Government mandating to the nth degree every aspect of building design. It would cost so much to build that building there that they simply would never have built it, and thus there would have be NO jobs for anyone and they would have been left to scratching in the dirt to make a living. Is the current outcome good? No, but it is still BETTER than the alternative, where instead of 1000 people dying and 2000 surviving maybe 2500 die of starvation and 500 live through subsitence farming.

They likely built it this way because of crooked govt, paying off inspectors, and never thinking they could get in trouble. In a free market there is no one to pay off. They would have built it better knowing 100% with certainty they would go to jail were it built shoddily

The Fallacy of Prevention

Gun Control Advocate: “We need more/better gun laws to eliminate gun violence.”

Gun Rights Advocate: “Gun laws do not decrease gun violence because criminals do not follow the law.”

Gun Control Advocate: “So we should just get rid of all laws because they fail to stop all crime?”

And that’s where this little exchange usually ends. The gun right’s advocate typically stutters through some non-sequitur argument that doesn’t at all address the apparent “gotcha” from the now smug gun control advocate. Sadly courses on logic are no longer taught in our schools, because if they were, we would easily spot logical fallacies such as this one. This is an example of a false analogy or comparison, that is, assuming two things are equivalent and inferring they must share the same properties. Not all laws are the same.

Laws against violations of person or property (murder, rape, theft, etc.) are primary laws. Their sole function is punitive. They prescribe the consequences for violation of the law. If the consequences are severe enough there may be a small preventive tendency but overall people breaking these laws really aren’t concerned with the fact that somewhere there are words on a piece of paper saying they shouldn’t do such and such. In short, these laws can only affect criminals (i.e. those who broke the law).

Laws like gun control (i.e. interventionary laws) are secondary laws. They attempt to prevent the violation of a primary law through interventionist procedural means. Whereas primary laws affect only their violators, secondary laws affect only non-violators of the related primary law. Prospective violators of a primary law simply ignore the demands of the related secondary law. Because there is no way to know who these potential violators might be, secondary laws must by necessity cast a wide net and attempt to inconvenience everyone. Sadly they fail in their attempt, they catch all the fish you don’t want and allow all others to escape. In short, these laws can only affect non-criminals.

And so the fallacy is exposed. Abstractly it is implied that gun laws (“B”) are beneficial because: eliminating primary laws (“Not-A”) is “bad”, therefore “A” is “good”, and because “A” is assumed to equal “B”, it follows that “Not-B” is likewise “bad”, and so “B” must be “good”. As I’ve shown above A does not equal B, and without that the argument fails.

Laws against murder ARE anti-gun laws. They are also anti-knife, anti-bomb, anti-poison, anti-anything that could be used to kill someone. Laws against specific types of weapons are a fear driven whack-a-mole style attempt to prevent future violence. The futility of this preventive approach is clearly seen in our nation’s prisons. In the most highly controlled, rights restricted environment one can imagine there are still drugs, there is still violence, and there is still murder. If preventive efforts fail in prison, how could they possible be expected to work in a free society? Some often cite Australia’s stringent gun controls laws of 1996 as proof that tight restrictions can “work” by pointing to the drop in gun violence since enactment. While such violence has dropped, what they conveniently leave out is that the statistics clearly show the rate of gun violence was already on a decades long decline prior to and after the 1996 laws. In fact armed robberies had a dramatic increase shortly following the new gun restrictions. I don’t suppose that had anything to do with the fact that criminals opted not to follow the law and instead kept their guns?