People get mad at individual corporations a lot. The other week, a famous shoe company started running ads with a controversial football player in them, and that made some people very happy with the shoe company and other people very angry with it. These people wrote about the shoe company a lot, and by writing about the shoe company they gave it $43 million in free advertising. See, it didn’t matter to the shoe company which stance it took on the controversial football player–by taking any stance, it could induce the media to give it free attention, and that free attention translated into sales for the company. People thought the shoe company was taking a stand because of some kind of commitment to social responsibility–but this is a shoe company which has happily, for years, employed child labourers in sweat shops, stolen their wages, and verbally and physically abused them. But this isn’t because the shoe company is especially immoral–it’s because all companies are subject to a set of structural incentives which, by design, prevent them from taking moral considerations into account independently of their ability to contribute to revenue.
Tag: United States
Migrants Don’t Destroy Traditional Values–The Market Does
The other day I ran across a survey–apparently 40% of British people feel that “having a wide variety of backgrounds has undermined British culture”. When people say that western culture has been undermined, they are implicitly saying that at one point in time western culture was better. Many socialists, liberals, and progressives don’t agree with that–they think traditional values are wrong and moving past them is good. But today, instead of relitigating social issue debates about changing values, I want to make a case to our socially conservative friends on their own terms. To be clear, this doesn’t mean I agree with traditional values. I merely want to show that the values social conservatives treasure are not threatened by migrants–they are instead threatened by the very markets many on the right so deeply prize.
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The Slow Corruption of Public Discourse Since Watergate
In the 44 years since Richard Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States, political discourse has deteriorated. There are many reasons for the decline in the discourse, but today I want to focus on two forces which have come together in America–one sociological, the other technological–to impose a spontaneous order which greatly reduces the scope for authentic expression, both in public and in private. This new social order is not planned by anyone–it has no author, it requires no institutionalised hard coercion. It arises spontaneously from the interaction of the two forces.
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Ben Shapiro Laid a Trap For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
I was dismayed this week to see Ben Shapiro successfully trap Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This is a good opportunity to talk about political rhetoric–the art of talking political smack. It’s important to know not just how to do it but when not to.
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Why It’s Hard to Calculate the Cost of Single Payer in the United States
Lately there has been some back and forth in the states over the expected cost of single payer healthcare. There is a lot of disagreement over how much single payer will cost because single payer grants the state a monopoly over the healthcare system. This means that the state can dictate how much it is going to pay its doctors, its administrators, its nurses, its drug and equipment manufacturers, and so on. Because the state can dictate the cost of single payer, the true cost of the proposal depends on how much the particular people implementing the proposal intend to spend.
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Benjamin Studebaker 