Tag: Ignorance

As Americans approach another even-year trip to the polls, those currently running and those positioning themselves for 2020 are revealing their vast ignorance in how they would “fix” what they think are our core problems. The many free lunches (or more accurately, stolen lunches) they promise, all the way up to multi-trillion dollar utopian health care boondoggles-in-waiting, show that few know enough to pass an economics principles course, much less to advance Americans’ general welfare. While some words passing beltway lips make sense (e.g., recognizing burdens from regulation), many fail to understand opportunity cost (e.g., free college and paid leave), comparative advantage (e.g., protectionism), that market incomes are earned by benefitting others (e.g., making “the rich” pay more), not to mention the roles of property rights and profits and the markets for labor and capital, and far more. But why does the snake oil offered by political candidates prevail so often electorally, compared to similar nonsense where people are free to make their own decisions? In market competition: Economic knowledge need not be articulated to the consumer, but is conveyed... in the prices and qualities of goods. The consumer may have no idea at all—or even a wrong idea—as to why one product cost less and serves his purpose better; all he needs is that end result itself...better and more accurate knowledge on the part of the producer is a decisive competitive advantage, regardless of whether the consumer shares any part of the knowledge. In political competition, however: Knowledge is conveyed by articulation, and its accurate transmission through political competition depends upon the preexisting stock of knowledge and understanding of the receiving citizen...In political competition, accurate knowledge has no such decisive competitive advantage. It is important that consumers need not correctly understand how something is accomplished to be well served by market competition. In markets, “prices convey effective knowledge of inherent constraints,” where “Consumers buy results and leave the processes to those with specialized knowledge of such things.” In contrast, “there are no constraints on my voting for...[mutually inconsistent] options simultaneously desired [but] unrealizable from the outset.” Further, “no small part of the political art consists in misstating options and in trying to give them the appearance of simultaneously satisfying competing claims when they cannot be satisfied in reality.” Consequently, political competition “does not...bring to bear more accurate knowledge, as in economic competition, but promotes exaggerated hopes and fears.” The too-common end result is that “In their political behavior, the public must judge...economic processes of which they may be ignorant or misinformed,” to the point where “every perceived problem—whatever its reality or origin—calls for political solution, and these ‘solutions’ tend to create a never-ending supply of new problems to be ‘solved.’” Thomas Sowell recognized that “Perhaps the greatest achievement of market economies is in economizing on the amount of knowledge needed to produce a given economic result.” He also saw it as “their greatest political vulnerability,” which we see continuously acted out before our eyes. Americans, who benefit from the vast web of voluntary market arrangements without understanding them, can be lured by siren songs of something for nothing, that, in fact, undermine those arrangements which reliably serve them.

As Americans approach another even-year trip to the polls, those currently running and those positioning themselves for 2020 are revealing their vast ignorance in how they would “fix” what they think are our core problems. The many free lunches (or more accurately, stolen lunches) they promise, all the way up to multi-trillion dollar utopian health care boondoggles-in-waiting, show that few know enough to pass an economics principles course, much less to advance Americans’ general welfare. But why does the snake oil offered by political candidates prevail so often electorally, compared to similar nonsense where people are free to make their own decisions? In market competition: Economic knowledge need not be articulated to the consumer, but is conveyed… in the prices and qualities of goods. In political competition, however: Knowledge is conveyed by articulation, and its accurate transmission through political competition depends upon the preexisting stock of knowledge and understanding of the receiving citizen…In political competition, accurate knowledge has no such decisive competitive advantage. It is important that consumers need not correctly understand how something is accomplished to be well served by market competition. In markets, “prices convey effective knowledge of inherent constraints,” where “Consumers buy results and leave the processes to those with specialized knowledge of such things.” In contrast, “there are no constraints on my voting for…[mutually inconsistent] options simultaneously desired [but] unrealizable from the outset.” Further, “no small part of the political art consists in misstating options and in trying to give them the appearance of simultaneously satisfying competing claims when they cannot be satisfied in reality.” Consequently, political competition “does not…bring to bear more accurate knowledge, as in economic competition, but promotes exaggerated hopes and fears.” The too-common end result is that “In their political behavior, the public must judge…economic processes of which they may be ignorant or misinformed,” to the point where “every perceived problem—whatever its reality or origin—calls for political solution, and these ‘solutions’ tend to create a never-ending supply of new problems to be ‘solved.’” Thomas Sowell recognized that “Perhaps the greatest achievement of market economies is in economizing on the amount of knowledge needed to produce a given economic result.” He also saw it as “their greatest political vulnerability,” which we see continuously acted out before our eyes. Americans, who benefit from the vast web of voluntary market arrangements without understanding them, can be lured by siren songs of something for nothing, that, in fact, undermine those arrangements which reliably serve them. Gary M. Galles is a Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University, an Adjunct Scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and a member of the Foundation for Economic Education Faculty Network. His books include Apostle of Peace (2013), Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014), and Lines of Liberty (2016).

Karen Bradley has admitted that before becoming Northern Ireland secretary she was profoundly ignorant of the country’s political divisions and “slightly scared” of the place. She said she was unaware that nationalists did not vote for unionists and that unionists did not vote for nationalists – the most elementary fact about Northern Ireland politics. “I freely admit that when I started this job, I didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland,” Bradley told House magazine, a weekly publication for the Houses of Parliament. “I didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland – people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa. “Actually, the unionist parties fight the elections against each other in unionist communities and nationalists in nationalist communities.” Minister announces pay cut for Stormont assembly members Read more Theresa May appointed Bradley to the post in January – succeeding James Brokenshire – at an exceptionally sensitive time because of Brexit and the breakdown in Stormont’s power-sharing government. Theresa May sent the former culture secretary to Belfast supposedly as a safe pair of hands. “That’s a very different world from the world I came from where in Staffordshire Moorlands I was fighting a Labour-held seat as a Conservative politician and I was trying to put forward why you would want to switch from voting Labour to voting Conservative. On Thursday she said their pay will be slashed after 19 months if the devolved government is not restored. Their pay would fall from £49,500 to £35,888 in November, with another reduction of £6,187 three months later if the assembly did not resume its work, Bradley told MPs. She ruled out immediate elections for the devolved assembly, which has not operated since power sharing between the DUP and Sinn Féin collapsed in January last year, and announced plans for civil servants to have more powers to implement policies.