From Matt Zwolinski:
From Matt Zwolinski:
May 1 2013
Co-blogger Bryan Caplan made a good point yesterday about the alleged efficiency/equity tradeoff. He's right to emphasize it. Many economists smuggle in their "equality" value by equivocating between equity as equality and equity as some other value. I pointed this out in the Wall Street Journal in 1996 when Stanfor...
Apr 30 2013
The world's a complex place and we don't know a lot about how it works. To make matters worse, it's not just that we're ignorant about the world, we're ignorant about ourselves: We rarely know our own strength. Given our ignorance, how should we interact with the world around us? William Brainard worked out one answer...
Apr 30 2013
From Matt Zwolinski: Guy stuck on the side of the road. Car tire blown out. Waves down passing car. Libertarian/Marxist in the car: "Sorry, buddy. What we need is structural change. In a [Communist Utopia/Freed market], ...
READER COMMENTS
Demosthenes
Apr 30 2013 at 10:19am
The liberatarian isn’t wholly wrong, though. In a freed market, the stuck guy probably owns a cell phone and has roadside assistance.
MikeP
Apr 30 2013 at 11:08am
And in a communist utopia, the stuck guy probably doesn’t have a car.
Prmkff
Apr 30 2013 at 12:15pm
Wow. I wonder if the point of the parable was maybe that it doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong? At least not to the guy flagging down cars right now.
Marc F Cheney
Apr 30 2013 at 12:17pm
“It’s a fair cop.”
Eric Sweeney
Apr 30 2013 at 1:06pm
As a libertarian, I make the comment and then voluntarily help the guy. Not wanting to help people through government force doesn’t mean not wanting to help people!
Jeff
Apr 30 2013 at 1:22pm
An economist would recognize changing tires was not his comparative advantage, so he’d hand the guy $50 to call a tow truck and then drive away.
MingoV
Apr 30 2013 at 5:12pm
Libertarian/Capitalist in car: I can help you change the tire or give you a ride for a fee that’s open to negotiation.
ThomasH
Apr 30 2013 at 6:31pm
The passerby should help repair the non-structural component of the tire.
MikeP
Apr 30 2013 at 7:34pm
Keynesian in the car: “Sorry, buddy. This is an AD problem. You are in need of some inflation, but unfortunately you’re in a liquidity trap!”
Ken P
Apr 30 2013 at 11:04pm
Keynesian #2: “Sorry buddy, you must have run over a government placed nail. Aggregate Tire Pressures were too high, your sacrifice contributed to the solution.”
So Matt is saying that libertarians are exceptions to the theory of moral sentiment?
Carl
May 1 2013 at 8:10am
This makes sense because everyone is a disembodied, decontextualized, politically determined consciousness before they are helpful, jerkish, human, whatever.
Oh, it’s meant to be funny?
Himanshu Sanguri
May 1 2013 at 10:11am
I like the comment “And in a communist utopia, the stuck guy probably doesn’t have a car”.
Delphin
May 7 2013 at 6:01pm
And what about those Libertarians who would admit all would-be immigrants equally?
[broken link fixed–Econlib Ed.]
Comments are closed.