a curious pair of political beliefs

• Greater legal restrictions on guns will have no effect whatsoever on actual gun activity. Unlawful citizens will still perform illegal gun violence.
• Greater legal restrictions on abortions will effectively eliminate actual abortion activity. Unlawful citizens will never perform illegal abortion procedures.

I know many voters who profess to both of the preceding political beliefs. How curious.

personal responsibility through collective suffering

I'm no economist, which explains why I attempted to describe the economy using "deadlocks" and "local minima/maxima". And I suspect that many other commentators aren't economists either, which explains why their preferred analysis also comes from a different domain: morality. Within that frame, economic decisions are moral decisions; decisions in the context of efficient markets result in swift and appropriate moral consequences. Personal responsibility is a synonym for the level of economic success.

Like many perspectives, this one has an unsurprising problem: its implications aren't a perfect fit for all reality. For example, market shifts in the unit price of fossil-based fuel have unavoidable consequences on anyone who has no substitute method of transportation to and from the workplace, yet the sole cause of these shifts isn't their personal decisions. Nor are they personally responsible for drastic adjustments in the market price of their largest assets. Nor are the downsized employees of a company responsible for the new competing product that decimated the company's number of customers. In an actual massive economy, relatively tiny participants might not have meaningful personal responsibility for their current level of economic success. (Although they decide how to adapt to the changes, of course.) Poetically, transactions link the fates of many, whether temporary or ongoing, whether material or contractual.

Hence, while the moralistic interpretation is sometimes accurate and instructive, it also has pragmatic limits. To prescribe grave and unrestricted consequences is to affect the "innocent" as well as the "wrongdoer". To permit a woeful decision to ricochet is to watch escalating damage to the bystanders. It's paradoxical. Market "punishment" can be effectively unjust. The perpetrator might be able to absorb the fall in wealth without much harm but the same loss eliminates the net worth of multiple others.

I agree that personal responsibility is a vital principle for a realistic free market. I agree that an economy without risks is an economy without a brighter future. But I disagree that the entire thing must be left sick whenever a slob sneezes, in order to ensure the slob's maximum pain.

trigger words

Sometimes I like to select words that I know to be "triggers" for particular thoughts and emotions. My purpose isn't to follow the basic communications proverb "consider your audience" ¹ but to provoke internal contradiction and confusion. It's fun to watch the reaction. I'll concede that it isn't constructive or respectful.

For instance, imagine a hypothetical conversation with someone who's angered by Wall Street yet who also has a fanatic attachment to free markets².
"We need to do something about those thieves and gamblers on Wall Street."
"Who is we? Are you suggesting 'government intervention'?"
"No! Government intervention is always bad. I just mean that Wall Street should play fair."
"Are you proposing better 'regulation' to define and enforce fair play?"
"No! Regulations are always bad. But what if all the money that's currently sunk into finance was in manufacturing instead?"
"You mean a 'redistribution' of that money? Or 'public investment'?"
"No! Redistribution is always bad, and so is when the government tries to pick winners by investing. Forget that. What the individual worker needs is more power and a greater share of the overall pie. Despite their hard work they earn so little compared to company executives."
"As individuals, workers don't exert much power. As a group, they could. They could 'bargain collectively' to argue their case for a greater share."
"No! Collective bargaining is always bad. Really, the cause of the crisis was too much debt. I wish Wall Street hadn't swindled people by providing them with mortgages."
"Those mortgages were voluntary. So the underlying problem was the 'free exchange' of credit?"
"No! Free exchange is always good. The problem was that the people who took out those mortgages weren't knowledgeable about adjustable rates, so they were at an information disadvantage compared to the lenders."
"A market in which any participants have incomplete information isn't an ideal well-functioning market. Are you asserting that the market therefore failed to 'self-regulate' or act 'rationally' or 'efficiently'?"
"No! Markets always adjust rapidly to compensate for every weakness or eventuality. Therefore the problem must have been the government. The government has a monopoly on the money supply, hence its mismanagement of the money supply must be the culprit."
"That makes sense if excessive money forced people to take stupid actions. Would that the opposite is true: that it's better to cut off the majority of credit and speculative loans altogether? That would certainly restrict the generation of 'start-ups' and 'small business' to the 'independently wealthy', who can finance their own risks."
"No! I greatly like start-ups, small business, and self-made men who started out, um, independently poor. Talking to you is so frustrating. You keep stating things the wrong way."

¹By quoting the proverb, I'm not implying that I'm effective at observing it. For instance, I'm spectacularly uncertain who the audience of this blog is. (According to the redone Blogger interface for posts, "nobody" isn't too far off!)
²The key word is "fanatic". In my opinion, that's distinct from believing in the macroeconomic truism that, in practice, decentralized experimenting actors in a well-functioning market are better at adapting to information and change than a centralized stagnant authority. Someone can have principles without being blind to the complexity and limitations inherent to applying those principles.

rule of 8...

...If someone discusses the budget of the federal government of the U.S.A. with fewer than 8 independent numbers or factors or categories, then chances are that the discussion is oversimplified. Figures have been skipped to present a "condensed" viewpoint that's more consistent with a partisan narrative. The 8 or more numbers are "independent" in a statistical (information-theoretical) sense: none of the numbers is a complete mathematical function of the others, such as the third always equaling the difference of the first and second.

omniduction break down II

To lampoon the use of omniduction...

Inviolable Proposition 1: The Constitution is a sublime and superb document, and if interpreted in a particular way (not necessarily the same way that judges have), it would cure society's ills.
Inviolable Proposition 2: Political compromise is a despicable, cowardly act that yields terrible results. Staring contests are better.
Historical Fact 1: The Constitution is packed with political compromises.

SYSTEM ERROR!

omniduction breakdown

Apologies for flashing some political stripes, but here goes... Recently I read an angry online comment about the "threat of raising taxes by gradually reducing the mortgage interest deduction". 1) On one hand, the comment's writer believes in limited government that doesn't intervene in private markets. 2) On the other, the comment's writer believes that all rises in the effective tax rate are by definition terrible. So removing a tax cut, which is evil according to #2, would reduce government intervention in the housing market, which is good according to #1.

The attempt to derive an opinion by omniduction has produced a "SYSTEM ERROR". Perhaps policies in the real world have trade-offs and case-by-case factors to consider, and individual policies can't be attacked in isolation from the rest?