Third, the argument consists of two sentences. The first tells me that I shouldn’t mind having my wealth effectively used up by the stupid people around me (implicitly, it suggests that the way I can cope with stupid people is by spending money to avoid them).The second tells me that I should mind having the government effectively use up my money. What’s the difference? In both cases, stupid people are making it so that I have less money. Why should I care if one set of the stupid people works for the government?There is EXACTLY one question for bothering me and the other libertarians. The question is: Where's the opt-out switch. Exit is the condition that matters. The rest of the conditions are fluff. For the most recent time...Exit is the difference. If you deal with governments...you have no exit (go to a different government, which is basically the same). If you interact with folks you don't want to interact with enough...you exit. super-simple difference...and the only MORAL difference.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Foseti responds
Quite politely, too, given my aggressive tone. He ends with a question, that he asks every time we hit this kind of difficulty. My answer is always the same, and I figure that writing it here is louder than in his comments for the 17th time. The question:
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The question that we were initially discussing is: “What did stupid people ever do to you?”
You started by arguing (with Caplan) that stupid people have basically no impact on people like me (I think). Now you're arguing that I can always move away from them.
The only way I can reconcile these two positions is to assume that you no longer believes that stupid people have no impact on me. Directly determining where I live is something rather fundamental, no?
In other words, exit is not a costless option - ergo, stupid people have an impact on me.
Now that we both agree that stupid people impact our lives, we can move on to the question of whether it's easier to exit from stupid people or bad government.
This is a completely subjective question. The answer will depend on your definition of "bad government" and your subjective valuations of moving to places with good government.
To be honest (and snarky), I'd rather move to Singapore than exurban Virginia. That way I would escape both stupid people and bad government. It would probably be cheaper for me to move to Singapore, since I'd have to change jobs if I moved there and my new employer would likely help with relocation costs. Costs are subjective - I'd rather die than sit in a car for a couple hours every day. For me, it's not clear that the costs of exit from stupid people are necessarily lower than the costs of exit from government. And either way, it misses the point of the original question . . . stupid people impact our lives in myriad ways and everyday.
Pretending otherwise is the height of wishful thinking.
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