How Free Markets Address the Disabled and Destitute

Someone on Quora asked,

How do advocates of a completely free market address those people are are unable to compete, e.g. the disabled, or destitute?

So I answered:

The free market doesn’t fix every problem in the world. Neither does any other system 

Consider the following questions: how does the non-free market address cops shooting innocent people by mistake? How about when child protective services separates parents from children for illegitimate reasons? How about when government decides that people should be arrested for carrying a plant in their pocket? How about when government decides that people of Japanese ancestry should be put in concentration camps? How about when 63,000,000 people vote for Donald Trump? I’m sure you have your own list. How is government going to address that? 

Sometimes government does “address” these problems by various means, just like the free market addresses the disabled and destitute through charity, trade, and economic growth. Yet when someone points out that this is an imperfect solution it seems like some kind of knockdown argument against free markets. Are government solutions not imperfect? Does government never exasperate these problems? Does government never inhibit markets from treating these problems? Do government solutions not come bundled with a bunch of government created problems? 

I think what happens is we compare what government should do to what the private sector will do. This is comparing an ideal version of one thing to a realistic version of another. This is not apples to apples. 

A completely free market addresses the disabled and destitute the same way government does, partially, sometimes negatively, sometimes merely theatrically, and always imperfectly.

Where Jonathan Haidt thinks the American mind went wrong | Ezra Klein Show

Listen to two cool cucumbers Jonathan Haidt and Ezra Klein talk about how parenting has changed, how it's influencing journalism, the academy, and tech, and how accurate the social justice lens is.

"Teen anxiety, depression, and suicide rates have risen sharply in the last few years," he writes in The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff. "The culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers."

Walls around Boarders and Brains

I wrote a short post over at AFinerGrain, it makes an obvious bare rarely noticed point,

But if you're pro-immigrant, should't arguments for the wall's futility make you more pro-wall? The more effective the wall would be, the more you should be against it. The less effective, the less you should be against it.

Michael Huemer's New Blog

Philosopher Michael Huemer has started blogging. He used to write rather long posts on Facebook, now I'm happy to see he's transitioned to a blog that organizes his posts a little better.

For a good first post try Ideology and Outrage:

What do feminists and Trump supporters have in common? Lots of things. Both are humans, both are mostly ideologues, both will hate this question. Also, both of them are easily scammed. That’s because ideology makes people suckers. 

How to scam an ideologue: tell them a story that fits their narrative about society and plays into their stereotypes.

Politics in Your Genes

Twin study shows political attitudes are somewhat heritable, more so environmental, but have little to do with upbringing:

To the extent that political ideologies are inherited and not learned, they become more difficult to manipulate. Conservative parents who try to make their children conservative by carefully controlling their children’s environments are probably overestimating the importance of those environments. Offspring of such parents are likely to end up being conservative but less because of the environment created by the parents than the genes passed along by the parents.

Did Toronto Really Break the Homicide Record?

While other news outlets are saying Toronto just broke homicide records, The CBC deserves credit for pointing out the difference between rates and instances:

Nearly half a million fewer people lived in Toronto back in 1991, so with 89 slayings the homicide rate was 3.9 per 100,000 residents. Right now it's 3.3 per 100,000 with the 90th homicide of the year.

#Everythingisawesomenobodyishappy

What is The Euphemism Treadmill?

Click here for a clear explanation of The Euphemism Treadmill, with lots of examples.