Argument Is A Vulgar Impracticality

Will Wilkinson’s beef with all things Jacob Weisberg continues unabated:

The actually-existing system of institutions at any given moment is the result of a wickedly complex interaction of forces. In particular, the character of heavily government-regulated market institutions, like ours, is the outcome of set of bargains between public opinion-sensitive legislators in the democratic body, between competing ideological constituencies within regulatory agencies, between possible targets of regulation and legislators, and on and on and on.

This is in fact the system Weisberg seems to demands. He’s at least OK with it. His problem with the status quo apparently has nothing to do with the deeper structure, or the chronically unstable strategic character, of this system. His problem is simply that the wrong bargains sometimes get struck. Weisberg correctly notes, in the vacuous manner characteristic to this immensely popular but truly sophmoric conception of political economy, that the last disastrously bad set of bargains wouldn’t have been struck had the contents of the minds of key players been different in certain ways. Indeed. So… what? So when the bargaining outcome leads to instability and massive structural failure, the correct response is simply to attempt to ensure that, in the future, people who believe certain things are not key players. This is preferably accomplished by ensuring that, in the future, no one of significance believes those things at all.

Is there any reason to believe this is not Jacob Weisberg’s way of thinking? Is there any reason not to think it is monumentally stupid?

Okay, the first paragraph is true enough. But isn’t the phenomenon Wilkinson describes here as “monumentally stupid” simply what most people would call the marketplace of ideas? Isn’t the whole point of pieces like Weisberg’s, and blogs like Wilkinson’s, and all the rest of the public discourse, to promote ideas participants consider good and eliminate ideas participants consider bad? (Which would obviously entail ensuring that no one of significance holds to them.) Isn’t trying to make sure the wrong bargains don’t get struck precisely what makes the marketplace of ideas necessary in the first place? Changing the minds of key players in an effort to ward off bad decision-making seems like a perfectly reasonable project to me. How is any of this sophomoric or stupid?

Am I missing something, or is Wilkinson implying we’d be better off with a system of government and markets in which we need as little actual discourse as possible in order to run things? A system in which the debate and interchange of ideas is tossed aside as a woefully inefficient practice, and the self-driven, spontaneous technocratic organization of unregulated capitalism reigns supreme? This seems naive at the very least.

Responding to Weisberg’s specific argument laying blame for the current financial mess at the feet of economic libertarianism (which is rather silly), Wilkinson is on slightly more plausible ground:

The deeper objection is that it’s just retarded to implicitly affirm a system so easily destabilized by ideological diversity. If a smattering of libertarian ideas can bring it all down, then the problem isn’t really libertarian ideas, is it? If the integrity of the economy in your preferred model requires a high level of ideological conformity, you might think to reconsider the wisdom of harnessing it so thoroughly to democratic political institutions meant to accommodate pluralism.

It’s an interesting point. I wouldn’t go so far as to say a robust regulatory welfare state requires ideological conformity to remain stable, but I wouldn’t dismiss the idea out of hand either. Regardless, even if it is an accurate assessment, the reason we leftists and liberals oppose an unregulated laissez-faire free market is because we believe such a system would be morally wrong. We oppose tyranny and authoritarianism for the same reason. If those moral imperatives put us between a rock and a hard place, well, then they put us between a rock and a hard place. I do not feel required to assume that the relative instability and inefficiency of such a tension would inherently invalidate those underlying moral assumptions. Doing the right thing rarely if ever makes life any easier, and I see no reason why that rule shouldn’t apply in this instance as well.

~ by Jeff on October 22, 2008.