"Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency." - Raymond Chandler

***

In some ways, a lot of libertarian ideology seems like faith. For a huge and startling array of problems, the root cause is somehow always traced to government intervention or regulation. If some degree of deregulation causes problems, the solution is not to reverse the deregulation, but somehow even more deregulation. If reduced government intervention means that monopolies will reign unchecked, the fact of these monopolies' existence in the first place is blamed on governmental action (when in fact many counter-examples can be raised, including the NKF in a Singaporean context, as well as natural monopolies like power distribution).

I can't think of any political system where Libertarian has been practised, so all its promised benefits are - so far at least - purely theoretical. But then the law of unintended consequences comes into play; the Laffer curve sounded like a good idea in principle (and in fact tax cuts are a cornerstone of libertarian ideology), but it plunged the US into a decade of red ink. Communism also sounded like a good idea in principle, but look how it turned out (and is turning out).

Libertarianism is predicated upon markets clearing, but the truth of the matter is that markets are imperfect. Labour is less mobile than capital, so a moderate minimum wage is not necessarily harmful; furthermore cutting the profits of capital owners is less hurtful than cutting the wages of poor laborers (it helps that perfect competition rarely holds so the costs can't all be passed on to consumers). Other problems are that people are irrational and comparative statics works well on paper but maybe not as well in practice (in giving you exact numbers) since things change all the time (one reason why policy making does not require as much mathematics as academia).


Economists like to advise that companies must restructure health/pension plans to stay solvent, but the discourse is structured in such a way that the fact that but this is tantamount to reneging on binding contracts signed with workers is not considered. Similarly, the costs of a minimum wage are assumed to be passed on to consumers, but similarly so will any punitive fines the government imposes on a company. Does this mean we shouldn't fine companies then, since they won't really 'pay' and consumers will bear the cost?

I wonder what would happen if some of the techniques of political correctness were used in those fields to manipulate the system. For example, a male in a gender studies class could claim that the field, being dominated by women, was systematically biased against him. A science student could claim that essays in literature class imposed a foreign epistemological paradigm upon him by diktat, and that the test was culturally biased and hence rubbish. A non-native speaker of English could complain that being assessed in English was inherently ethnocentric and racist.