Categories:
Institutional Economics
My latest essay:
the spontaneous order of the market can adapt to a tax relatively easily. However, when government tries to control supply, disorder emerges. Profit opportunities are created in crime and corruption. Compare the crime and mayhem in the market for drugs with that in the market for cigarettes. Or compare the disorder that resulted from alcohol Prohibition with the order that prevails today.
Bonus question: How can you apply this idea to the problem of controlling immigration?
READER COMMENTS
Troy Camplin
Sep 16 2007 at 12:32am
I study complexity, and any time you have any sort of complex system, it exists on the border or order and chaos. If you try to impose more order, you get more chaos, while allowing chaos to do its thing oftentimes results in order. We also know that this same borderland is where rules of behavior arise. Thus, it is not a place of anarchy. Quite the contrary. The cleaning up of anarchy can in fact result in the creation of order, as rule-based behaviors begin to dominate. Please note too that I use the word “rule” and not “law,” as rules can be bent, but laws are broken. THe rigidity of laws can be counteracted — turning them into rules — through the use of mercy. Mercy is, of course, unjust, insofar as it treats people who should be treated equally unequally. Yet mercy is what greases the wheels of justice. and prevent the machinery from locking up and becoming completely unjust. Justice without mercy is injustice — to have a fair system, a more complex system, one needs both the order of laws, and the disorder of mercy.
This may not answer the question, but I hope it gets the mind thinking about what answers could come from this.
TGGP
Sep 16 2007 at 2:35pm
Regarding immigration, build a wall. It seems to have worked pretty well for all the other countries doing it.
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