Economic Rights: The Missing Component

What is the missing component? The right to help either ourselves or one another economically, as more and more laws and regulations stand in the way of meaningful social interaction. If it's difficult to envision this as a substantial issue for middle to upper income levels (where more services alternatives exist), consider the services marketplace which is often inadequate or even nonexistent for lower to middle income levels. This is particularly true, the further one travels from primary economic centers.

Based on that criteria, it becomes easier to recognize the very real limitations which have been placed on our capacity to heal, educate, create, innovate, or simply be there for one another in the marketplace. Fees of every kind imaginable, licenses, patents, degree requirements, shaming ("wrong" knowledge) and debt loads: they all stand in the way of what would otherwise be natural human responses to the ways we go about our lives. In a world where dispersed knowledge use depends on logistics and time capacity, often the issue is not even about a supposed "just right" product or service. Rather, the issue becomes whether or not society has the right to respond to its own basic needs.

Knowledge use often means contrast in method, and coordination with the skills sets of all who take part in the exchange. But that's not the way it's being treated. We are still pretending there is an "appropriate" knowledge set which is not only the exclusive domain of the provider, but is expected to preclude all other possibilities.

What's more, society is quite prepared to dish out the appropriate "punishment" if the "all knowing" service provider fails to fulfill their role "properly". A natural born desire to care for others becomes a straitjacket of expectation, or else the willingness to walk away completely if one is not up to the sacrifice the role entails. While many individuals are ready to assume the sacrifices involved, others need  better ways to think about what services actually represent.

Sometimes the whole scenario feels like a fire sale of our skills use potential, in slow motion. That's a liquidation which serves no useful purpose! Perhaps today's restrictions and regulatory environment wouldn't be so bad, if every time a new law were enacted, that meant another had to be discarded, as Megan McArdle suggested recently. If systematic removal of out of date laws were adopted in the U.S., now that would be a day I would go out into the streets to celebrate.

Often, issues regarding freedom are approached in ideological terms. But it is the loss of economic freedom which can play the most havoc - both for those who lack economic access and others who have no choice but to follow the straitjacketed rules. As for lower income levels, these individuals have too few remaining choices to be resourceful. In the days following the Great Depression, people had more options for problem solving to overcome economic hardships. Many of those earlier means have long since been legislated out of existence.

Supposedly the experts are taking care of pressing matters today so that the marginalized won't have to worry...hmmm this hasn't worked out very well, has it. In a sense, those with little economic access in the developed world, are in a position not unlike populations of the developing world who are also expected to follow through on the opinions of the experts. Even though William Easterly's latest book, "The Tyranny of Experts" is about the latter group, there are obvious parallels between the two.

While I've not yet read Easterly's most recent effort, I did read "The White Man's Burden" some years back, and I also kept up with his blog in its last year. For anyone not familiar with his material, it's definitely worth taking the time to listen to his latest podcast with Russ Roberts. From Econtalk:

...there is a more fundamental paternalism and condescension towards the poor, this inability to believe that the poor, that poor people are really capable of developing themselves. Development is thought of as something that we, the experts, have to do to and for them, as we really don't believe they can do it themselves.

Suffice to say that the development experts Easterly speaks of, are not alone in their insistence. What's more, it is this inherent paternalism which allows special interests to become intermediaries between governments and their citizens. In developed nations, expert "tyrannies" especially take the form of distorting redistribution systems so that incentives become misaligned. Even so, the problem is not that we have experts. The problem is it's too easy to believe the experts are the only ones with answers which are feasible. At the very least, that's a problem which could be overcome.