You'll do massive economic damage that harms the poor if you price control or subsidise any commodity, including water. The economy is the way it is because of millions of individual decisions that factored in volumes of information that you could not fathom. Creating a law that with a stroke of a pen overrides the decisions of millions of people on resource usage, based on a simplistic formula created by a couple hundred people in a legislature, is incredibly reckless.

> You'll do massive economic damage that harms the poor if you price control or subsidise any commodity, including water.

That depends on how it is done, Venezuela showed how not to do it. I think a good option is to also provide commodities by non-profit companies run by the state and then use their costs plus a profit margin as a cap for commercial competition. If water, electricity and basic foods become too expensive people suffer and one finally will face revolts - which pure commercial entities are not necessarily incentivized to prevent (just pulling out of a market when the suffering becomes too great might be more cost efficient for them).

Venezuela did enough damage where it becomes obvious that intervention fails. Just because the damage done by intervention is not apparent, doesn't mean it's not there. It's the hidden damage, that is caused by milder forms of authoritarian intervention, like that seen in mixed economies, that is the most dangerous, because it is not diagnosed and cured so it continues sapping the economic growth of the country for decades on end.

>one finally will face revolts -

One should not be cowed into instituting authoritarian measures. If there is a law-and-order issue, that should be dealt with directly by punishing violent protest.

So the "most dangerous" interventions are the ones that are so subtle we can't see the damage they cause?

I would have thought the most dangerous interventions were ones that tanked the economy and caused widespread poverty and desperation. But yeah, slightly reduced economic output sounds worse.

I do love the untestable nature of this assertion, too. The underlying claim here is that all interventions cause economic damage, even if we can't detect it. This is analogous to claiming that microwave ovens increase the risk of cancer, even though we can't detect it.

Yes exactly. They are allowed to continue hurting the economy for decades.

>I would have thought the most dangerous interventions were ones that tanked the economy and caused widespread poverty and desperation. But yeah, slightly reduced economic output sounds worse.

The compounding effect of slightly reduced economic growth adds up to a lot over the long term. Much more than a big one or two year drop in GDP. You can do the math and see what I mean.

>The underlying claim here is that all interventions cause economic damage, even if we can't detect it.

To clarify, you probably can detect it but like all economic phenomena, we don't have absolute proof that so-and-so economic policy was the cause of the damage. We only have a reasonable cause to believe it is the cause.

The problem is that the majority of the electorate are not well-versed in economics so unless the damage is extremely obvious they're not going to react properly and correct the harmful policy..

Decades of sightly reduced economic output is worse than violent revolution? Really? Do you not place much value on human life?

There are better ways to prevent violent revolution than instuting socialist policies. Three decades of 2% lower per year economic growth adds up to 80% of the base year's GDP. I imagine that at a much lower cost, you could prevent revolution.

And you're totally misunderstanding my position. I am arguing for economic development because it is the most effective means of saving and enriching human life.

2% lower growth is huge. I'm pretty sure this isn't something that would go unnoticed for decades. You're arguing that minute interventions have enormous effects that everyone is just to incompetent to measure and so wet need to appeal to beliefs rather than data.

There is no way to easily show the electorate that the policies are responsible for 2% less growth per year. The policies that affect growth are instituted gradually over the course of many decades. It is not obvious that the growth rates would be higher if those policies were not in place and there are huge vested interests who spend considerable amounts of resources on propaganda to convince people that those policies are not responsible for slowing growth. So the electorate is not going to necessarily be motivated to repeal those policies.

>You're arguing that minute interventions have enormous effects

First of all, not all the interventions are minute. Social Security or Medicare redistribution, is not minute. But the effects take a long time to manifest themselves. Lower levels of private sector investment only manifest themselves as less growth in GDP statistics years later, and can even boost GDP statistics in the short run.

Second, thousands of minute interventions over the course of decades do have enormous effects.

> It is not obvious that the growth rates would be higher if those policies were not in place

You're right. It's extremely nonobvious, because you're not making an argument from a position of fact but from a position of principle. Which is my point.

If GDP is 80% lower than it should be, I think you'd be able to demonstrate that.

You know who had experienced absurd GDP growth? China. Not that I think the Chinese model is what we should strive for, but I don't know how interventionism is clearly bad when interventionist governments like China have been growing so aggressively.

>It's extremely nonobvious, because you're not making an argument from a position of fact but from a position of principle. Which is my point.

It is not obvious because it would require a person reading many pages of dense economic data. Obviously the average voter is not going to do that.

>but I don't know how interventionism is clearly bad when interventionist governments like China have been growing so aggressively.

China's economic growth increased substantially after it instituted pro-market reforms in the early 1980s. It also imposes far lower levels of income redistribution in the form of social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP.

> This is analogous to claiming that microwave ovens increase the risk of cancer, even though we can't detect it.

To be fair, the control group would be difficult to say the least. The same is true with the economy. So yea, it's very possible there are behaviors we can't detect.

> You'll do massive economic damage that harms the poor if you price control or subsidise any commodity

Source?

Is it possible the unfathomably complex economic machine will simply adapt to the subsidy? If the subsidy was limited to a couple liters per person per day (e.g., sufficient to ensure survival), could this be less reckless than letting people die of dehydration?

My childhood was during the last years of Soviet Union. I saw first hand how incredible was damage from price control and government distributing food and basic necessities. Everything disappeared. Often in shops there was only empty shelves and when thing came one has to spend hours in a queue. It is so sad watching Venezuela going the same path with the same disastrous results.

There's a vast continuum between the Soviet Union and modern Western economies, all heavily regulated. It's not a binary choice. Food, in particular, is subsidized in most prosperous countries. Today we know that both Soviet-style communism and Hayek-style free-marketism have the annoying tendency to result in people starving, which is why both approaches have been rejected by Western countries, that, in general, try to aim at some middle ground.

>Today we know that both Soviet-style communism and Hayek-style free-marketism have the annoying tendency to result in people starving

It's very annoying when people make bold statements like this without any evidence or factual support. Please provide some examples of free market economics leading to people starving.

>which is why both approaches have been rejected by Western countries, that, in general, try to aim at some middle ground.

I don't know if you know this but Sweden was the most free market economy in the world from 1870 to 1950. After it adopted social welfarism in the 1970s, its growth stagnated. It fell from being the third richest country in the world to the 17th. Imagine how much higher its standard of living would be today if it had maintained the rate of economic development it had in the early 20th century.

You assume that since Western electorates have chosen a particular path, it is the optimal path. I see that as hubristic.

> Please provide some examples of free market economics leading to people starving.

In a completely free market, how does someone without money not starve?

> I don't know if you know this but Sweden was the most free market economy in the world from 1870 to 1950. After it adopted social welfare is in the 1970s, its growth stagnated.

I have no idea if this is even remotely true, but I'll assume for a moment that it is. Does the fact that Sweden adopted welfare not tell you something about the consequences of their free markets? The free market was just so awesome that they passed welfare for all the rich Swedes who didn't need it?

You can't compare the isolated instances of people starving in developing free market economies, e.g. the US circa 1880, to the mass starvation and economic strangulation caused by communism.

>Does the fact that Sweden adopted welfare not tell you something about the consequences of their free markets? The free market was just so awesome that they passed welfare for all the rich Swedes who didn't need it?

People are shortsighted when voting. They are easily misled by election promises that give them short-term benefits at the expense of long-term development. In the long run it is much better to sacrifice short-term benefits for greater long-term growth period that will maximize the rise in standard of living and life expectancy.

Certainly I'd choose a free market over communist Russia. But I'd take modern American it European policies over the raw free market. I'd like to not starve if I go broke.

Because you have zero risk bias. Faster economic development reduces overall risk of mortality more rapidly than lower rates, and there is good theoretical and empirical reason to believe the unadulturated free market maximizes the rate of economic development. This holds true even if risk of starvation is not zero percent in an unadulterated free market.

Until you exhaust your resources. Then you just die.

The only thing a free market does perfectly is use resources as fast as humanly possible. Efficiently, of course. Why waste resource you can't profit from?

Even resource conservation is done better in a free market, because it responds to anticipated future shortages by raising the current price of the commodity, leading to more responsible consumption.

>Source?

This is logical extrapolation, and it's more or less validated by empirical evidence. It's not scientifically proven because we're dealing with incredibly complex phenomena where there are always potential confounding factors, but a reasonable case can still be made based on real world events.

See Venezuela for an extreme example of the consequences of interventionism.

The theory that intervention does harm is based on the fact that this complex system we know as an economy exists the way it does because of carefully weighted decisions of millions of people, each trying to meet their own needs in the most efficient manner available to them that does not cause harm to others (since harmful action is generally illegal in a market economy [there are edge cases of courses, like misleading advertising]). That carefully wrought symphony of welfare-maximizing human interaction is crudely disrupted by authoritarianism any time a legislature signs a law in effect that forces millions to act a certain way, that they otherwise would not have, or refrain from engaging in some voluntary interaction that they otherwise would have engaged in.

An authoritarian intervention to force several million to do some action to benefit several other million is going to have innumerable unintended consequences, that could not possibly be a net positive for the world.

Whoa, authoritarianism? Who said anything about authoritarianism? All prosperous economies are quite heavily regulated. You sound like that messianic group in the 40s and 50s of Milton Friedman, Mises, Hayek and friends who believed that the market solves everything. No one is proposing communism; no need to dig up the politics of the Mont Pelerin Society.

All regulations on voluntary market activity are a form of prohibition, where engaging in some voluntary activity is punished by prison sentences or expropriation of wealth. That is textbook authoritarian intervention. Just because it is popular and the most powerful countries do it does not mean it is not authoritarian.

I don't believe that markets will solve everything but I do believe that the best chance we have to solve problems is through voluntary market action as opposed to authoritarian action.

> That is textbook authoritarian intervention.

It's really not. It's not authoritarian when a democratically elected government creates regulations that it's citizens want. That's just governance.

Otherwise every law a government passes is authoritarian, in which case the word is meaningless.

Any law that punishes a voluntary action is authoritarian, whether it has a democratic mandate or not.

Not all laws punish voluntary action. For instance, a law against theft is not authoritarian.

Theft is a voluntary action. The thief is taking an action of their own volition. Your definition is flawed and meaningless.

I should clarify, when I say "voluntary action", I mean mutually voluntary or consensual action, where no one's person or property is violated.

The idea of being free to act in any way other than violating the rights of others (though violence, theft, etc) is a pretty widely accepted principle of a free society.

Nearly all laws are passed under the belief that someone is victimized when the behavior is but prohibited (or required).

The vast majority of such justifications are hollow, and usually premised on the idea that adults are too incompetent to make correct consumer, employment, etc decisions for themselves. E.g. laws against selling dangerous products like drugs to adults. The arguments for such laws are only appealing to the sound-bite digesting 20-second-attention-span crowd. I'd argue that they'd never stand in a court of law.

> The vast majority of such justifications are hollow

Eh, depends on the law in question. Banking regulations, for example, protect consumers and the broader economy from short sighted actions in the part of bankers. I don't think the justifications are hollow given the history.

> and usually premised on the idea that adults are too incompetent to make correct consumer, employment, etc decisions for themselves.

Well, if you believe citizens are too short sighted to vote rationally, then I don't know how you can argue that they are not too short sighted to make other decisions rationally.

But more to the point, some laws are truly intended to protect people from their own decisions (often in the context of hardships, such as usury laws), but many are intended to protect society as a whole, where the belief is that individuals are harmed collectively by the actions of others.

> E.g. laws against selling dangerous products like drugs to adults.

I don't feel like drug laws and market regulations have much in common.

>Eh, depends on the law in question. Banking regulations, for example, protect consumers and the broader economy from short sighted actions in the part of bankers. I don't think the justifications are hollow given the history.

A regulation that prevents me as an adult from investing in a high risk instrument is not protection against aggression (which is a justifiable prohibition). It is nanny state authoritarianism and denies me as a banking customer options because of an assumption on the part of busy-bodies that I can't be trusted to make wise investment decisions for myself.

>Well, if you believe citizens are too short sighted to vote rationally, then I don't know how you can argue that they are not too short sighted to make other decisions rationally.

Can't you see that this argument can be made more compellingly against your position than mine? If you think consumers are not smart enough even to make purchasing decisions for themselves, how could you possibly entrust them with to elect politicians that will impose thousands of force backed mandates and prohibitions on the economy, that intimitaly affect every aspect of our lives, and determine the winners and losers among thousands of companies?

Either we accept the precepts of liberal democracy, and assume an adult has a right to determine their own path in life, or we give into fascism and make decisions for them. If we choose the latter, there's no principled reason to preserve the right of the masses to vote.

All of the arguments given for prohibitions on mutually voluntary actions to "protect society" or "protect consumers" seems like hollow justifications for authoritarianism to me.

Justification for restricting individual actions should be based on empirical study of whether or not they harm others, not on an a priori creed that appeals some simplistic logic. What constitutes a free decision cannot be decided by the decree of a mid-20th-century fringe think-tank. For example (although this example, too, is very simplistic), capturing a bird and putting it in a cage restricts its individual freedom. But if it is discovered empirically that 98% of birds of that kind are unable to resist the draw to some sound at a particular frequency, then playing that sound is also a restriction of their freedom. In other words, "free" is not defined by math, but by the actual study of the behavior of actual people in actual societies. I'm not claiming that careful studies are always or even usually, conducted, but nor is it the case that freedom is defined arbitrarily.

>Justification for restricting individual actions should be based on empirical study of whether or not they harm others, not on an a priori creed that appeals some simplistic logic.

Harm others or harm themselves? Or are you referring to the restrictions themselves, and whether they harm others? I don't think the threat of imprisonment should be used to restrict human action that is nonviolent. This is not just libertarianism. This is common sense and basic decency.

As for private property rights and their scientific justification: they are the manifestation of the first possession principle that is found in game theory experiments to be an emergent behavior that maximizes social welfare, and which even other animals exhibit.

Violating property rights, by prohibiting financial transactions outside of state licensed banks, or demanding a percentage of all earnings made in private trade be transferred to politically appointed authorities, is often a great contributor to the concentration of wealth, and maintains the status quo, so your intuition that anti-authoritarianism and private property rights serves the rich is wrong.

Just to give concrete examples from humans, it is not clear to me why private property is an a priori untouchable liberty, while economic pressure is declared to be kosher and categorically different from physical pressure. Both require actual empirical study of their interaction with human behavior to determine which is an essential freedom and which isn't. In fact, there seems to be no logical justification at all for the categorization done in this Mont Pelerin tradition. Rather it seems like arbitrary choices that miraculously happen to justify the status quo, and ensure that the power of the rich (economic) is deemed ethical, while the power of the poor (numbers) is deemed an encroachment on freedom. This system of ethics is transparently self-serving.

> where engaging in some voluntary activity is punished by prison sentences or expropriation of wealth. That is textbook authoritarian intervention.

That's not what authoritarianism means. When society restricts some individual freedoms that's not always authoritarianism. You personally may not like it; you may be ideologically opposed to it, but that's not enough to make it authoritarian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

Otherwise, every possible society would necessarily be authoritarian for a simple reason: a society comprises more than one person. For simplicity assume there are only two. Either person A is allowed to do as they like -- including things that may restrict B's freedoms -- in which case the system is authoritarian, or there is some social mechanism in place that forbids A from behaving in this way, in which case the system is also authoritarian.

>That's not what authoritarianism means. When society restricts some individual freedoms that's not always authoritarianism. You personally may not like it; you may be ideologically opposed to it, but that's not enough to make it authoritarian.

I'm referring to the more generic meaning of authoritarianism, as in imposing authoritarian measures, from Google:

au·thor·i·tar·i·an adjective favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.

Personal freedom means being able to do anything you want outside of violating other people's person or property without their consent. The idea of being free to act in any way other than violating the rights of others (though violence, theft, etc) is a pretty widely accepted principle of a free society.

That means any consumer protection law, that restricts the right for a party to offer a particular product/service, by fining or imprisoning those who do, is authoritarian.

A law against theft or murder is not authoritarian.

> Is it possible the unfathomably complex economic machine will simply adapt to the subsidy?

Not only possible: it happens all the time. There are very few industries in the US that aren't subsidized by the govt one way or another. Agriculture and oil being one of the best examples.

We can safely assume, based on some sensible and self-evident axioms, that the adaptation is less economically optimal than the actions that would have been taken absent the authoritarian intervention.

>Source?

Any recent news from Venezuela.

That's such an easily solvable problem that I wonder why people even bring it up. Just distribute all the extra profit from the water sales equally among the population. The poor will get a check more than large enough to pay for the increased cost of water.

Alternatively you could just subsidize water use up to some threshold and then charge more for every additional gallon.

> That's such an easily solvable problem that I wonder why people even bring it up.

Edit: initially, I didn't think your first plan works, but then I realized people need water to survive. You can charge anyone an arbitrary amount if the alternative is death by dehydration.

I think he has a point if water market didn't need to generate profit for a private company.

So then you get to have all the fun issues surrounding nationalised utilities ! (nb I personally feel there are some things that should be public goods, water being one of them, but saying it's a simple solution is naïve)

The water can be nationalized. But the government still needs to put a price on it to prevent overuse. If the price is higher than the operating costs of the water system, then they have profit they can redistribute to the people.

Metering water seems reasonable but there are upfront costs to more widespread adoption (financial + political/social) + a bureaucratic layer (with all the associated complexity/corruption issues) that would need to be implemented for metering plus nationalisation, so while I'm [quite possibly naïvely] personally in favour, it opens a very large can of worms.

Your first solution sound like it would just inflate prices.

Your second doesn't appear to account for any cost increases except for directly used water.

This approach seems rather over-simplistic.

The first plan only inflates the price of water, but makes up for it. It's exactly equivalent to letting everyone have an equal share of the water, and letting them decide to use it or sell it.

But everyone can't have an equal share of water, because there is already not enough water to go around in the first place.

Unless you mean everyone will get only one cup of water. But then, the farmer will be fucked, because one cup of water is not enough to farm. And if the farmers can't farm, then you'll have another set of problems on your hand: NOT ENOUGH FOOD.

That's just nonsense. There is more than enough water for everyone's basic needs and then some. The problem is people using excessive water on their lawns, agriculture, or industry. And to some extent toilets, showers, and cleaning, which are all nice but could be reduced or cut in a crisis.

If a rich person wants to buy extra water to use on their lawn, they can. But they need to find someone willing to sell it, and offer them enough money to make it worth it.

If it really gets to the point there is only 1 cup of water per person per day, well then so be it. Everyone gets exactly 1 cup of water. That's perfectly fair. What's not fair is giving 1.5 cups to one person and 0.5 cups to another. Just because they are rich or a farmer or whatever.

Such a situation would create huge economic incentives to find more water, to conserve existing water, to reuse waste water, etc. The point is to get the benefits from a free market with incentives, but to distribute the benefits equally among the population.

I agree with the free market part. I disagree with the equal redistribution part.