One of the points taught in a great many introductory courses on microeconomics is that a tax-cut can be expected to have the same effect on schedules of supply and of demand, and thence on the resulting equilibrium, as would a subsidy. In this sense, economics shows that a tax-cut is equivalent to a subsidy. And, ignoring differences in administrative costs, the resources possessed by the state given a tax-cut are equivalent to those after dispensation of a subsidy. But it is only in these effects that microeconomics shows an equivalence; and, even if we confine ourselves to the considerations of non-normative microeconomic theory, we would be speaking or writing rather loosely if we simply said that a tax-cut were the same as subsidy.

In the sphere of normative discourse, whether a party's refraining from taking is equivalent to giving is determined by whether that person or group of people is entitled to take. A person who forgives a debt may be said to give;[1] but the person who does not steal that which is yours does not in this way donate to you. The invaders or other thugs who declared themselves to be lords did not give what they merely did not confiscate from the farmers whom they conquered.

To treat a tax-cut as morally equivalent to a subsidy, or to do as so many progressives and left-wing populists — to insist that a failure to increase some tax on some party to a prior or even new level simply is a subsidy — is to insist that the state is morally entitled to tax at the greater level, that the state owns those resources.

This moral claim is certainly not a principle of economics nor a consequence of bringing economic principles to bear on moral theory, and should not be allowed to pass as such nor by insinuation.

[1] A creditor who forgives a debt has given her rights as surely as if she had assigned them to a third party.

In introductory treatments of economics, one often encounters a distinction drawn between what is called positive economics and what is called normative economics. In these names — and in typical discussion — there are problems.

The meaning of positive here is restricted to fact, as opposed to speculation. Now, on the one hand, supposedly positive economics, like all attempts by human beings to understand the world, is permeated by speculations, which in scientific effort are hypotheses. (The philosophic movement called positivism arose with incompetent aspirations.) On the other hand, contrasting the normative with something called positive entails an implication, insinuation, or declaration that the normative cannot be placed on as solid a foundation as the rest of our understanding. Sometimes a lack of present agreement is treated as if proof that there is no objective ethical truth; sometimes the question is just begged. In any case, the distinction is irrational.

Instead using the terms descriptive and prescriptive steps away from the worst aspect of using positive, though it would be less corrosive to refer to non-prescriptive economics as, well, non-prescriptive or as non-normative.

However, in behavioral science, elements drawn from prescriptive theory are often useful non-prescriptively, either as approximations or as bounding cases. Economic rationality and expected-utility maximization (the latter sometimes conflated with the former) are such elements.

Some economists would not even recognize economic rationality or expected-utility maximization as prescriptive in any case, because they are meta-preferential — they express a preference for structures of preference that have ordering properties such as transitivity and acyclicity, but say nothing about ultimate objectives and thus, in themselves, say nothing about whether one should prefer tomatoes to apples or life over death.

The prescriptive arguments for economic rationality and for expected-utility maximization are to the effect that those who conform realize more of their objectives — regardless of what those objectives might be — than those who do not, with it usually treated as tautologic that one desires such maximization.[1]

The non-prescriptive arguments for economic rationality and for expected-utility maximization as approximations note that these are relatively tractable models of behavior for which evolutionary dynamics will select. Because the models are taken from prescriptive work, some people mistake or misrepresent any use of them as necessarily prescriptive, but the claim is neither that social or other biologic evolution ought to select for something approximated by such behavior nor that agents ought to engage in the behavior for which evolution selects. (If anything, what is illuminated is that evolution selects for a propensity to such prescriptions!)

I endorse use of these models as tractable approximations in many cases, but I also embrace use of a weaker notion of economic rationality as a bounding case. A boundary of economic outcomes is given by considering what those outcomes would be were agents economically rational.

Behavioral economics concerns itself with when-and-how people actually behave, and especially with failures of the aforementioned models. Although this research is not what I do, I acknowledge its value. However, a great deal of what passes for behavioral economics involves an inferential leap from identifying a real or apparent deviation of behavior from one of these models to a conclusion that this-or-that result could be obtained by state intervention, with the researcher looking away from any proper examination of the behavior of agents determining practices of the state. Behavioral economics is thus used as the motte for a statist bailey. Additionally, even behavioral researchers with no apparent statist agenda often fail to recognize when behavior that seems at odds with these models is or may be instead at odds with some presumption of the researcher.[2]

[1] The main-stream of economic theory treats completeness of preferences as a feature of economic rationality but I've never seen a prescriptive argument even attempted for this feature. The prescriptive cases for transitivity and for acyclicity seem to presume an absence of conflicting, prior meta-preferences. The prescriptive argument for expected-utility maximization is especially problematic.

[2] While I have problems with some of the work and with much of the rhetoric of Gerd Gigerenzer, he has ably identified important cases of such failure on the part of researchers.

In almost every instance in which the admonition Don't take the law into your own hands! is used, the intention is that one should defer to some other party. But there are various parties to whom one could defer, some of them rival. A choice to defer at all is itself a choice about what is the law and implicitly about how it should be applied. In choosing to defer to one of these parties, rather than to another, one has already taken the law into one's own hands, if only then to let it go. A person is always responsible for such choices. Sometimes, deference is a very appropriate choice, and perhaps even the only appropriate choice, but one is responsible for choosing when and to whom to defer. The only way that a person could perhaps not at all take the law into his-or-her own hands would be in utter passivity — not even acting to draw some other party into the situation as giver or enforcer of law. And, still, to choose passivity would be a choice, and sometimes a morally unacceptable choice.

Those who insist that we should not take the law into our own hands almost always intend that we should defer to those with the most social power concerning law. Various concerns might motivate that intention, but most often the admonition comes from members of that group (state officials), or from people who take it that the social power somehow arises from virtue of some sort, or from those who believe that the only alternative to deferring to those with the most social power is so obviously barbarism that no argument need be made. If a reader believes that I need to critique any of these cases, then he-or-she should comment below to that effect.

Assuming something that is not necessarily believed by oneself or by one's audience or by either is a regular practice in various intellectual pursuits.

In discussion of policy, appropriateness of the set objectives of a real or imagined audience will often be assumed by economists who are either attempting to proceed in a wertfrei[1] manner or to argue for or against some ostensible means of accomplishing that set of objectives because of how those means would affect other matters about which the economist has a normative position. Thus, an economist who does not believe that an objective is right and proper may none-the-less assume that it is, to explain

• that some policy will not accomplish the objective; or
• that some policy will be most effective at accomplishing the objective; or
• that some policy might be very effective at accomplishing the objective, but would, will, or does come at unacknowledged costs of importance to some in the audience; or
• that some policy will be very effective in accomplishing the objective, and would, will, or does bring unrecognized benefits of importance to some in the audience.

One of the various things that I find uncomfortable about engaging in discussion of policy is that some people lose or never catch sight of the point that my assumption of objectives is not an endorsement of those objectives. However, I think that repeatedly assuming objectives in the context of being socially surrounded by people with those objectives will indeed lead some analysts to fall into the habit of presuming those objectives — of implicitly embracing those objectives — and may eventually lead them to endorsing those objectives overtly.

Unhappiness prevails amongst various libertarians and near-libertarians, concerning the comportment of what are called beltway libertarians, who are scholars, intellectuals, and professional political operatives located in or near the District of Columbia, and who self-identify with libertarian yet who have been silent about some of the most illiberal[2] policies of our day, or contort themselves to argue that these policies are actually libertarian, or even assert that circumstances warrant policies that they acknowledge to be illiberal. For the most part, the liberal community elsewhere simply takes it that the beltway libertarians have been corrupted by their context; I am here suggesting part of the mechanism of corruption.

[1]  Normatively neutral.

[2] I use liberal and illiberal in their original and proper senses.

Alphabet has removed this video from YouTube:

Fairly inexpensive hair combs made of hard rubber — rubber vulcanized to a state in which it is as about firm as a modern plastic — could be found in most American drugstores at least into the mid-'90s. Now-a-days, they have become something of a premium item. I was looking at listing on Amazon supposedly of hard rubber combs and discovered, to my annoyance, that a careful reading of the descriptions showed that most of the combs explicitly described as hard rubber were made of plastic. To me, the situation seemed to be of pervasive fraud, as it will to many others.

But then I realized that it is more likely to be something else. Fraud, after all, involves deliberate misrepresentation. Whereäs we live in a world in which a great many people believe that no use of a word or phrase is objectively improper — that if they think that hard rubber means a rubbery plastic or a plastic that looks like another substance called hard rubber, then it indeed means just that. (Of course, we cannot trust any verbal explanation from them of these idiosyncratic meanings, as they may be assigning different meanings to any words with which they define other words.)

My defense of linguistic prescriptivism has for the most part been driven by concerns other than those immediate to commercial transactions. And, when I've seen things such on eBay as items described with mint condition for its age or with draped nude, my inclination has been merely to groan or to laugh. But it seems to me that the effects of ignoring or of rejecting linguistic prescription have found their way into commercial transactions beyond the casual.

Well, those who are not prescriptivists are hypocrites if they complain, and they're getting no worse than they deserve.

I often hear or read someone objecting to judging an historical person or act by present moral standards. Although there seems to be some element of reasonableness entangled in this objection, it's very problematic.

It is especially problematic as expressed. Technically, we cannot judge anyone or anything at all, except by whatever may be our present standards. If we judge historical people and acts differently from how we do present-day people and acts, it is exactly because our present standards incorporate a recognition of historical context.

I don't see that the real issue is historical context as such, but context more generally. If we are to make allowances for historical person or acts, it is because of what informed them and what did not inform them; and, similarly, acts by persons in some present-day contexts are very differently informed from acts by other persons in other present-day cultures. As L.P. Hartley usefully noted, The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Cultural relativism, in application to other places or to other times, is sensible when it warns one against presumption that one's own culture is doing things the only right way. (One's culture may be doing things a wrong way, or there may be other ways that are just as good.) But a cultural relativism that instead claims that something is automatically acceptable simply because it prevails in the culture of that place or prevailed in the culture of that time dissolves into nihilism because each person at each time and at each place is him- or herself a subculture.

And I think that some allowances should be made; but I think that too much allowance is often made.

For example, is the case against slavery now available really all that much better than the case that was available in America a few hundred years ago? Inverting that question, was the case against slavery available a few hundred years ago really much worse than the case available now? There is a sound argument, even to-day, for not waging war against slavery in the territories ruled by other states; and there may be a case for making treaties or even forming alliances with such states; but those are different practices from engaging in slavery or actively enabling slavery. Is there really a meaningfully better defense of the slavery of two hundred years ago than there would be of slavery now?

I   don't   think   so.

Nor do I think so for a great deal else that I am told not to judge by modern standards.

Those who support locking-down in response to SARS-CoV-2 are like weird locusts. Instead of eating the crops; these locusts prevent growth and harvest. That is to say that they prevent economic activity, which is an implicit consumption of an especially perverse sort. In any case, they leave despair and literal starvation in their wake.

State officials should not use tasers as devices to compel positive acts. I have made and explained this point elsewhere, but I believe that I have failed to do so previously in this 'blog.

When tasers were introduced to policing, they were presented to the public as devices to stop attackers, without potentially lethal force. It would take some contrivance to present a situation in which such use of a taser would not be preferable to lethal force.

But tasers also inflict pain. And police officers quickly began using them to hurt people until those people complied, even when compliance was a positive act, such as moving one's body in some way. The pain inflicted by a taser is sufficiently severe that it will cause people to act in ways that will lead to their convictions, as when a taser was used to induce a suspect to produce a urine sample. Used to motivate behavior, a taser is a device of torture. Judges have acquiesced to this use of torture to compel positive acts. Almost no one speaks out against it. The taser has become a socially accepted device of torture.

In nearly every election of a state official, even those in which only a few hundred voters participate, the margin of victory is more than one vote. What that means is that, if any one voter had refrained from voting, or if any one abstaining voter had not abstained, the candidate who won would still have won. Some people — even some very intelligent people — conclude that the vote of an individual has no efficacy beyond that of other acts of expression. Those people are missing something.

Indeed, one's vote or refusal to vote has absolutely no effect on the election at hand. There are various things that one can do prior to the election which may help one candidate to achieve a margin of victory, or prevent another from achieving such a margin. But one's own vote isn't going to make any difference in that election.

However, as potential candidates and parties decide what to do with future elections in mind, they look at margins of victory in past elections. Potential candidates decide whether to run and, if they choose to run, how to position themselves, informed by those margins. Parties decide their platforms and whom to nominate, informed by those margins. With large margins in their favor, they feel free to alienate a greater number of potential voters; with small margins or with losing margins, they consider what to do differently in order to pull voters who previously voted for another, or who didn't vote at all.

Thus, an individual vote or the decision not to vote has a small effect — but its only effect — on later elections and on behavior of those who are acting with concern for later election.

The least effective thing that a potential voter can do is to vote for a candidate whom he or she dislikes. People in America who have held their noses to vote for the Democratic or Republican nominee in order to stop the nominee of the other party did worse than to throw-away their votes; they have helped to ensure that the next pair of choices would likewise be disagreeable, and that the behavior of officials in the mean time would likewise be disagreeable. It is only if one genuinely thought that one of these candidates were worthwhile that one should have voted for him or for her, and then still only to affect the next election and interim behavior of officials.

The most effective thing that a potential voter as such can do is to vote for a candidate of whom that voter approves, even if that candidate has no chance of winning, or to submit a ballot from which no candidate receives a vote. An increasing number of people are doing the latter, either in expression that no candidate is worthy, or to challenge the legitimacy of the process in a way that makes it difficult for these people to be dismissed as apathetic by apologists for the process.