Hal O'Brien

Executive summary: If American business is so smart, why is Dilbert so popular?

There's a well-known phenomenon in politics: People dislike Congress as an institution, but generally like their local Congresscritter. (I suspect this also happened to the LibDems' detriment in the recent UK elections: Parliament are bastards, but "my" MP is all right, Jack.) I suspect this is an example of experience vs theory. Congress is abstract and distant, and won't complain back. Local guys (of either gender) may well be known to you, and it's much tougher to dislike them without a concrete reason.

So, here's the curious thing: The like/dislike relationship completely reverses (in general) when it comes to business, or laissez-faire, or entrepreneurship, or whatever you choose to call it. That is, many people grouse about the stupidity of middle-management (and higher) at the companies they work for, but small-l libertarians still praise The Genius of the Market. I suspect this is an example of experience vs theory as well. Sure, the local guys (of either gender) may be total incompetents, but the story of the possibility of success due to hard work and merit (let alone the Lottery of Luck aspect) is so appealing it trumps people's experience with the real thing.

Thus the realists in the office put Dilbert in their cubicles and watch The Office at home, even as middle management is enraptured by tomes of survivorship bias like Good to Great, The Millionaire Next Door, etc.

Interesting piece in the New York Times on the possibility of Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, running for Governor in California. Ms. Whitman was also a major supporter of John McCain.

The revealing stuff is at the end. Seems Republicans aren't exactly unified in their support. Their beef?

She allowed eBay to police itself as a marketplace for too long.

I'm not kidding -- that's a quasi-quote:

“She will not be getting my vote, and she will not be getting the vote of anyone I’m conversant with on eBay in California,” said Jay Senese, a registered Republican who has sold items on eBay for a decade from his home in Sierra Madre.

Mr. Senese said eBay should have long ago started registering and verifying sellers on the site, as rival Amazon does, which would have blocked the fraudulent retailers who sullied the company’s reputation.

Randy Smythe, a blogger and former eBay seller, sums up the sentiment by saying Ms. Whitman had “let the marketplace manage itself far too long.”"

The interesting thing here is that both Pierre Omidyar (the founder of eBay) and Peter Thiel (the founder of PayPal and a major investor in Facebook) explicitly started their businesses as libertarian, laissez-faire showplaces. So to see Republicans show such uneasiness with a "marketplace (that) manage(s) itself" is a fascinating exercise in observing hypocrisy.

But, more than that -- in the article:

"(I)n the past two years, eBay has been mired in a pronounced slowdown in growth and a painful transition. Buyers have fled the online marketplace, which many say is compromised by forgeries, disreputable sellers and an unpredictable buying experience, and the company’s stock has lost two-thirds of its value."

So... The marketplace has looked upon and experienced a wholly laissez-faire environment -- and found it wanting.

Through a complicated chain of links (beginning with an egoscan at this site, which is deceptively simple), I found myself at a blog post of esr's, because this passage was quoted:

"The free market is a wonderful thing. I was going to call it the most marvellous instrument ever devised for making people wealthy and free, but that would be wrong — the free market isn’t a ‘device’ any more than love or gravity or sunshine are devices, it’s what you have naturally when nobody is using force to fuck things up."

Short response: Oy. Longer response... well, we'll get there.

Through coincidence, I was later reading the new issue of Foreign Affairs, which has this quote by Isaiah Berlin:

"Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs."

Which captures exactly the problem with the "all government is coercive" sort of small-l libertarian. Free markets aren't natural (or else they would spontaneously appear a lot more frequently). They're highly artificial social constructs which require policing. Otherwise the wolves get a tasty lamb stew. And, of course, any form of policing that will deter the wolves necessarily involves "coercion".

Now, your typical teenager-of-all-ages small-l libertarian tends to think he's a bad ass wolf. But he also likes to think that he has some virtue in him, and would be easily persuaded to do "good". So he just doesn't think "coercion" is necessary.

But that, to paraphrase the character Jules from Pulp Fiction, ain't the truth. The truth is, your average small-l libertarian is a lamb. Who wouldn't last more than five minutes without protection from the tyranny of wolves, but refuses to admit it. Or, in an extreme case, really is a wolf, and refuses to see why the concerns of lambs matter.

A free market allows a wolf and a lamb to have a transaction with neither party feeling overly powerful, or overly weak. This is a great thing. And it wouldn't be possible if not for the hunter with the rifle watching over them both.

It's precisely because wolves are, well, wolves that they keep asking the hunter to bugger off, reduce "stifling regulation", and allow the wolves to get to the task of {denuding the environment} {ripping off the investors of every dime they have} {reneging on pension or other contractual committments} {pay sweatshop wages} eating a tasty lamb stew.

Me, I just want an honest and effective hunter. Because, yeah, even if I'm a wolf, he might constrain me from what I really want to do sometimes... But he also stops the lambs from forming a mob.

There's that darned Golden Rule again.