Re: Payday Lending Part Deux

plausible prose man wrote:
> 
> On May 21, 12:43 pm, "Bill Bonde { ''the oblique allusion in lieu of
> the front

> > > > I think it's called "democracy".
> >
> > >  Which is a considerably more parsimonious version of the argument
> > > than you're stating above.
> >
> > You mean this?: "Society is the collective group will, what the
> > people want, after voting, after setting up their government."
> 
>  Right. One sure seems to involve something a lot like
> transubstantiation, the other can take place, or is a convenient way
> to talk about something that takes place on the world in which I
> live.
> 
> > I
> > think that there are things that people would choose together that
> > they might not choose if left entirely to themselves to decide.
> 
>  Okay. Now, why is that a good thing?
> 
Because they might really want good roads, clean air, and puppies
to be happy.



> >For
> > example, people as a group might choose to save the environment,
> 
>  Probably not, though. Oh, a certain subset might attempt to impose
> their stated preferences on everyone else, but its hard to tell how
> much they really prefer it to anything, and even assuming all that
> it's still undemonstrated that such collective action, where A  takes
> money from B to actualize A's idea of C's preferences, actually makes
> anyone better off.
> 
So it's unproved that taxing benefits anyone or everyone?



>  You do know it's precisely because of this sort of "collective will,"
> and by "collective will" we mean "coercive state action" the Cuyahoga
> river caught on fire serveral times, don't you?
> 
I didn't know that.


> > but individually they might figure that they could just pollute and
> > gain personal benefit that way.
> 
>  Well, no...no one gains benefit from polluting. Oh, okay, I suppose
> someone does, but what they're figuring is they can make some product
> some other person values more than the producer values going to the
> trouble of making it in the first place, the pollution is just
> happenstance.
> 
Is it im****tant whether it is happenstance or malevolence if the
collective view of the people as expressed through their government
is antipollution?



> > I think that it's fair to say that
> > these things can be decided using the democracy process and the
> > resulting government by the collective group, society.
> 
>  Well, they can, unless what you want is an optimal solution or
> something.
> 
So the optimal solution would be to have no laws?



> > >  No, because your theory fails empirical testing. Choices improve
> > > utility, as there simply isn't anything here that transcends
> > > individuals and the options open to them, or not, as the case may
be.
> >
> > How do bad choices improve utility?
> 
>  They don't. Thus people tend to not make them, to put some effort
> into avoiding them.
> 
The pay day lending business is a multi-billion dollar business yet
we can find almost no logical reason to ever use their services.



> > It seems to me that you are
> > saying that people automatically make the best possible choices
> > themselves without external forces, the "best choices" being those
> > with the greatest utility.
> 
>  Right, or the highest expectation thereof.
> 
I think care is needed not to make a circular argument.



-- 
 "It happens sometimes, people just explode, natural causes." 

-+Alex Cox, "Repo Man"