akirlu | The Bonk on the Head of Enlightenment

This morning's aha! on the bus: a society which takes the moral primacy of Personal Responsibility seriously would outlaw corporations and limited liability companies and public and private insurers in favor of sole proprietorships and self-insurance, because any scheme that distributes liability for risk among a group increases the likelihood that some individuals will act in overly risky ways because the costs of doing so have been externalized. If our moral ideal is to insist that the person who fucks up or has bad luck take the full cost of the fuck-up or bad luck, then auto insurance is immoral, and incorporation is really, really immoral.

This insight brought to you by Joseph Heath.

Possibly the most interesting and enlightening book on politics I've read in a while is actually a book on economics by a professor of philosophy: Economics without Illusions by Joseph Heath. If I were richer I'd be deeply tempted to buy a bunch of copies and start giving them out because it's that useful and important to clarifying one's economic and political thought. Every chapter has several 'aha' moments and makes me see new ways in which economic confusion or dishonesty is driving the public discourse in directions that nobody actually wants to go. It's not a book for entrenched ideologues on either end of the political spectrum, though. The structure of the book is to tackle twelve common economic reasoning fallacies -- six common to conservatives, six common to liberals -- and there are a lot of sacred cows that get gored along the way, but for anyone who wants to ditch ideologies in favor of understanding how markets actually work and how to evaluate government action in terms of actual results rather than theoretical ones, this is a very important book to read.

Also, and this point possibly should have been the one I led with, Heath is funny. He's funny like a philosopher, in a dry, sly, sort of way at times, but that in no way should be seen as a bad thing. Go out and get a copy of this book, dammit.