re: #147 Obdicut

Why are you talking about ‘zero-sum’? It really doesn’t relate to the subject.

The marginal utility of spending on lobbying is not just the value gained, but the value not lost. In other words, if a bill is coming up to, say, ban child labor, those companies that employ lots of child laborers will find a great deal of marginal utility in lobbying against that bill.

We have an open legislative system; the government can create bills whenever it wants, on whatever subject it wants. So, what determines the real marginal utility of that lobbying money is the legal channels of lobbying, not some ‘more or less politics’ measurement.

There’s no such thing as ‘left’.

No, really, the amount that politics ‘matters’ is constant. Companies don’t lobby less when regulation is more lax— the new marginal utility is for them to lobby for even laxer regulations. You’re creating this weird situation where there’s this possibility of ‘more’ or ‘less’ politics being involved.

I think what you’re trying, but failing, to get at is that if the government is the provider of a service, like health insurance, then there is no possible market solution to underservice. This is ignoring, of course, that private health insurance is allowed under most single-payer plans, so your overall point is moot. But in so far as it isn’t moot— imagining a purely single-payer system with no private insurance allowed— then it is possible to imagine that those with more political clout will gain preference in the delivery of the health insurance— by diseases for white males being compensated for at a higher rate than those for black females, etc. However, for your point to have much validity, you’d have to show that that inequality would be greater than our current inequality.

“Zero sum” is highly relevant to this discussion. People work to better their lives. If their work is political, it serves only to override the work of others. All the work, collectively, achieves nothing. If everyone were to redouble his efforts, the result could well be the same.

Anything people spend on politics and lobbying and electioneering is spending not available for food, clothing, housing, R&D, or any other purpose where one man’s success is not another’s failure.

The whole point of my complaint about the cost of lobbying and how it’s a zero-sum effort is precisely that it is zero sum. And when you raise the point that part of lobbying is defensive, an effort to get the government to not do something that others are lobbying for, you make my point. Lobbying pits lobbyist against lobbyist. Neither lobbyist is available to work as a software engineer or grocery clerk or to do any other useful thing except to annul the other.

As to your talk about single-payer insurance, I’d have thought that my point would be unmissable. But here goes with a reiteration: under a single payer system, the government doesn’t exactly give away its services. There will be a baseline that it gives away, but there is always a question of where to provide some good thing that of its nature cannot be available to all. Under a single payer system, not on paper but in the real world, what will happen will be that these good things go to districts whose representatives can secure them. In other words, the citizens will have to provide a quid pro quo: you get me the votes and I’ll get you the new cancer treatment center.

Now in a market economy, the citizen also must work, to get the money. But unlike with a political economy, that work produces a straight benefit to society. The citizen has produced software or sacked groceries. Something. There is no net benefit to society from a knock-down drag out political fight, with lobbyists and campaign cash galore, over who gets this hypothetical hospital. Inequality of result will be a feature either way.