Excellent post by Arnold Kling. I particularly like the “moral free ride” argument. You see that behavior all the time from interventionist “liberals.”
Consider the minimum wage. I’m working on a review of a recent book in which two philosophers debate libertarianism. The anti-libertarian, who wants to be called an advocate of “democratic liberalism” insists that we must have a substantially higher minimum wage so that low wage workers can lead “dignified” lives. He’d feel a lot better about society if the min wage were higher, although exactly how much higher it should ideally be, he doesn’t say. He is familiar with the argument that if we make it more costly to hire low-skilled workers, fewer of them will even be able to (legally) earn any money at all, but he salves his conscience by pointing to the silly Card-Krueger study of the mid-90s, which found no disemployment effect in the fast food industry shortly after an increase in the min wage in New Jersey. He points to it as proof that we are mistaken in believing that a higher min wage will throw people out of work.
Does that settle it? Because one study failed to find any loss of employment in a tiny slice of the labor market, does it follow that there are no adverse effects of increasing the min wage ever? Absolutely not, and the authors of that study would undoubtedly agree that their work does not disprove the idea that employers are sensitive to price changes in labor. But because there is no personal cost to a college professor if he’s wrong and an increase in the min wage causes some poor people to lose their jobs, he gets a free moral ride on his advocacy of the issue.
What if we were instead considering a medication that the professor himself was taking. His wife suspects that the medication might do him far more harm than good, and points to dozens of studies and anecdotes indicating that that’s the case. Now suppose that the professor comes across one bit of information saying that the medication might not be harmful. How do you think he’d behave?
You usually get poor results when decision makers don’t have to bear the cost of being wrong. That’s when you get moral free riding.
