5 Comments

Lots of good stuff here but I quibble with your conclusion: “Let me suggest to you that anytime someone claims otherwise—claims that the solution to the problems of liberalization is more liberalization—you should not take that argument seriously.”

Surely liberalization can be done incompletely and poorly, creating problems that are solved by further liberalization. For example, Britain partially liberalized currency markets by cutting the Sterling Area down to just the UK, Crown Dependencies, and Gibraltar. This cured some but not all of the problems exchange control had caused. The further liberalization by ending them in 1979 fixed those.

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That's not a quibble. That conclusion just does not follow from the arguments at all.

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Why focus your energy on preventing me from having fun? Just prioritize getting DAs to lock up criminals. Why tailor laws to the most low Iq and low impulse control? How much fun should we deprive ourselves on their behalf?

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For the clean air example, it does not take much imagination to make a law that can ban any type of smoking/vaping in those intended public spaces.

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