or at least in very strong like, or something - it's a bit beyond respect and admiration.

In this post, I mentioned the incredible reasoning and rhetorical skills of Milton Friedman in an old video clip.

I love the internet. I found the transcript. Turns out it's from 1975, not the '60s. It's wonderful. Read it.

The post title was Milton on Fire and was a follow up to Milton Friedman Doesn't Beat His Wife. I've long been an admirer of Uncle Milty too, so I pretty much had to read it. Roberts selected this exchange to pull out of the transcript.

HEFFNER: Yes, but it interests me that you just said that mankind is selfish and greedy. And that has always been the battle cry of those who have said; therefore, we must impose controls upon them.

FRIEDMAN: Therefore, we have to put power into the hands of other selfish and greedy men. Now I want to apologize for what I said. The great bulk of mankind. There are always conspicuous exceptions, not everybody. And also for each person there is an exception. People are selfish and greedy in one aspect of their activity. They are unselfish and generous in another.

HEFFNER: No, I understand that, but -­

FRIEDMAN: I don't mean to be making a -­

HEFFNER: I understand, but again that is the philosophic basis of the argument that government must step in.

FRIEDMAN: But it's a false argument, because it assumes somehow that government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?

I liked this exchange, which contrasts the stated intentions of regulatory programs with the real effects.

HEFFNER: If one looked at the label, though, and perhaps one of those government regulations that you would look askance at, is that we look at labels. If one looked at the label and identified the objective of minimum wages, are there no positive, legitimate objectives achieved by minimum wage?

FRIEDMAN: None whatsoever. In my opinion, there's absolutely no positive objective achieved by minimum wages. It's real purpose is to reduce competition for the trade unions and make it easier for them to maintain wages of their privileged members higher than the others. And again, go back to my earlier point. Is there any group in this country that has been more discriminatory in its effects than the trade unions? It used to be at one time -- to take this point of yours farther -- you and I are both old enough to remember that it used to be lese majeste to criticize trade unions -- trade unions were on the side of the angels -- and it was an automatic (pause) conditioned reflex on the part. of any intelligent, well-meaning man, if you said trade union, 'ah, good." That's changed. And desirably, it's changed. Why has it changed? Because the harm which they've done -- do -- has become so absolutely obvious and patent. But even the most innocent and naive of well-meaning people -- he might still have a warm feeling in his heart for labor, but he no longer makes a mistake of equating labor with labor unions.

These two exchanges address one of my themes: the policies advocated by various do-gooder groups, especially environmentalists, do not mitigate the problems that they claim to address. Instead they empower some of the worst people among us who then pursue their personal agendas and make things worse rather than better. More sensible folks, such as Milton, oppose such policies not because they are indifferent to the problems, but because they see clearly that those policies will not work, and often make things worse.

When we sincerely wish to solve, or at least soften, socio-economic and socio-ecological problems, it isn't enough to care deeply. We have to have good ideas and good policies. That's not so easy. This is the motivation to do some study of collective cognition, group problem solving and plain old critical thinking outside the political boxes. This requires quite a lot of unlearning and defection from confederacies of dunces.

Update:

I love it when the threads seem to converge. In Constraint and Collapse I objected to the paternalism of confederacies of dunces.

There is something especially insidious about these confederacies of dunces that advocate hype, hustle, grift and corruption. There may be innocents - useful idiots - that don't grasp the nature of these groups and so actually believe the surface claims, but that cannot be true of all of them. They are not that stupid. It is more a matter of choosing evil outcomes as instruments to achieve some larger objective. It's eggs and omelettes thinking, Robespierre thinking that accepts collateral damage as an unavoidable and even bracing necessity. Corruption and deception are required in their view since people would not freely choose to do the things they advocate, things that are held to be "for their own good". History is littered with the rotting gobbets of such nonsensical thinking.

One of the arguments currently in vogue among such dunces is that there are neuroeconomic justifications for paternalism.

Reforming 401(k) plans is an example of “asymmetric paternalism,” a new political philosophy based on the idea of saving people from the vagaries of their limbic regions. Warning labels on tobacco and potentially harmful foods are similarly intended to keep subcortical structures in check. Neuroeconomists have suggested additional policies, including warning buyers of lottery tickets that their chances of winning are practically nonexistent and imposing mandatory “cooling off ” periods before people make big-ticket purchases, such as cars and boats. “Asymmetric paternalism helps those whose rationality is bounded from making a costly mistake and harms more rational folks very little,” Camerer, Loewenstein, and three colleagues wrote in a 2003 issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. “Such policies should appeal to everyone across the political spectrum.”

As Russ Roberts notes:

I guess I'm not part of the political spectrum. Asymmetric paternalism has no appeal to me whatsoever. My next Econ Talk conversation will be this Monday with Ed Glaeser—we discuss the dangers of soft paternalism, this kind of so-called gentle urging by the government (warning labels, mandatory opt-out provisions) to "improve" our decision-making.

Glaeser and I share one important belief derived from neuroeconomics: politicians have a limbic region of the brain just as you and I do.Here's a nice article summarizing Glaeser's objections to the new paternalism.

Soft paternalism is merely a tarted up version of the same old paternalistic crap the dunces have been peddling for ever, and fail just as Friedman noted above:

. . . it's a false argument, because it assumes somehow that government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?

Perhaps a warning label would help the dunces break their addiction to steam age thinking: Warning! Politicians are sociopaths far more likely to harm than help you. Empowering them is self-punking.