Sometimes people discuss the case for or against God, hoping to prove or disprove His existence.
That’s not my goal. Deities – and magic of all kinds – are often defined as being beyond the realm of evidence or proof. You either believe or you don’t.
As far as our scientific discoveries are concerned, there’s no reason to believe in God. We’ve never encountered data that would require the presence of a deity to be explained.
But then again, as far as our scientific discoveries are concerned, there’s no reason to believe in free will. We’ve never encountered data that would suggest that the workings of our brains are caused by anything other than the predictable movement of salt atoms inside of us. And, personally? I’m totally willing to believe in free will, based solely on how my existence feels.
So I can’t fault anyone for believing in God. Or gods. Witchcraft, ghosts, or aliens – sure, I do think some of these beliefs are a bit more outlandish than my belief in free will, but it’s all a matter of degree.
Instead, I’d like to discuss the legal case against God.
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I’m pro-life.
That’s why I’m vegan – I don’t believe animals should be killed or caged just for me to have a tastier meal. As a heterotroph, I obviously have to hurt somebody every time I eat, but I’d rather hurt a carrot than a cow.
And it’s why I’m an environmentalist. Although climate change would open up a variety of new ecological niches, presumably benefiting many lifeforms (including some that don’t even exist yet!), many of our world’s current denizens would suffer. Many current species would go extinct.
And, because I’m pro-life, I’m also pro-choice. I believe that parents can do best when they’re allowed to choose when & with whom they’ll have children. I believe that fooling around with people is often fun, and can be deeply emotionally fulfilling, and that people should be able to partake in consensual pleasure without the fear of lifelong repercussions. I believe that human women are living creatures and should have autonomy over their bodies.
I vastly prefer contraception to abortion. It would be marvelous to live in a world where safe, effective contraception was freely available to everyone who wanted it!
When my spouse and I were hoping to have children, we declined genetic testing during each pregnancy. Given our immense privilege, we could afford to love and raise whomever arrived in our family. But not everyone believes that they can. Some people feel that they’ll be unable to care for children with dramatic healthcare needs. (Inevitably, when we allow people choice, some people will base their choices on rationales that I don’t agree with.)
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Following the Supreme Court’s misguided decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, many states have criminalized abortion. In Washington state, legislation provides “to unborn children the equal protection of the laws of this state,” and in Iowa, legal personhood begins “from the moment of conception.” Under such laws, abortion constitutes murder.
And worse. As Madeleine Schwartz documents in her excellent 2020 essay “Criminalizing a Constitutional Right,” even before the Dobbs decision, many women were already being charged with murder or neglect if they happened to have a miscarriage or stillbirth.
In the vast majority of cases, though, a miscarriage is not the mother’s fault.
Most often, the culprit is God.
Under these laws, state prosecutors ought to bring their murder charges against God.
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After conception, each embryo passes through several developmental checkpoints. A wide range of genetic or chromosomal abnormalities could cause a fetus or embryo to fail to pass these checkpoints. At that point, the pregnancy is terminated. The unborn child is aborted by – or, if you agree with the sort of legal language that the Dobbs decision unleashed, murdered by – God.
A miscarriage is often an emotionally wrenching experience for aspiring mothers. The emotional aftermath of miscarriage is typically much worse than that of abortion. The outcome is the same – the pregnancy is terminated – but when God aborts a pregnancy with miscarriage, a perhaps desperately wanted unborn child is lost.
Miscarriage is frequent, too.
It’s hard to know the exact frequencies, because in addition to the general culture of shame and disparagement with which the medical community has long regarded women’s bodies, miscarriage is particularly hidden. Miscarriage is so common that women are advised not to announce their pregnancies until their second or third trimesters, but this means that their support networks of friends, family, and colleagues might not even know why a person feels devastated.
But a good estimate is that about fifty percent of conceptions will fail to pass all the necessary genetic and chromosomal checkpoints.
Which means that – insofar as we believe that legal personhood begins at conception – about fifty percent of all people are murdered by God before they are born. God is a ruthless eugenicist, dispassionately evaluating the DNA of each unborn child and quelling the development of half.
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From Schwartz’s essay, you’ll learn of numerous women who were imprisoned – and lost their jobs, their homes, their families – because they were suspected of harming their own unborn children. (And this was all before the Dobbs decision.)
For the cases that Schwartz chooses to discuss, most of the women were very poor. If we as a nation had chosen to spend money to give all women access to high-quality nutrition and prenatal medical care, some of these fetuses may have survived their pregnancies and had the opportunity to become living, breathing, impoverished babies. In which case I’d argue that the people who intentionally withhold free access to nutrition and prenatal care – the Republican governors and legislators – are accessories to murder.
But before we punish any of them, we should start with God.
The Supreme Court is considering whether to overturn the standing decisions from Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). The majority opinions in those cases guaranteed … um, actually, quite little?
Soon, those opinions might guarantee even less!
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor is worried that the Supreme Court might lose its aura of legitimacy.
Justice Sotomayor said, “Will this institution survive the stench that [overturning Roe v. Wade would create] in the public perception that the Constitution and its readings are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.”
This is actually a major reason why Roe v. Wade wasn’t overturned previously. In a recent essay on Planned Parenthood v. Casey, ACLU legal director David Cole writes that “As the three then-recently Republican-appointed justices … warned in 1992, overruling Roe would do ‘profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy and to the Nation’s commitment to the rule of law.’ That is only more true today.”
And, look: I’m pro-choice. I would prefer for anti-abortion laws like those recently enacted in Texas and Mississippi to be revoked.
But also: the idea that our Supreme Court might lose some of its power makes me quite pleased!
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In our country, there are ostensibly three equal branches of government to balance each other.
Which sounds like a nifty design! Barstools often have three legs because any three points define a plane (unless they’re all on the same line), so three-legged stools are rarely tippy. Quite helpful when the sitter might be tipsy!
But something’s gone wrong with our government.
The recently-ritualized filibusterer system of our legislative branch that allows any proposal to be passively smothered, often by senators who represent fewer people than live in single neighborhoods of major cities. The post-9/11 domestic spying and drone strike assassinations from our executive branch. These are strange aberrations!
The worst offender, though, is probably our judiciary. Over many years, our Supreme Court justices have steadily commandeered more power, and the system is untenable.
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Unfortunately, our Supreme Court justices are incompetent.
This isn’t really their fault!
And I happen to think that several of them are clever, kind-hearted people. I really liked when Justice Sotomayor’s minority opinion for Utah v. Strieff included a reading list to help people who hadn’t noticed the lingering ramifications of institutional racism in our country.
That was grand!
But for our Supreme Court justices to form meaningful opinions about the whole range of cases that come before them, they should understand computers, artificial intelligence, psychology, sociology, economics, biology, medicine … and, they don’t.
To be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, a person instead needs to have specialized in our country’s adversarial system of law. Which means, due to time constraints, that they probably won’t have an adequate understanding of many vital subjects.
Worse, the one subject that they did specialize in – adversarial law – isn’t even helpful! Immersion in this style of thought probably makes people less suited to serve on the Supreme Court. As law professor Sarah A. Seo wrote in a recent essay on public defenders, “Adversarialism is not inherent to justice – it’s simply one way of administering it.”
Even if the adversarial arguments mattered – if, for instance, we lived in an alternate universe where the judges were such flexibly-minded people that they allowed themselves to be persuaded in court, that we couldn’t predict how they were going to vote well before any arguments had been presented – the idea of “justice” arising from competition instead of justice by collaboration is a foolish way to run a country.
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Often, people refer to Roe v. Wade in shorthand, suggesting that the decision guarantees a right to privacy, perhaps, or more specifically a right to abortion.
It doesn’t.
Instead, the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade says that “Though the State cannot override [the right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy], it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a ‘compelling’ point at various stages of the woman’s approach to term.”
There are two conflicting rights, and the majority opinion is proposing a guideline for their balance. This is quite common. We balance people’s privacy against the state’s interest in preventing crime. We balance manufacturers’ desire to pollute with other people’s desire to breathe clean air or drink clean water.
In Roe v. Wade, the justices were balancing women’s bodily autonomy against the state’s interest in protecting the health of possible future citizens.
The justices concluded that: “For the stage subsequent to [fetal] viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.”
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When conservative commentators describe Roe v. Wade as a terrible ruling, I’m inclined to agree with them.
Yes, the three new Supreme Court justices – the stolen seat, the attempted rapist, & the hypocritical election’s-eve appointment – would like to overturn Roe v. Wade. But they hardly even need to! The existing opinion already does so little to protect women’s rights!
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A large section of the ruling for Roe v. Wade discusses ancient attitudes toward abortion.
This discussion is markedly incomplete. Supreme Court justices simply don’t know enough to make their rulings! And there’s not a great solution to this, since very few possible groupings of nine people would include enough expertise to handle all the cases on a year’s Supreme Court docket.
Abortion has long been a common practice – healers and midwives in many cultures knew which local plants were arbotifacients. And any discussion of ancient attitudes toward abortion should also discuss infanticide.
Infanticide was common during recorded history. Based on studies of surviving hunter-gatherer cultures, we also have reason to suspect that infanticide was even more common in our species’s prehistory. In relatively recent times, if a baby was carried to term and then given up for adoption – perhaps left upon the doorstep or a church or monastery – there was significant risk of death. Amid high childhood mortality, a baby separated from the mother would face especially grim odds.
Compared to other primates, human mothers form emotional bonds to a child relatively late in development. Among our evolutionary cousins, it’s rare for a mother to allow any individual (not the baby’s father, not her own mother, not her other children) to even touch her baby. A full year might pass before the mother could bear the sight of her baby in another caregiver’s arms.
There are huge benefits that human mothers are less protective – shared child-rearing cements trust between adults, allows for our babies to be born earlier in biological development (essential given the size of our brains!), and leads to more attentive lifetime care.
Plus, this evolutionary history has made human babies so cute! Our offspring wouldn’t giggle and coo – behaviors that delight a potential caregiver – if they relied only upon irrevocable maternal love in order to survive. Chimpanzees are born cute – in their first few moments, they need to delight their mothers – but their tendency to giggle or mirror facial expressions fades within the first week or so. Unlike human babies, they aren’t constantly prepared to woo a new adult.
But human delay in attachment also made abortion and infanticide more acceptable to our species. In many hunter-gatherer societies, any child who could not be cared for would be abandoned. Other great apes are actually far more likely to care for a developmentally-disabled child than are human hunter gatherers.
In many societies, personhood wasn’t attained until age five or six, at which time a naming ceremony would be held. It was considered bad luck to name a child sooner, or to feel too attached before that date.
Of course, most families probably still did feel attached. There can be a stark difference between private affection and public nonchalance, a play act to ward off bad luck.
In terms of the rights at stake in Roe v. Wade, though, all these historical considerations are mostly irrelevant. Yes, that’s the science – findings from nature. But nature isn’t good or bad. Nature isn’t ethical. The natural world simply is, whereas ethics demands that we think about how the world should be. Reading the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, it seems like these topics were introduced only to make the conclusion seem scientific or better reasoned.
In the end, the majority opinion is based solely on medical technology: the State can ban abortion at the age when a baby could survive outside a woman’s body.
Could survive.
Not would. And certainly not will.
Could survive.
“For the stage subsequent to viability the State … may proscribe abortion … “
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In Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, journalist Jenny Kleeman investigates several efforts to construct an artificial womb.
In an age when being a good parent means being as attentive as possible even before birth, we want better access to the babies growing inside pregnant women, better ways of measuring them and putting them under surveillance, so we can do the best for them even before they enter the world. Women’s bodies are almost getting in the way.
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Ultrasound images show how much female bodies are already seen as vestigial in reproductive medicine.
“I’ve been arguing for years, don’t show pictures of fucking developing fetuses unless you show the entire woman’s body,” [says Soraya Chemaly.]
“I understand people getting pregnant and being excited, but I’m the terrible feminist killjoy; I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s nice, why don’t we just make it bigger?’ Ultrasound was very deliberately developed to show the fetus as though it were a planet in a void, in a vacuum, in a container, in a jar. A wallpaper of blackness around it. It completely erases the woman whose body is generative.”
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For a human baby to be born, a parent must make an enormous gift. Feeding and protecting and creating the gestating fetus over many months.
Currently, there’s no other way.
Currently, it’s impossible to combine a sperm cell and an egg cell in the laboratory, create an embryo, then provide the necessary nutrients and environment for that embryo to develop into a fetus, a baby, a child.
Currently.
This would be a challenging project!
But not impossible.
Researchers will eventually be able to create a viable human child this way.
An act that would, per Roe v. Wade, instantly erase women’s rights.
Maybe this experiment would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So what? For Supreme Court rulings, cost is irrelevant. They’ve made this clear in their decisions for many recent cases.
Our Supreme Court decided that anonymously-chartered corporations have as much right to free speech as individuals – as though they weren’t already privileged with more speech, since wealth can be used to purchase expensive advertisements, think tanks, unscrupulous academics.
Our Supreme Court decided that the police can legitimately spy on you with any technologies that are publicly available, even if these technologies – like infrared cameras to visualize your body through the walls of your home, or telescoping lenses to peer into your windows from a distance, or a steady helicopter to linger overhead and watch you from unexpected angles – are far outside the budgets (and therefore expectations) of most private citizens.
It’s quite convenient that the justices so often fail to notice people’s wealth! (Or lack thereof.) Abortion laws were never really intended to target wealthy people, anyway. Wealthy people could either travel out of state or pay off a doctor to certify that an abortion met “appropriate medical judgment for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.”
If researchers spent hundreds of millions of dollars to nurture one embryo into a viable human baby – in a laboratory anywhere around the world – then the principle of fetal viability cited in Roe v. Wade would allow states to outlaw all abortion. Even though the material facts of women’s lives would be unchanged.
This is, after all, the problem with trying to slap scientific justifications onto a philosophical argument. Whether or not women should have bodily autonomy is a philosophical question. I think that they should. Our steadily increasing technological prowess shouldn’t change that.
The womb-suckers are trying to eat your children. Poke a soda straw into the future and sluuurp, away they go. Hopes and dreams, metabolized today into so many dollar bills.
I spend a fair bit of time with drug dealers. Most are ethical people – they wanted to ingest drugs, and they knew some other people who wanted to ingest drugs, so they started selling.
But there’s an unethical way to push – some dealers focus on getting new users hooked. That way they’ll have a steady income stream. Most of the guys in my poetry class, if somebody talks about getting clean, congratulate and encourage the dude. But some dealers would see rehab as a threat to their own livelihoods.
The future-eaters are like the second type of dealer. They’re trying to kill babies – including babies who haven’t even been conceived yet – while proffering incredibly cynical rationalizations.
Yup, you’re right, kid. Earth is beautiful. I’m sorry the grown-ups aren’t trying very hard to keep Earth beautiful.
Here’s the deal: regions of the Earth’s crust that lie beneath territories claimed by the United States contain rich deposits of hydrocarbons. These could be dug up and combusted to power our factories, our automobiles, our giant arrays of computer servers that enable the internet. The average person’s lifestyle in the U.S.gobbles energy, and deep below our lands is solar energy that photosynthesizing plants captured millions of years ago.
But we now know that there is only a limited amount of ancient stored sunlight beneath us. The world’s oil reserves will eventually be depleted. And so a smart investor, even if that investor believed that all the hydrocarbons beneath us should be combusted, bringing our planet closer to the hellhole that runaway climate change allowed Venus to become, would decide to wait. Right now, the price of oil is low. The total supply of oil is decreasing. The population is rising. If oil really is the best energy source, then the price will obviously rise.
Venus was habitable once, but after atmospheric carbon dioxide levels got too high, climate change spiraled out of control. I certainly wouldn’t want to live there now. Artist rendition from NASA.
I believe this relationship, lower supply = higher price, is taught within the first two lectures of any undergraduate economics course.
Since we’re rich enough to do it, we would make more money by buying oil now from those foolish countries who need cash right away and are currently selling their buried wealth, then extracting our own oil later when the total supply is lower and each barrel is worth more money.
The womb-suckers love money. So why isn’t this their plan?
After all, we as a nation are wealthy enough to invest. Throughout the ages, that’s what people blessed with current prosperity have done. By socking away money now – maybe by lending it to a neighbor and charging interest – you gain a constant source of income for the future.
The usual stereotype is that it’s foolish poor people who eat the future. When you’re starving, you might eat seeds from the granary. That’ll help you survive another winter, but next year the famine will hit even worse. Methamphetamines let you trade away future health to do more today. So do cigarettes.
The womb-suckers rarely pull drags of nicotine into their own bodies. But they’ll happily light one for our planet.
But there is a framework in which their urgency to eat the future is rational. If people will notice what’s happening and stop them later, they need to get it done now. The window for personal gain is closing: slash and burn while you can.
And there is, of course, the comparison to an unethical drug dealer. You have to keep selling even when the heat is closing in because otherwise your customers could get clean and then you can’t make money off your product anymore.
We’ve reached a point where many people have realized that the future is in peril –most people who get their news from any source other than the state-endorsed propaganda network – but, let’s face it, people are lazy. I’m lazy too. Even though I know that disposable diapers are wasteful to manufacture and then ship off to landfills, my family resorts to them during weeks when we’re too overwhelmed to wash another load of excrement-encrusted rags.
Similarly, everyone knows that a vegan diet is better for the planet. But most people still eat meat. The Republican party’s big-government subsidies make hamburgers cheap … and those burgers are already cooked, waiting at the drive through, chock full of delicious fat, salt, and MSG. Being vegan takes more effort.
But we’re well-meaning, most of us. And lazy, well-meaning people just need a little nudge to start doing the right thing.
The womb-suckers are justifiably worried that a small hiccup in the rate of extraction now might be the final nudge necessary to get the world to change. Switch to renewable energy. Recycle and re-use more of what we’ve already dug from the ground.
The womb-suckers need to flood the market, get what money they can before the rest of us sober up. It’s the best thing for a murderous hedonist to do; with enough money, they can soar the skies in gold-plated airplanes. With enough money, even boorish, ugly men have a shot at having sex with pornographic film stars.
The future eaters see no contradiction, calling themselves “pro-life” while they frantically strive to make billions of unborn children die.
Despite being rather politically liberal, I consider myself a free market economist.
(Maybe it’s unfair to self-describe as an economist, though? I did the coursework for a master’s degree in economics… but couldn’t get a degree because I didn’t complete the residency requirement. I was enrolled as an undergraduate at the time, and apparently would’ve needed to be enrolled as a graduate student for my coursework to count.)
Sure, there are instances where free markets don’t fare so well — the free market solution to entertainment is for people to pirate whatever they’d like to watch, hear, or read, and then for producers of those media to realize they can never turn a profit. But for many types of commerce, free markets work great.
But, just like the term “pro-life” (I describe myself as pro-life, for instance, which can confuse people because I am a staunch supporter of women’s rights and lives), the words “free market” have taken on a political connotation that doesn’t always gel with actual meaning.
For instance, I promptly began to pout when I read the following paragraphs in James Surowiecki’s New York Review of Books article, “Why the Rich Are So Much Richer“:
The redistributive policies [Joseph] Stiglitz advocates look pretty much like what you’d expect. On the tax front, he wants to raise taxes on the highest earners and on capital gains, institute a carbon tax, and cut corporate subsidies. But dealing with inequality isn’t just about taxation. It’s also about investing. As he puts it, “If we spent more on education, health, and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.” So he wants more investment in schools, infrastructure, and basic research.
If you’re a free-market fundamentalist, this sounds disastrous — a recipe for taking money away from the job creators and giving it to the government, which will just waste it on bridges to nowhere. But here is where Stiglitz’s academic work and his political perspective intersect most clearly. The core insight of Stiglitz’s research has been that, left on their own, markets are not perfect, and that smart policy can nudge them in better directions.
A strange turn of phrase.
Sure, it’s reasonable to imagine a free-market fundamentalist kvetching over increased taxes on high earners and capital gains (progressive taxation means that, for anyone outside the bottom tax bracket, choosing to work one additional hour produces income taxed at a higher percentage than the average tax rate being applied to your current income. So the claim is that progressive taxation causes people to work less. This claim is unverified, though, and indeed you could make an equally plausible argument for the opposite: if people want a certain post-tax income, raising tax rates will cause them to work more in order to earn that same amount).
But it’s very strange to write that a free-market fundamentalist would consider it “disastrous” to cut corporate subsidies. How do government handouts to high-fructose corn syrup manufacturers reflect the free market?
They don’t, obviously. But it’s so ingrained in our culture to equate things like “free-market fundamentalist” and “right-wing economist” that even very bright people (I enjoyed the rest of Surowiecki’s article) sometimes make claims about one when they mean the other.
Similarly, I think that someone who self-describes as “pro-life” should be concerned about women’s well-being, would weigh the well-being of a sentient neglected child above that of a pre-sentient fetus, would be an advocate for economic & social justice, would have empathy for livestock subject to torturous existences in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operation), would be appalled that environmental harm & climate destabilization is aggravating armed conflict across the globe. Obviously I was thrilled to read Thomas Friedman’s editorial, “Why I Am Pro-Life.” I thought it’d mean I’d get fewer confused looks.
Producing carbon is a negative externality. That means it’s a cost of production that is not inherently paid by the producers — other well-known negative externalities are the raw sewage, bad smells, & concomitant reduced property values brought by CAFOs, or the suddenly poisonous well water in towns adjacent to certain types of coal mines.
For the free market to work properly, negative externalities must be priced through taxation. If not, too many of the associated good are produced and everyone’s utility (“happiness” is a reasonable synonym for the word “utility”) is lower than it could’ve been.
(Well, almost everyone’s — in some cases net utility is lower, and all but one person’s utility drops, but the person operating a mine at below-market rates and poisoning everyone’s water is happier. The mine owner might earn enough that he can afford to buy bottled water, a big house, & a politician or two.)
This is analogous to the well-known “tragedy of the commons,” the idea that if all shepherds have unlimited free access to a shared space, they’ll have their sheep overgraze it. After a few years, the grass is dead & everyone’s sheep starve. Similarly, if we give all corporations unlimited free access to the atmosphere as a garbage bin, each has an incentive to overpollute and kill us all.
If that sounds overdramatic, please read the Easter Island chapter of Jared Diamond’s Collapse. The book’s central message is that environmental disaster obliterates societies, and Easter Island is perhaps the best example of a once-fertile land pillaged by its inhabitants, who then could not survive minor geological shocks. To this day the island is covered by grassy hills & insouciant gods, but it was once densely forested & harbored a variety of plant life. Then the inhabitants chopped down the trees. In Diamond’s words:
I suspect that landscape amnesia provided part of the answer to my UCLA students’ question, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say as he was doing it?” We unconsciously imagine a sudden change: one year, the island still covered with a forest of tall palm trees being used to produce wine, fruit, and timber to transport and erect statues; the next year, just a single tree left, which an islander proceeds to fell in an act of incredibly self-damaging stupidity. Much more likely, though, the changes in forest cover from year to year would have been almost undetectable: yes, this year we cut down a few trees over there, but saplings are starting to grow back again here on this abandoned garden site. Only the oldest islanders, thinking back to their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their children could no more have comprehended their parents’ tales of a tall forest than my 17-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife’s and my tales of what Los Angeles used to be like 40 years ago. Gradually, Easter Island’s trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. At the time that the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, the species had long ago ceased to be of any economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the falling of the last little palm sapling.
Sure, a free-market fundamentalist would bemoan government interventions like a cap & trade system to regulate pollution. I’m a hippy-dippy liberal and I hate the idea of cap & trade, too. But assessing the cost to all for each unit of carbon production, then levying a tax so that corporations know the true consequences of their decisions? That is a free market solution.
Similarly, a free-market fundamentalist should support government subsidies to education, infrastructure, and basic research. Those are all goods with significant positive externalities, meaning each produces benefits that accrue to the population as a whole, not just to the individual who had to pay to build a road. Since the value of these goods to the economy as a whole is undercounted, the correct equilibrium amount won’t be produced unless they are subsidized.
Positive externalities are things like keeping bees. If you keep bees, you get some honey, maybe you get some pleasure by looking at your hive from time to time. But your decision to keep bees also makes all nearby farmland more productive. Because it’d be difficult to track each bee & charge each nearby farmer for every flower fertilized by one of your bees, it’s more sensible to simply subsidize beekeeping (with perhaps some restrictions on where you’re keeping bees — if you’re living in the middle of a city, your bees might not be helping much).
Similarly, if you educate children, employers gain access to a more competent workforce, citizens gain more pleasant neighbors, often less needs to be spent on policing & prisons a few years down the line. Government-funded research made possible our wireless technologies, the internet, microwave ovens — & these make everyone’s lives more efficient. The free-market solution that compensates the researchers who gave us all these near-magical technologies is to subsidize their research.
The other common solution, the one that is not a free-market approach but is favored by many right-wing politicians, is to grant patent protections, artificially disallowing all but one corporation from producing any of a good.
That type of distinction is why it saddens me to see habitual misuse of words or phrases as slogans lend them a connotation that’s so different from their actual meaning. Especially because, in the case of something like “free market” or “pro-life,” the distinction changes the world in appreciable ways. Like, okay, if everybody wants to use the word “peruse” to mean “skim,” of if everybody wants to use the word “fortuitous” to mean “fortunate,” I’ll just stop using those words. I don’t want to use them incorrectly, but I don’t want to confuse anyone, either. But “free market” and “pro-life” are such big, emotionally-charged concepts that I get upset about political efforts to commandeer them.
Frank Brown Cloud 