Or to put it another way, the answer to the question “Do you have any better ideas?” when asked of attempting to institute free-market laws remains no, the answer when asked of the Soviets or socialism or government in general remains a resounding yes, which is a fundamental difference.

There’s no question that getting people to like markets is tricky, though, and I’d say the reason ultimately (as Hayek, Jeffrey Friedman, and numerous others have lamented) is that we evolved to pay attention to families and tribes and small villages, making us strongly tempted to treat even complex extended social orders and global markets as if they are as amenable to simple solutions, emotional appeals, one-size-fits-all tactics, quick and easily-understood resource allocation, and unity-inducing speeches heard by all.

Everything from the seductive but false appeal of democracy to socialism and the inclination to think there’s a Father in the sky stems from this tragic inherited flaw, I think. All we can do is fight it and educate, until we grow adept at rewriting instinct with biotech and cybernetics someday, I suppose — not that markets don’t work until human nature’s rewritten, only politics.

For example, “laws” of economics (observations of human behavior) tell us that competition tends to drive prices down, and increasing demand tends to stimulate increases in supply, etc….

…but observation of human political behavior tells us that – nearly as universally, it seems – people tend to seek protectionism and favoritism and generally game the market for their perceived economic gain through the political process. Enough to make me wonder whether human nature as expressed in politics renders human nature as expressed in economics inevitably compromised. That is, perhaps there’s a contradiction between lessons from human behavior in economics and lessoms from human behavior in politics.

And yes, this is all basically just a libertarian’s pessimism.

But enough about all this.

I’m not arguing against free markets; I’m pessimistic about their odds in suceeding in the politicla arena, in their surviving the political process.

I’m not suggesting the free markets of Hong Kong wouldn’t or didn’t work. I’m lamenting their rarity, and wondering if there aren’t other nigh-on-unavoidable facts of human nature that lead to them getting screwed with.

Economics properly understood is a set of generalizations about human behavior, and they hold up extremely well.

Law — in the sense of what laws are on the books — is a separate matter, and the law may well say “there will be upwardly-sloping demand curves” and “free sausages will rain from the skies in time of need,” but that’s not a problem with the laws of economics, just with the law.

I hardly think we can conclude humans _inevitably_ screw up economies if they’ve done as well as they have despite _virtually no one_ consciously promoting free-market-based law, which I strongly suggest more people start doing before declaring all variations on the human experiment a failure.

The Republicans aren’t instituting laissez-faire laws, but then they don’t claim to be. This is a problem with Republicans but not a problem with the laws of economics. It might be reason to give up on the Republicans (though a separate, contestable, argument could be made that they’re still the best available vehicle for advancing market-based policies under current political constraints) but not a reason to give up on attempts to institute market-based policies in general.

If places more nearly approximating free markets such as Hong Kong under the British kept proving to be disasters for unforeseen reasons, there’d be greater reason for pessimism of the sort you’re suggesting. Instead of reason to think markets unworkable or even uninstitutable, we are left with the more tiring but more promising situation of what is simply _ a tough ongoing fight_.

And I can’t even offer the solace of saying it’s safe to sit back and watch how long-term trends play out because the current healthcare battle is yet another example of how even one seat in Congress — which can hinge on one media scandal or unexpected turn of events — can decide the fate of nations. Scary, eh?

Or here’s another way to think about it: perhaps the ideal libertarian society is in keeping with economic laws – that is, principles descriptive of human nature in a strictly economic sense – and that’s the society that ought to be in economic terms, but that “political laws” – realities of human nature in the political realm – inevitably screw it up.

In more colloquial terms, how many times does the Republican party have to F everything up before one throws up one’s hands and says “to hell with it all”?

Now, if you want to say that _being unpopular_ is a problem in some sense comparable to being at odds with economic reality, you may have a point, but the two problems are extremely different ones, the first being far less severe and merely raising questions of how to handle media messages differently (something very few people have even attempted to do in the service of pro-free-market ends, in the grand scheme of things), whereas the latter is the sort of problem you only solve by rewriting the fundamental logical rules of the universe.

An intermediary position might be the contention that the fiscal right’s ideas are _inevitably and permanently unpopular_ due to, say, basic intuitive structures in the human brain, but I don’t think we can plausibly say anything that pessimistic when we’ve seen how fired up people can get over, say, the American Revolution, Rand, Tea Parties, etc.

To put it more simply: Marxism cannot work _regardless of whether it has truly been tried_. Free markets do work, and we merely have to convince more people to try them. That’s no small difference. Do not indulge in pessimism.

And I for one will do my small part by being even more overtly capitalist at New York social gatherings, since “government overreach” is no longer something that any sane person needs explained to them in a purely hypothetical way — it is rapidly destroying the nation right outside our windows, and cocktail party liberals must now bid farewell to the days when they could at least pretend to have the moral or intellectual high ground and a few decades left to chat about it all before the shit hits the fan.