Thank you, Goliath, for recognizing what I actually said. The qualities, of shallowness, unsophistication, oversimplification, and incongruity with experience, apply to the processes described and suggested by the statement in question, and not the speaker. However, with respect to the last part, unfortunately I did not merely employ a rhetorical device. In truth, the very presence of these qualities in a political debate on economic policy, in particular regarding public necessities, and the presumption that any of these qualities is a virtue, makes me afraid.
For the record, the statement in question is the following.
Rush Limborg, a number of questions occurred to me as I tried to parse the statement in question. Some of those questions, sixteen listed here, many of which are interrelated, are as follows. To keep the discussion manageable, I've limited those listed to the issue of drinking water alone. I've indented the list so that the questions may be easily skipped over.
1) Does the market converge to supplying nothing but untainted drinking water immediately, or does it do so over time?
2) If it takes time for tainted drinking water to become less profitable to produce than untainted drinking water, how long does it take?
3) Is there always a buck to be made in the short term from a start-up supplying tainted drinking water, and then voluntarily going out of business before the invisible hand forces the company to be shut down? If not, why not?
4) Are there different reasons why different sources of drinking water might be tainted, and therefore different costs and varying techniques required to purify them or to ensure that they are not tainted when they reach market?
5) What if the cost to completely purify a source of drinking water exceeds the purchasing power of those demanding to drink it?
6) What if a third party, besides the seller and purchaser, has polluted a source of drinking water with artificially produced non-biodegradable chemicals?
7) What if neither the seller nor the purchaser is even aware that the drinking water is contaminated?
8) Is the free market the only source of drinking water?
9) What choices in water supply do water drinkers have?
10) To change suppliers of drinking water, must a water drinker move to a new city or state? How expensive is such a move?
11) In places where there are two or more supplies of drinking water sold on the market, what differentiates the products? Price? Purity? Exact contents besides water? The confidence level in the characterization of exact composition?
12) What exactly constitutes unreasonable contamination?
13) Is it acceptable to drink a little bit of highly contaminated water, so that a family can periodically have "bad water night" in order to stretch their dollar?
14) Is refusing to purchase any drinking water a viable option for consumers? How long can a consumer not purchase drinking water on the free market before he dies of thirst?
15) If there are places where there is only one supplier of drinking water, then how is there pressure to make sure that the water is completely untainted?
16) Why completely ensure the purity of all drinking water all the time, if greater profit is expected when the supplier plays roulette with the quality of the drinking water, especially in circumstances when there is reasonable confusion in the cause of illness, or when variations in mortality rates may seem only marginal?
Individuals spend years learning engineering and economics because they are difficult subjects. Your lack of nuance, in how you say the invisible hand will move a hypothetical free market, belies the complexities of these disciplines. The statement in question asserts that demand alone would be the cause of cleanliness in a free market. Yet the evidence does not back this assertion up. Don't you think that people prefer uncontaminated drinking water right now, and that they have preferred it throughout recorded history? Then, I'd be interested to know why you think contamination actually occurs. I would be interested to read what you think of the contamination of groundwater in Hinkley, California by Pacific Gas & Electric. 2) If it takes time for tainted drinking water to become less profitable to produce than untainted drinking water, how long does it take?
3) Is there always a buck to be made in the short term from a start-up supplying tainted drinking water, and then voluntarily going out of business before the invisible hand forces the company to be shut down? If not, why not?
4) Are there different reasons why different sources of drinking water might be tainted, and therefore different costs and varying techniques required to purify them or to ensure that they are not tainted when they reach market?
5) What if the cost to completely purify a source of drinking water exceeds the purchasing power of those demanding to drink it?
6) What if a third party, besides the seller and purchaser, has polluted a source of drinking water with artificially produced non-biodegradable chemicals?
7) What if neither the seller nor the purchaser is even aware that the drinking water is contaminated?
8) Is the free market the only source of drinking water?
9) What choices in water supply do water drinkers have?
10) To change suppliers of drinking water, must a water drinker move to a new city or state? How expensive is such a move?
11) In places where there are two or more supplies of drinking water sold on the market, what differentiates the products? Price? Purity? Exact contents besides water? The confidence level in the characterization of exact composition?
12) What exactly constitutes unreasonable contamination?
13) Is it acceptable to drink a little bit of highly contaminated water, so that a family can periodically have "bad water night" in order to stretch their dollar?
14) Is refusing to purchase any drinking water a viable option for consumers? How long can a consumer not purchase drinking water on the free market before he dies of thirst?
15) If there are places where there is only one supplier of drinking water, then how is there pressure to make sure that the water is completely untainted?
16) Why completely ensure the purity of all drinking water all the time, if greater profit is expected when the supplier plays roulette with the quality of the drinking water, especially in circumstances when there is reasonable confusion in the cause of illness, or when variations in mortality rates may seem only marginal?
It is the shunning of the complexities in favor of the shiny lure of oversimplified truthiness that I find frightening in what you say. It strains my imagination that even self-proclaimed advocates of the statement in question, who are also actually in a position to effect policy, would really make decisions based upon the principles behind it. What strikes me as more likely, is that pat simplification polls higher in blocks of voters that are easily manipulated, than nuanced complexity does. And that's scary to me, because in a democracy, and in this context in particular with respect to public necessities, that constitutes a potential threat to my personal safety.
