Doug:
The end of your recent interview with Seth Mnookin quite surprised me. Why did you not confront his morally dubious (and almost certainly harmful) move to "not ... tell people what they should or should not do" in a case--childhood vaccination--where the correct policy seems obvious, and where moreover both you and he clearly agree? Why I ask, and why (IMHO) it matters:
In the interview Mnookin spent ~20 minutes (while flogging a book in which he spends pages > 400) either asserting or agreeing, correctly, that childhood vaccination provides significant benefits (and, though IIRC youse didn't discuss this explicitly, significantly *external* benefits), and that failure to vaccinate children causes significant negative externalities. (Note that I'm not arguing against either claim--the evidence for both seems irrefutable.) Then, in your final question (~26 min into
http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArchive/2011/11_03_12.mp3
), you asked about the "consequences on the rest of the population [of] medical NIMBYism," whereupon Mnookin (IMHO) took a dive. He reiterated the harms caused when parents fail to vaccinate their children, explicitly noting the externalities and attacking views of vaccination as a "personal decision" that "doesn't affect anyone else," but then refused to either "tell people what they should or should not do" or "[make] prescriptive [legal] recommendations." Am I missing something, or did this not strike you (as it did me) as morally incoherence, journalistic cowardice, or both?
I suspect you will (though you will of course feel free to not) agree with me that
0 One should not (c.p.!) allow one set of persons to harm another set
of persons. The ceteris paribus is there to "spike out" admittedly
non-trivial feasibility objections to the main point, which I
suspect we both find both self-evident and the core of the
importance of politics as public morality.
1 Rhetorical support for economic libertarianism (notably the ritual
genuflection before "free markets" and "free trade") is endemic
among US corporate media elites (e.g., Mnookin).
2 The claims of economic libertarians (mostly) are positively false
and (normatively) support bad policy. Their salient problem (and the
main reason why I'm a democratic socialist, i.e., one who believes
economic decisions should be made by a mix of democratic and private
entities) is free-riding: markets are not perfect (duh!) and thus
persons face powerful incentives to internalize benefits provided by
others and to externalize harms from one's behavior onto others.
3 That rhetoric (from corporate-owned and corporate-friendly media)
matters: while there are numerous causes of the US' present social
decline, one is almost certainly the continual, Goebbelsian
repetition of the claims that, in matters economic, markets and
private actors are inherently good, while state/public actors or
interventions are inherently bad.
4 The positive and normative case for economic libertarianism is
nowhere weaker than WRT childhood vaccination.
Hence I believe it's important to confront mediacrats wherever possible when they either assert economic libertarianism, and even more so when they assert a libertarian normative position in conjunction with a set of facts that frankly cry out for state intervention. Yet you gave Mnookin a pass. Am I missing something? If so, what? If not, why didn't you push back on this?
FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>