Fall in Love, Eat Good Food, and Save the Planet . . . in Philadelphia
Philadelphia - gritty, blue-collar, throw snowballs at Santa Philadelphia - on the cutting edge? Absolutely. Here's three snapshots to prove it:
1. Here's another carbon footprint calculator, spearheaded by none other than the Nutter Administration here in Philadelphia: Erase Your Trace. Conveniently, to offset your family or firm's footprint, you can give to the City's Fairmount Park Conservancy, which will plant trees with your dough.
2. Here's some cool urban art you can peep while you ride the elevated train through West Philadelphia: A Love Letter For You. My favorite? "If you were here, I'd be home now." 1, 2, 3, . . . awww.
3. The best is yet to come, but I wanted to give you the early scoop on a very cool green/food/entrepreneurship/justice initiative being birthed by The Enterprise Center: Center for Culinary Enterprises. I'm telling you, you're going to love this one.
Comments
Of course, one response is to say-- if there weren't a coercive state deciding on behalf of all of "its" citizens (gotta keep your pool of worker bees safe) what constitutes "safe" facilities, there were already be a boat-load of these home-based people making a good living for themselves without fear of fine or imprisonment. :-)
But I do want to find out more. If there aren't too many government funds involved, I might even be interested in being involved myself, in some way.
Re: health and safety regulations, here's where I break a little from Milton Friedman (and, I would have to guess, from you as well). While agreeing that one can over-regulate (witness all of the unintended consequences associated with many of the environmental regulations that have emerged from California), Friedman trusts the free market to completely self-police: if a product is shoddily made, the bad publicity that results from accidents will automatically punish that product versus safer products.
Maybe I'm just being a nervous parent (I'd like to know that the toys my kids play with and the foods they eat have been properly vetted). Or maybe I'm acknowledging that there's some asymmetry going on here, in that the manufacturer knows more about its product than I do at the time of purchase. This, to me, justifies some third party that has been empowered by law to play regulator on behalf of the masses who don't have time to vet every single product.
Again, you can go overboard on this - check out the interesting discussion over at the Freakonomics blog about the right to shave beards, at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/if-everyone-could-trim-a-beard/. But I'm not comfortable with a completely unregulated market either.
There is no reason I can think of that government regulations would be "better" than market-based ones. And the problem with government regulation is the same as with government everything: it is one size fits all, and it never shrinks, only increases. Regulations can be rescinded, sure, but big business actually loves a lot of regulations, because it erects very high barriers to entry in the industry in question.
In a world of market-everything (inclusing security, roads, and utilities) enterprises that succeed in responding to the needs of the public will survive, and those that don't, won't. Government has no magic dust that allows it to adopt the "right" regulations, quicker than the market.
But anyway-- until we agree on some philosophical foundations on this, quibbling on side topics like executive branch regulation is going to be a little bit of a waste of time.
But I would argue that the existence of externalities, public goods, and transaction costs is such that, purely from a practical standpoint, there is a role for a government of/by/for the people. (I say “practical” to mean that I am not looking at this from a spiritual or moral standpoint.)
Pollution is a good example that hits on all three:
1) The full cost of pollution isn’t borne by the polluter, so s/he will produce more pollution than is optimal (externalities).
2) Clean air is considered non-rivaled (you breathing it in doesn’t mean less for me) and non-excludable (I can’t be kept from breathing it in), so the marketplace isn’t properly motivated to provide enough of it (public goods).
3) And, one solution would be for all affected by a plant’s pollution to band together and cut a deal with the polluter to be compensated for having to bear his negative impact, but no one has enough time to cut thousands of such deals every day (transaction costs).
Hence, there is a role for an entity outside of individuals and companies, but accountable to individuals and companies, to help get us to a more optimal level of pollution. In a sense, we willingly tax ourselves to do something through that entity that we can’t do as well by ourselves. (On a not unrelated note, special service districts are exploding in this country, as many communities are deciding that they are more than willing to tax themselves to raise money to get something done inside their community that is better done by a special service district rather than privately.)
Of course, the devil is in the details, and government can sometimes cause more problems than solutions. Relatively low-regulation parts of the world, like Hong Kong and Texas and Dubai, are also known for being very commercially successful, and I think there’s certainly some correlation. But I personally would not argue, philosophically or practically, for an economic system that is completely devoid of a government that has taxing powers.
As a post-script, I’d like to note that you mention three very interesting sets of goods, which straddle the line between public and private delivery: security, roads, and utilities. Clearly, these are areas that have had both public and private involvement, and, in my opinion, rightly so. National security is non-rivaled and non-excludable, so you wouldn’t want to leave it solely to the private sector to provide; but it’s quite easy to make a philosophical case for contracting out production and services. Roads intersect with public policy goals like land use, economic equity, and economic development; but there are a whole host of levels of private involvement in building and maintaining roads that have worked in the US and around the world. And the high fixed cost nature of utilities makes some governments justify having a monopoly, while others opt to rely on private generators and distributors.