William Greider's *Who Will Tell the People?* is an amazingly
interesting work, if only for coming up with dozens of original fallacies.
Here is one of my favorites. Greider lambastes the entirely
cost-benefit analysis/risk analysis industries, private and government,
as a gigantic smokescreen for corporate murder. If a private individual
fires a gun into a crowd of 100,000 people and kills one, he goes to
jail. If a polluter kills a statistical life, however, it's business as
usual. Greider basically claims that if ordinary law were applied to
polluters and such, they would be shut down completely.
The big problem with Greider's analysis is that it's 180 degrees wrong.
Under normal murder law, no one with cancer could ever prove beyond a
reasonable doubt that *their* cancer was caused by pollution in general,
much less any particular corporate suspect. Indeed, they could never
prove it with a preponderence of the evidence.
I'm not a legal historian, but I would bet that before modern C/B and
risk analysis, corporations were never tried for murder for precisely
this reason.
Another fun feature of Greider: He inadvertently provides an efficiency
defense of rent-seeking. He is outraged that corporations fight against
various stupid populist measures like Superfund. His analysis makes me
suspect that I've judged the lobbying industry too harshly. If his
story is true, lobbyists effectively mitigate, delay, and prevent
countless foolish policies.
Greider also has interesting material on the Democrats' connection to
the S&L industry. I'd never heard about any of this, but he seems to
have his facts straight on this point.
Wrong hasn't been so much fun in years!
--
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Department of Economics George Mason University
http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that
one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults
who prattle and play to it."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
