You've simply read in a certain libertarianism value assumption into your criteria for the definition.
I understand you have those values, but I think it's a mistake to mix our descriptive and value claims and we'd be better avoiding loaded terms like economic freedom and simply replace them with less contentious ones.
No, because my whole point is that you shouldn't mix value and descriptive claims -- not to argue for one definition over another. Calling it something controversial like economic freedom just forces people to mixup questions about whether it qualifies under the descriptive term and whether it's good.
If Bryan wants to argue specifically that this measure isn't good for Y purpose sure. But whether or not it's what Bryan wants to optimize/protect is different from whether it's a useful concept and this kind of talk conflates the issues.
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But since you asked, the example doesn't actually show what it tries to because it at best shows that certain features of a society with a 100% tax rate are undesirable -- not that this needs to be a part of the measure everywhere. I could as well argue "any notion of economic freedom which doesn't count (as MORE free) restrictions on what other people can do with their money is bad because any society that doesn't ban precursors to nukes/bioweapons etc is one in which you will have a very short life and thus not be economically free".
Both arguments fail because you can't say that something must be an integral part of a measure just because at one point on the curve it produces a certain outcome. There are all sorts of things that of you set to zero or an idiotic extreme value would mean no effective freedom but that doesn't mean the notion should track them everywhere.
We seem to have understood what Caplan said differently. I saw him primarily as using his hypothetical to refute Sumner's claim. Does your criticism apply to Sumner even more than Caplan, since Sumner raised the topic?
I just don't think it's helpful, I wasn't trying to accuse anyone of some kind of sin. As to whether the criticism should apply more to Summer it depends on whether he realized his definition would be particularly contentious when he made it and intended it to capture the normatively desierable thing in the area or just felt it was a decent descriptive term.
But, at this point, it seems clear that Summers definition captures something some people seem to think is well described/termed as economic freedom and that others (such as Bryan) feel doesn't track what they find normatively valuable about economic choices.
Given that, the best responses are either:
1) Say, "whoa, c'mon, calling that economic freedom is kinda stacking the deck isn't it? That improperly implies it does track the normatively valuable property in the area to a high degree and some/many of us disagree it does that" (and you've not given a compelling argument it does). Let's back off this presumptive vocabulary and use less divisive terminology.
2) Go become a philosopher and write a treatise that attempts to characterize what the normatively relevant notion of freedom is generally and why this notion over here is objectively a bad way to try and reduce it to a number.
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Ultimately all measures are imperfect and you can't collapse a broad idea like economic freedom down to a single number without making tradeoffs and, in practice, lots of useful measures behave badly at the extremes. So Bryan is making a judgement across the whole measure (not just at the extreme 100% case) that what's lost in terms of how he wants to understand freedom is sufficiently important that he dislikes calling it freedom.
Ok, fair, but once it's clear you have that kind of disagreement I'd prefer going to 1 or 2 rather than having 2 sides with differing value judgements push and pull over definitional terms.
It seems that a lot of countries are more capitalist and some other more free than we are, EXCEPT for healthcare.
Let me point out something unique about free shots that's different than free housing or free beer. The more of the latter, the better, the more shots, the worser. Health care is not a pleasant thing so there is a bit of discipline in the wanting of it. Not as much as we have, but our healthcare is almost free for the poor anyway.
About time to debunk also the healthcare story. go in any European country and ask two questions: how much do you wait for an ordinary MRI provided by the national healthcare system? 6 to 9 months unless urgent; secondly, if you could afford it would you buy a private health insurance? 99.9% would say yes. That is the service provided.
Switzerland healthcare is run as a private service de facto based on a private insurance system. I lived there for 8 years and I know how it works. I also remember paying a nice 1500CHF a month for health insurance 15 years ago (young couple with 2 small kids), or 600 CHF if you needed an ambulance. And I am fine with that. The issue is that in all the other systems you pay for the national healthcare service via taxation PLUS a private insurance if you want a decent service. Ask any French, Brits, Italian, Sweds, Etc….
I was mainly responding to the usual inane comment that there is a European healthcare system. Ironically, when Americans think of European health systems, they think that they are all the same as the NHS in the UK. In fact there are multiple systems which are all funded differently and are all of different quality measured across
Multiple axes. They are a mix of private and public and social insurance funding.
I bet I could get a non urgent MRI very very quickly in Denmark or Belgium
In context of this specific post it seems to me that Sumner is claiming that level of government spending/taxation isn't a *direct* proxy for economic freedom. He then cites Heritage's rubric that puts those things as 20% of overall economic freedom and argues that Sweden is number 1 in that remaining 80% bucket. Saying X is overall good at Y because it is very good at 80% of Y and passable at the remaining 20% sounds quite reasonable. Moreover, it is different than claiming that the remaining 20% wouldn't govern if X was sufficiently atrocious at that 20%.
I also think dunking on the Heritage foundation for only having taxes/spending as 20% of the criteria when a hypothetical 100% income tax would mean zero economic freedom is misguided. The criteria presumably are designed to help make qualitative assessments for realistic countries rather than also model theoretical countries in edgecaseland.
Epic, those Freedom rating are so horrible. In the Netherlands you are taxed and regulated horrible, yet somehow it is classified as free because the bureaucracy is relatively good or something.
Welfare/pension/healthcare outlays are government spending, neither more nor less. MAYBE they yield more benefits than military or law enforcement, but then again, maybe not. All should be curtailed/eliminated.
It has always troubled me when supposedly unbiased writers and especially economists use tax/GDP ratio of most rich countries comparing them to the US without figuring out how to include the cost of health care. One ought to add the analysis of deficits and debt in terms of whether we are borrowing forward at what percentage of our GDP that future citizens and creditors will have to deal with. This is just not an apples to apples comparison.
40% vs 50% of gdp is close enough as to the same. When you consider employer group health insurance a government program it’s 50%/50%.
If I pay 40% in the usa and get back 20%, while I spend 50% in Sweden and get back 40%, then USA is taking 20% of my income and Sweden is only taking 10%.
You've simply read in a certain libertarianism value assumption into your criteria for the definition.
I understand you have those values, but I think it's a mistake to mix our descriptive and value claims and we'd be better avoiding loaded terms like economic freedom and simply replace them with less contentious ones.
Is this intended to address Caplan’s thought experiment? If so, how? If not, what is the point?
No, because my whole point is that you shouldn't mix value and descriptive claims -- not to argue for one definition over another. Calling it something controversial like economic freedom just forces people to mixup questions about whether it qualifies under the descriptive term and whether it's good.
If Bryan wants to argue specifically that this measure isn't good for Y purpose sure. But whether or not it's what Bryan wants to optimize/protect is different from whether it's a useful concept and this kind of talk conflates the issues.
---
But since you asked, the example doesn't actually show what it tries to because it at best shows that certain features of a society with a 100% tax rate are undesirable -- not that this needs to be a part of the measure everywhere. I could as well argue "any notion of economic freedom which doesn't count (as MORE free) restrictions on what other people can do with their money is bad because any society that doesn't ban precursors to nukes/bioweapons etc is one in which you will have a very short life and thus not be economically free".
Both arguments fail because you can't say that something must be an integral part of a measure just because at one point on the curve it produces a certain outcome. There are all sorts of things that of you set to zero or an idiotic extreme value would mean no effective freedom but that doesn't mean the notion should track them everywhere.
We seem to have understood what Caplan said differently. I saw him primarily as using his hypothetical to refute Sumner's claim. Does your criticism apply to Sumner even more than Caplan, since Sumner raised the topic?
I just don't think it's helpful, I wasn't trying to accuse anyone of some kind of sin. As to whether the criticism should apply more to Summer it depends on whether he realized his definition would be particularly contentious when he made it and intended it to capture the normatively desierable thing in the area or just felt it was a decent descriptive term.
But, at this point, it seems clear that Summers definition captures something some people seem to think is well described/termed as economic freedom and that others (such as Bryan) feel doesn't track what they find normatively valuable about economic choices.
Given that, the best responses are either:
1) Say, "whoa, c'mon, calling that economic freedom is kinda stacking the deck isn't it? That improperly implies it does track the normatively valuable property in the area to a high degree and some/many of us disagree it does that" (and you've not given a compelling argument it does). Let's back off this presumptive vocabulary and use less divisive terminology.
2) Go become a philosopher and write a treatise that attempts to characterize what the normatively relevant notion of freedom is generally and why this notion over here is objectively a bad way to try and reduce it to a number.
--
Ultimately all measures are imperfect and you can't collapse a broad idea like economic freedom down to a single number without making tradeoffs and, in practice, lots of useful measures behave badly at the extremes. So Bryan is making a judgement across the whole measure (not just at the extreme 100% case) that what's lost in terms of how he wants to understand freedom is sufficiently important that he dislikes calling it freedom.
Ok, fair, but once it's clear you have that kind of disagreement I'd prefer going to 1 or 2 rather than having 2 sides with differing value judgements push and pull over definitional terms.
Unfortunately we are heading in the wrong direction on both fronts: more redistribution, less freedom to trade. Welcome to globalized China….
It seems that a lot of countries are more capitalist and some other more free than we are, EXCEPT for healthcare.
Let me point out something unique about free shots that's different than free housing or free beer. The more of the latter, the better, the more shots, the worser. Health care is not a pleasant thing so there is a bit of discipline in the wanting of it. Not as much as we have, but our healthcare is almost free for the poor anyway.
About time to debunk also the healthcare story. go in any European country and ask two questions: how much do you wait for an ordinary MRI provided by the national healthcare system? 6 to 9 months unless urgent; secondly, if you could afford it would you buy a private health insurance? 99.9% would say yes. That is the service provided.
I can get one on the same day as request in Zurich. In fact I did
Switzerland healthcare is run as a private service de facto based on a private insurance system. I lived there for 8 years and I know how it works. I also remember paying a nice 1500CHF a month for health insurance 15 years ago (young couple with 2 small kids), or 600 CHF if you needed an ambulance. And I am fine with that. The issue is that in all the other systems you pay for the national healthcare service via taxation PLUS a private insurance if you want a decent service. Ask any French, Brits, Italian, Sweds, Etc….
I was mainly responding to the usual inane comment that there is a European healthcare system. Ironically, when Americans think of European health systems, they think that they are all the same as the NHS in the UK. In fact there are multiple systems which are all funded differently and are all of different quality measured across
Multiple axes. They are a mix of private and public and social insurance funding.
I bet I could get a non urgent MRI very very quickly in Denmark or Belgium
In context of this specific post it seems to me that Sumner is claiming that level of government spending/taxation isn't a *direct* proxy for economic freedom. He then cites Heritage's rubric that puts those things as 20% of overall economic freedom and argues that Sweden is number 1 in that remaining 80% bucket. Saying X is overall good at Y because it is very good at 80% of Y and passable at the remaining 20% sounds quite reasonable. Moreover, it is different than claiming that the remaining 20% wouldn't govern if X was sufficiently atrocious at that 20%.
I also think dunking on the Heritage foundation for only having taxes/spending as 20% of the criteria when a hypothetical 100% income tax would mean zero economic freedom is misguided. The criteria presumably are designed to help make qualitative assessments for realistic countries rather than also model theoretical countries in edgecaseland.
Epic, those Freedom rating are so horrible. In the Netherlands you are taxed and regulated horrible, yet somehow it is classified as free because the bureaucracy is relatively good or something.
Welfare/pension/healthcare outlays are government spending, neither more nor less. MAYBE they yield more benefits than military or law enforcement, but then again, maybe not. All should be curtailed/eliminated.
It has always troubled me when supposedly unbiased writers and especially economists use tax/GDP ratio of most rich countries comparing them to the US without figuring out how to include the cost of health care. One ought to add the analysis of deficits and debt in terms of whether we are borrowing forward at what percentage of our GDP that future citizens and creditors will have to deal with. This is just not an apples to apples comparison.
40% vs 50% of gdp is close enough as to the same. When you consider employer group health insurance a government program it’s 50%/50%.
If I pay 40% in the usa and get back 20%, while I spend 50% in Sweden and get back 40%, then USA is taking 20% of my income and Sweden is only taking 10%.