Voting With Donations

My comment on Bob Murphy's blog entry... For the Purposes of the Current Debate, I Don’t Think Hayek Supported a “Basic Income Guarantee”

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Three years ago on Medium the liberal economist James Kwak also made the case that Friedrich Hayek supported basic income.  I responded to his story with more or less your same point... that he was neglecting the context.

Now, three years later, for me the real issue is that Kwak doesn't understand what markets are good for.  Markets are incredibly useful because correctly guessing demand is incredibly difficult.  The crazy thing is that this critique of Kwak's understanding is also applicable to even the staunchest market defenders such as yourself.  This is easy enough to prove. 

Here you supplied a story about basic income.  But what would you guess is truly the demand for this topic?  Again, if correctly guessing demand was so easy, then markets wouldn't be so useful.  Your blog is not a market... therefore it's clear that you don't truly understand what markets are good for. 

Turning your blog into a market would be really easy.  Readers could simply "donation vote" (DV) for their favorite stories.  DV is most commonly associated with people using donations to decide who will kiss a pig, or get a pie in the face, or get dunked into a water tank.  Sometimes zoos use it to name a baby animal.  But DV is also used to rank/sort/order/prioritize all the non-profits in the world.  The Red Cross, for example, receives very many donation votes which is why it can use a very large portion of the world's limited resources. 

Right now FEE is searching for a new president.  How are the candidates going to be ranked?  They definitely aren't going to be ranked by DV.  Therefore, FEE doesn't truly understand what markets are good for.

Last year, much to my very pleasant surprise, the libertarian party (LP) used DV to choose its convention theme.  Unfortunately, the LP didn't also use DV to choose the convention location, date and speakers.  So just because an organization uses DV doesn't guarantee that it knows why the market is so useful.

The market is an incredibly useful tool.  On a daily basis we use this tool to help each other prioritize.  Yet, the LP has only once used this tool to improve its own priorities.  FEE has never used this tool to improve its priorities.  As a pro-market blogger you're in the same boat.  Strange as it might seem, right now I'm the only person preaching the benefits of DV.  Does this mean that I'm the only person in the world who truly understands what markets are good for?  I guess.  I'm the only person in this boat.  Either I'm in the wrong boat, or everybody else is.  I'd really hate to be in the wrong boat so please, if you think that I am, then I'm all ears.  Make the case that some producers, such as pro-market bloggers, should be exempt from receiving specific and substantial feedback from consumers.  Or make the case that cheap signals are just as credible as costly signals.