In a Russ Roberts podcast, Otteson says,
So, who is making the relevant economic decisions? Is it a third party, a person, group, agency who is making it on behalf of others? That’s what I’m calling the impulse toward centralism. Or, is it principally individuals or communities, localized communities, themselves? That’s what I’m calling decentralized decision making. And that is a spectrum.
This ties in to what I call the FOOL theor, meaning Fear of Others’ Liberty. Chances are, few people want to cede their own decision-making to a third party. But many of us think that others’ decisions are bad for them or for society as a whole, and we want a third party to make those decisions instead.
Incidentally, I have started reading Otteson’s book.
I think we know now that socialism is mostly a marketing fraud. It is the 3rd party pretending to make decisions for you when it is really making decisions on its own behalf.
Pseudo-socialism is when the government needs the cooperation of insurance companies and academics, for example, to sell the plan to the FOOL-inclined and full socialism is when they don’t need any cooperation.
If FOOL is the gravity pulling towards socialism how do we modulate the FOOL bait and switch? Is it to point out the failures of government discretion?
Our age tends to absolutize the individual and the central authority at the expense of “middling” institutions (like family, church, neighborhood, union, college, etc.). One kind of socialist prizes the authority and power of the central authority to make sure the individual is maximally free from the constraints imposed by these other institutions. In the Econtalk podcast this shows up in their discussion of the social contexts in which “socialism” “works.”
I agree about economic decisions. There’s a widespread sense that economic rules don’t apply to the majority of people; only to business owners. If you feel that way, then FOOL rules helps you more than hurts you.
Likewise for things that are supposed to apply to “rich” people. Or even to “poor” people. Everyone fantasizes that the rules will apply to other people.
One exception I’ve encountered is medical decisions. I don’t feel this way myself, but I’ve run into people that want medical decisions to be made like sports decisions: some official-souding doctor-bureaucrat makes a judgment call and then that’s the way it will be. The idea is, any physical discomfort caused by a bad judgment call is offset by the reduction in mental discomfort of having to think about these questions. I don’t feel that way, myself, but there it is.