Fish and Game Dept. targets Asian Supermarket - Flawed Economics in Action

A daring sting operation has brought down another set of dangerous criminals in our midst. The proprietors of Great Wall supermarket (located about 20 minutes from where I live) have been arrested for selling "wild" sea animals including live frogs, crayfish, turtles, eels, and more. The store owners say that all of their stock comes from farmed sources, but that does not appear to be convincing the crusading Commonwealth bureaucrats.

Officer Rich Landers, of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, had this to say:

“History has show when wildlife becomes commercialized, the population dwindles,” Landers said. “Whether it’s elephant tusks or whales, we are trying to reduce the chances that wildlife becomes commercialized.”

Lets take a moment and think of a heavily commercialized animal population, like cows. We may have another disaster on our hands: the cow population is down to the lowest level since 1958, with only 92.6 million in the United States! An estimated 25 million cows are slaughtered each year. That means that in less than four years, there won't be any cows left in the United States. Savor your steaks while you can!

See what's wrong with this story? While commercialization allows animals to be consumed, it also creates strong incentives to rebuild the population for future consumption as well. That's why the decline in the cow population has been in response to reduced profitability of cattle ranching... not an ecological shortfall. Why would this be any different for farmed eels, turtles, or fish?

The historical examples that Landers uses are all cases where no one had ownership rights over the stock of animals being hunted, and therefore no reason to maintain sustainable population levels. That is clearly not the case here when we are discussing farmed seafood.

If anything, the proprietors of Great Wall should be applauded, for meeting consumer demand for uncommon (by American standards) foodstuffs. That way, Asian families can eat farmed eels etc. and do not have to catch them wild or import from abroad, potentially bringing exotic animal diseases to afflict U.S. ecosystems.

I won't go so far as to accuse the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries of racism or xenophobia, as I'm sure they'd be just as happy to apply their short-sighted and fallacious brand of reasoning to a predominantly-American grocery store as well. But, charging honest business owners with felonies, for selling live turtles and bass, does not inspire much confidence in either the agency's competence or its underlying motives.

What is law?

Early in my Law & Economics course, taught by Don Boudreaux (professor and former chair of the economics department at GMU, blogger at Cafe Hayek) he made a controversial point about the nature of law. While most of us associate "law" with legislation, handed down by Congress or other governing bodies, Dr. Boudreaux argues that we should see law as an emergent phenomenon, developed by the public's expectations for social behavior. For the curious, a similar lecture he gave can be found here.

To borrow his example: if I set down my books at a table in the cafeteria and go to get food, I have a reasonable expectation that when I return, no one will have taken the seat where those books were placed. It's generally accepted that a book (or coat, or other personal item) can act as a stand-in for a person's presence in reserving a space. Someone who took that spot would be breaking a law, even though that standard has never been written down or codified anywhere.

Sometimes law and legislation can be synonymous (e.g. people understand murder is wrong, and it also carries criminal penalties) and in other cases they are contradictory (e.g. speed limits that no one follows, or underage drinking at college that is illegal but generally tolerated). Legislation on the books has no power except to the degree that people will accept it, or the powers of government are willing to use force in order to apply it.

Generally, this makes a lot of sense to me: the Federal Register, which added over 75,000 pages in 2010 that probably less than a dozen people have actually read, probably plays less of a role in public daily life than seat-saving etiquette for restaurants, even though each part of the Register could (theoretically) be enforced with the full power of the United States Federal Government.

My only complaint is a semantic one. This conception of law subsumes and replaces the role of customs, norms, and social mores; those become redundant terms given this definition of "law." This is not necessarily a bad thing - it may even be good, if as Boudreaux argues, we should reframe the public understanding of law as being opposed to legislation - but the loss of precision from duplicating "norms" and "mores" bothers me. (Maybe my attachment to those terms is just the sociology minor talking.)

If I were starting this issue afresh, I'd propose a definition of law as the intersection of legislation and publicly accepted norms. This is much narrower (it includes the prohibition on theft and murder, but excludes unwritten social rules) and arguably has greater analytic power, because it creates a new category for what is both expected by society and enforced by the powers that be.

Of course this issue isn't being started afresh, and any new definition of law has to battle a centuries old Anglo-American tradition of treating legislation as identical to law. Changing that entrenched belief will be a challenge, no matter what theoretical or practical merits a new conception of law might bring.

Scary statistics for the medical economics debate.

[The shaded box is around my response.] Survey Source.

Stumbling around the internet awhile back, I came across this medical ethics questionnaire. In addition to providing a haven for procrastinators, this survey also shows the distribution of answers that others have made. Most of the questions were fairly ho-hum with predictable splits of opinion. However, the skew of answers to an economics-related question startled me.

When asked "what level of involvement should the government have in setting prescription prices?" a whopping 56% of the responders said "Create Price Ceilings" and 8% more thought the government should set all prescription prices. Apparently, 64% of those polled trust bureaucratic regulators more than the market when it comes to pricing medicine.


I can appreciate the sentiment behind price ceilings on prescription medication: it's undeniable that many people can't afford treatment they need to stay healthy. However, price ceilings are just a bad idea. 

Source.

For those unfamiliar, a brief rundown on the economics of price ceilings. When the government mandates a below-market price for a good, it creates several negative side-effects. Most immediately, amount supplied decreases. Faced with a lower price, manufacturers will cut back on production. In context of prescription medications, this means less drugs being developed, tested and sold to the public. Ailments that could potentially be treated will continue to harm people. Slightly more subtle is dead-weight loss, which represents market transactions which could have occurred, but did not. In other words, some people could have benefited by paying the higher price to get the drug, but the price ceiling prevented them from doing so. As a result, both consumers and producers lose out, although the outcome for the person seeking medication is perhaps most tragic.

High costs for prescription medications are definitely a problem; health care costs in general have been rising much faster than the general rate of inflation, putting important treatments out of reach for many people. High drug prices have also helped drive up health insurance costs, presenting a large drag on businesses.

Instead of an artificial cap on prescription prices, it would be more productive to look at the supply-side factors which keep those costs high. The lengthy FDA approval process alone costs "about $800 million per approved drug" and creates instant pressure for the company to charge high prices and recoup their investment upon release. Taking aim at these restrictions would be better than capping prices and ultimately smothering the development of life-saving medications.

Teamster wisdom on political economy

If God allowed everybody to die in bed, the government would regulate that we'd have to sleep standing up."

-Alex (on History Channel show Ice Road Truckers, Season 2 Episode 4).

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For context: Alex is driving a big-rig and hauling a 45-ton piece of mining equipment across the arctic ocean. The road he's driving on consists of nothing but frozen ice, and there's a blizzard rapidly approaching.

In addition to steady nerves and a dry sense of humor, the man has an intuition for political economy. I'll just let the quote above stand on its own. Thoughts?