Last week, Art Carden wrote an article at Forbes about Libertarian Compassionomics.  I wrote a brief response to it here, and there was a lively conversation in the comments thread.  Shortly thereafter, Art responded in a post at the Mises Economics Blog.  Yesterday, he published another response at Forbes.

Much of the substance of Carden's responses are directed at empirical questions, especially about the effects of the minimum wage.  To be clear, I don't have an issue with Carden's take on that topic.  I'm no economist, but my own non-specialist take on the economic literature is largely in line with Carden's on this point.

As I tried to say in my original response, my concern with Carden's essay wasn't that it said anything false.  It was more an issue of focus and context.  Yes, a lot of laws ostensibly designed to benefit the poor actually hurt them, and proper economic understanding can help us see this.  But to say this and then stop, and especially (as one commentator noted) to say it to the audience of Forbes (The "Capitalist Tool"), is to send a very misleading message, and one that might easily come off as pandering to the ruling classes.  By almost any reasonable measure of welfare or justice, policies designed to advance the interests of the already well-0ff are much more important than those designed to advance the interests of the poor, and it would have been a mark of courage and integrity for Carden to say so, especially to that particular audience.

To his credit, Carden's latest Forbes entry seems to grant this point.  "I largely agree," he writes, "that social welfare losses from policies like the minimum wage are probably pretty small compared to the damage done by corporate welfare, licensing regulations, and other policies that privilege the rich at the expense of the poor.  I also agree that there is a huge asymmetry in how conservatives and libertarians treat these issues…We need to do better."  

I, for one, am happy to hear it and grateful to Carden for taking the challenges raised on this blog seriously.   And I definitely look forward to hearing more from him on these issues.  Wouldn't it be great to see an article on Forbes on how the state has served as the ultimate "capitalist tool"?