free market teleology and the automaker bailout

Conor has complained that economic conservatives are at a disadvantage because their policies benefit people you can't see. As he said,

Conservatives and libertarians sometimes face a disadvantage in policy arguments. We’re attuned to the indirect effects and unintended consequences of certain policies, whereas our liberal interlocutors concern themselves primarily with direct effects. Why is this a disadvantage? Because the liberal can say, "Look at David from Detroit, who is going to lose his job, and his home, if GM goes bankrupt." Whereas the best conservatives and libertarians can do is to say, "Somewhere in America there is an unknown person who will lose their job, and their home, if the automakers are bailed out, due to the inevitable effect of egregious economic inefficiencies that will course through the financial system."....

The person who is hurt in the liberal narrative and the one hurt in the conservative narrative are both real human beings. But the fact that the former is identifiable is often used by liberals as an emotional bludgeon.

Perhaps! But Conor, I think, is ignoring a great benefit to conservatives on this score: there's a lot of non-falsifiability for libertarians and free marketers to work with. Consider this auto bailout. I say that if the automakers aren't bailed out, the human costs will be extreme, and (by the way) there are going to be major negative economic effects, too. (Imagine that.) Ah, but Conor and his brethren might say, bailing out the automakers will have great human and economic costs, too! Yeah, the immediate effect is going to be huge job loss, but there will be actually be more jobs saved and created, in the long run, by not bailing them out. You can make a childish appeal to emotion by trying to save real, existing jobs, but you're inevitably causing great heartache for these hypothetical people!

You can see the difficulty in arguing against this. These effects, though they may be real, have no referrent to real life. There's no way to check on them, no way for me to balance their effects against the effects of alternative options, no way to actually know if the extravagant claims made by those endorsing that position are actually true. There is an awful lot of faith, going on here, and while it certainly could be true that the positive effects of not bailing out the automakers will be better in the long run, I find the fact that you can actually tell the positive effects of bailing them out not to be some mark of intellectual dishonesty with the position but a rather large argument in its favor. As a matter of argument, though, it certainly benefits the anti-bailout crowd. They can assert all kinds of positive effects, and because the connection between not bailing out the car companies and these positive effects is necessarily tenuous and difficult to see, there's no way to tell if they were right, and effectively nothing for them to prove. It's a nice argumentative space to occupy. It's the same space that permits the nonfalsifiability of growth-driven utopian fantasy.

I've been a little taken aback by some of the opponents of this bailout because of their absolute certainty that the bailout is going to be a disaster. Are they really so sure, in fact, that David from Detroit keeping his job will ensure that some three other Americans lose theres? Really? How can they be so positive? Yes, I can see that there are arguments either way, when it comes to this bailout. But the utter insistence that we know, with absolute clarity, that his will be a net economic minus is absurd to me.

My acknowledgement that there are arguments for either side, by the way, is not something I share with many libertarians and free marketers, however. Of course, they are always certain. This is a strange attitude for an ideology so dependant on butterfly effects and far-flung consequences. It does make a certain sense, though. One reason so many libertarians adopt the argumentative stance of absolute certitude (and, indeed, contempt for those who disagree) is because the asserted benefits of their positions are necessarily distant and non-verifiable. As it is difficult to prove that their positions are the best ones for mankind, they adopt a stance of the utmost confidence out of necessity. They then bolster this position with sighs of "you just don't understand the complicated economics."

And so again we reach free market teleology, utterly non-falsifiable, not subject to external verification and resistant to calls for proof. Just keep looking farther and farther ahead into the future, whenever the arguments get dicey, cast the horizon for the benefits of growth farther and farther ahead into the future, until no one can keep perspective enough to tell you that you're wrong. Today it may not look like it, but tomorrow, by god, growth will deliver us from evil....