Why Ron gets so worked up

So Ron asked me if I understand why he gets so worked up around his coworkers...

My answer is a qualified "no."

I sympathize, but if I were Ron I wouldn't get so worked up when I hear what Bastiat called "economic sophisms" from my coworkers. There are a couple of reasons:

1) People believe all kinds of things that don't jive with any kind of empirical analysis; this is often the result of availability bias or representative bias.

2) Most people's beliefs don't fit into any larger, coherent (or consistent) moral philosophy. Their beliefs about politics, philosophy, and economics are purely context-dependent. They will invoke the first amendment to fight censorship when they agree with the speaker and conveniently forget about the amendment's full implication when it comes to speech they despise.

Okay, I guess that can be frustrating. But it's to be expected. Most people have higher priorities than forming an internally consistent political or moral philosophy. As my colleague Bryan Caplan has repeatedly pointed out: they're being rational, in the economic sense of the word. There's little cost to holding inconsistent beliefs about politics or economics. Maybe if you thought about it, you'd experience some cognitive dissonance. Maybe if someone like Ron comes along, you might, maybe, be made uncomfortable when he points out contradictions in your views. But maybe not. Human beings have a great capacity for dissembling and compartmentalizing.

So this means that when someone objects to, of all things, a campground for motorcyclists only, on the grounds that it's discriminatory, she thinks this is a valid point. The libertarian contrarian responds that *of course* it's discriminatory, and so is a health club that only admits women, or a golf league that requires a handicap of less than six to join. The notion that discrimination is universally bad is a heuristic, i.e. a mental shortcut. In some cases, it's correct: sometimes discrimination is a bad thing. Jim Crowe is a good example of that. But the heuristic fails where free association is concerned. Rather than merely assert: "it's private property, they can do whatever they want," it may be better to present a puzzle, to bring the contradiction into the light: Is discrimination ever acceptable? Doesn't forbidding all discrimination essentially abolish free association? Many free associations rely on the ability to include (and therefore exclude) people based on all kinds of criteria. People, though, only seem to get very upset when a business discriminates, when they have criteria for who they will do business with. That's kind of strange, because no one seems to hold customers to the same standard, and the distinction between buyer and seller is very fuzzy in economics. More later on buyers, sellers, and the nature of money.