One of the layup points in economics that people in politics and those who comment on the political realm often forget is that the reason people engage in trade is to make their lives better and easier, to toil less. The entire reason people create productive economies is to work less for what they want and need, not to work harder.
The problem is that many people disregard the concept of better living standards as the goal of economic activity, and replace it with the idea of "creating employment".
If the goal of economics were to “employ” people, we could eliminate the wheel and make humans lift wagons. Voila! Four people, working.
And, of course, that's really four people being less productive than one person with a wheeled cart. That requirement for more workers takes human labor, time, and resources away from unseen areas and productive endeavors that could help people in myriad other ways.
This is one of the reasons I used to argue with my high school teacher for 20th Century American History when she praised FDR’s alphabet soup of “make work” programs. FDR was actually harming the economy by pushing for government spending. He was syphoning resources – monetary, human, temporal, and natural – away from what consumers might have wanted, and directing them into endeavors (like hiring people to pull helium balloons along DC streets to frighten birds off buildings) that consumers themselves might not have valued.
People were “employed”, but that “employment” wasn’t directed by any consumer value or demand. FDR might as well have hired people to burn money.
It’s no wonder that my leftist teacher used to pull my hair (I don’t have much left) and threatened to pour a Pepsi on my head when she had a hard time coping with the points I made in class.
And so I think of that teacher when I see this story from Reason’s Christian Britschgi.
As Britschgi notes, only two states in the US possess statutes prohibiting people from pumping their own gasoline. New Jersey is, perhaps, the best known of the two, having enacted its law in 1949, and seeing millions of out-of-state northeastern commuters get out of their cars at stations only to stand in bewilderment as station employees prevent them from gassing up, and, instead, engage in that strange kabuki dance of pumping the gas, making small talk, possibly asking if the driver wants the oil checked, wants the windshield cleaned, or wants any one of sundry things the station might offer.
Of course, if the driver were to ask that the station post how much in taxes he or she is paying on each gallon, the employee wouldn’t be able to help, because that’s forbidden by law.
But, notes Britschgi, Oregon’s politicians might turn away from that vaunted totalitarian tradition of gas-up mandates, and allow for a tiny, tiny bit more… what’s that word?
Freedom?
This week, a bipartisan group of legislators in Oregon introduced a bill that would allow gas stations to designate up to 25 percent of their pumps as self-service. Service stations with less than four pumps would be allowed to have one self-service pump… The idea is to give those consumers crazy or brave enough to want to pump their own gas the option of doing so.
Utterly novel. Not for the faint of heart. It’s a good thing Oregon’s group of radical gas-freedom promoters aren’t allowed completely off the leash. Chaos could ensue.
And thank goodness politicians in New Jersey recognize that their population simply isn’t ready for that kind of responsibility.
And they’ll keep gas attendants working at jobs that the market has shown are wasteful.
Admittedly, Oregon hasn’t been completely in the Stone Age with New Jersey. Britschgi observes that the state already allowed a tiny bit of freedom in the difficult and tricky realm of gas-pumping for those traveling late at night.
Up until a few years ago Oregon, like New Jersey, had a flat prohibition on self-service. This was often a major inconvenience for late-night motorists traveling through the rural eastern parts of the state, where gas stations often did not have an attendant present 24 hours a day… In 2015, the state legislature passed a law allowing gas stations in counties with less than 40,000 people to allow self-service between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. This change was broadened by a 2017 law that allows for self-service at any time of day in those same counties.
Now, a bit more liberty might be allowed.
It’s amazing that more than 110 years after the first for-purpose filling station opened in St. Louis Missouri in 1905, agents of the state are still eager to mandate how people will conduct their business at gas stations. Imagine being the owner of a station where you cannot decide for yourself how many employees you will have, what they will do, or when they will work.
Imagine the waste you’d see.
Now imagine the tables turned, and gas station owners telling politicians that they couldn’t open a door without a door-opening employee, or sit down without someone preparing the chair, or turn on a light without a “lighting union employee” doing it for them. The politicians would see such astronomically higher costs it might stun them.
Of course, politicians aren’t involved with real commerce. They don’t have to please customers, and costs don’t matter to them because they have no competition to which people can freely turn. Tax slaves have to pay or they will go to jail.
So politicians have no incentives to think about costs. They merely have to cozy up to special interests and get more political donations.
It’s no wonder the political world has taken so long to catch up to reality.
They don’t operate in the real world.