In any case, I find your argument that there is a popular conception of the government as universally benevolent and that is what is creating a hotbed for crony capitalism unconvincing. First of all, the American people is plenty cynical about gubmint. The problem is that it is a kind of passive, apathetic cynicism that numbs us to outrage like the no-bid contracts in Iraq. Of course, I’m just speculating here (as are you), but I think it is equally likely that there would be more concern over Halliburton if we had higher expectations of government and what it can achieve.

But government has no genuinely necessary functions!

But maybe we can look at it with a little comparative taxonomy … why is Wal-Mart “bad” and Target “good?”

If a Nike or a Home Depot successfully manages its social position … should we blame the people for not liking Wal-Mart, or Wal-Mart for so ineffectively interacting with the people?

There are probably human/tribal things going on here, in our interactions with corporate players, that we are too immersed in to even see.

Empires like Wal-Mart, like Microsoft, like ExxonMobil — they usually don’t have to break the rules. Instead, they rewrite the rules to better suit them.

Behaviour economics is not a against “conservative” economics. Hayek was a behavioural economist, so was Adam Smith. Issues such as fairness are part of market exchange.

I don’t agree that Wall Mart is cheating, Wall Mart never promissed it’s workers something it is not delivering.

On the other hand people, in a political discussion, are attacking wallmart because they emotionally it is “unfair”. This is a great example of political faliure, that harmfull populist ideas effeckt politics.

Hayek has very good theories why from an evolutionary perspective we humans cannnot understand the market, and consider it “unfair”. For one thing mostpeople simply don’t have modules to handle corporations, and just analyse them morally as if they were people “can’t Wall-Mart give away a little money, he has so much”.

I thought about this while on my hike, and just decided that I can’t trust Wal-Mart at this point. It might be a “where there’s smoke there’s fire thing” but I worry that they might be cheaters.

If anyone of you have read The Winner’s Curse, you know that we are “economic” creatures, but that experiments often uncover “anomalies” of economic life that revolve around issues of fairness, and cheating. Game theory offers insight into why these rules might be advantageous over the long term.

Books like “The Blank Slate” and “Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees” extend this idea a bit in terms of both brain mechanism and evolutionary advantage. There is some interesting work in this area, especially in studies that show we might share ideas of “economic exchange” and “fairness” with other creatures.

Many of the posts above take this as a right/left split issue. That might be true, but I don’t think the extremes really illuminate the issue.

I guess the classically liberal stance would be that it is all about “fairness” and insuring such. On the other hand, the classically conservative stance would be that it is all about “economic exchange.”

Sorry guys (extremists) human nature includes both.

Being a conservative-leaning-moderate I’ll say that our nature is mostly about advantageous exchange, but that we carry very definite ideas of fairness within ourselves (certainly within the society, if not every individual).

Companies which sail too close to the rocks, and become identified as “unfair” or “cheaters” suffer. That’s just human society.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989287

Of course this does not show that NPR does not have a liberal bias or, for that matter, a liberal bias that is disadvantagous to the left.