This week, we got to watch a lecture given by Dr. Antony Davies. He discusses coercion and cooperation. One of the examples that Davies gave is that in Philadelphia, the law makers wanted to reduce the amount of people who drank sugar-filled drinks. They placed a high tax on it to try and stop this. However this didn't change the amount of people who bought and consumed these drinks. The reason being is due to method of consumption. The people who consumed these drinks went other places to buy them. This shows that when people are forced to do something, they will rebel. Coercion is the government telling people what they can and cannot do. This is also the case with the Mexico City pollution problem. People who wanted to drive cars, they bought clunker cars to drive instead and this caused pollution to go up instead. Dr. Davies mentioned that we could have been debt free for a long time because with the money that we spent, we could pay each person $10,000. The reason that didn't work is due to regulatory capture. There were good intentions, but others co-opted the regulators. Something interesting that Davies also brought up is that people still argue that the wealthy aren't paying their "fair share" when they do. The reason for this is political profit, politicians want to get elected. They will do whatever it takes to get the majority of people to vote for them. All together, coercion fails. After talking about coercion, Davies discussed cooperation. He said that the reason this fails is because of diversity. Having differences, means there are strengths and weaknesses in different areas. This leads to exploitation of the ones with weaknesses. Dr. Davies said that what works is the balance between cooperation and coercion. I agree with this. If you have too little coercion, this could lead to the strong exploiting the weak. Davies said "Coercion is how you prevent these people from exploiting". This can happen with economic freedom. I didn't think about things like this. I never really understood what cooperation and coercion were. Nor did I know that having both is a good thing. It's when one or the other is lacking. Coercion with driving places boundaries so that we won't harm other people However, cooperation allows us to decide what we do. This is a good balance. This kind of reminds me about parenting. Parents place boundaries in place so that you won't hurt yourself but also that you won't hurt others. However, ultimately it's up to us and our decisions. Do we rebel against our parents or do we obey them? That is where the cooperation comes into play.
