Republicans' Weird Values

On toasters and border crossings

In Economics In One Virus, I criticized Andrew Cuomo, then New York Governor, for saying of lockdowns:

I want to be able to say to the people of New York, “I did everything we could do.” And if everything we do just saves one life, I’ll be happy.

To the extent he actually believed this, it was pure trade-off denial. Even if you think imposing lockdown restrictions is a purely technocratic exercise, you should only impose policies up until the point where the marginal social benefit of doing so is equal to the marginal social cost. Trying to circumvent that calculus by saying you will set policy according to the principle that the value of a single human life is infinite—well, that would be ridiculous.

Unfortunately, Republicans have caught this bug of speaking about policy decisions in a similarly uneconomic way.

First, we had Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance:

The cheapest toaster that I saw on the first page of Amazon after searching “cheap toaster” is $13.99. So Vance is implying that American taxpayers and consumers should be forced to bear total costs amounting to almost $14 million to “protect” a single American job making…um, toasters.

It’s no longer just “strategically important” industries or those with “national security” implications that animate calls for tariffs or domestic industrial policies, it seems. It’s relatively low value-added, capital-intensive industries that, ironically, previous Republican policies (not least steel and aluminum tariffs) have made life more difficult for.*

Vance is saying that “what Republicans stand for” is imposing very large economic costs on other industries to try to protect certain manufacturing industries that very few Americans would aspire to work in anyway. Again, he is trying to throw off the shackles of having to justify the marginal costs and benefits of a protectionist policy by assuming any job saved has a hugely inflated value. The costs would be borne by American consumers.

Then we have Senator Tom Cotton tweeting about the border:

Saying “the only acceptable number of illegal border crossings is zero” similarly fails to “think on the margin” about costs and benefits. If it really were the case that there were, say, only 5 difficult-to-prevent illegal border crossings per year, would it really be worth the American government insisting on a blank check from taxpayers to invest in more expensive surveillance, border agents, helicopters, bases, and more to eradicate such a minor problem? Undoubtedly not. But Cotton is trying to rubbish this sort of thinking by implying the value of eradicating any illegal border crossings is extremely high.

Now, perhaps we should not take these musings of Cuomo, Vance, and Cotton literally. You could argue that they are just trying to signal that they really care about lives lost to COVID-19, American manufacturing jobs, and a secure border respectively. Yet grandiose, absolutist statements like this that seek to reject cost-benefit analysis are not only economically misguided, but lead to bad policy and, ultimately, deep disappointment in politicians.

* The toaster is an interesting example from Vance about the supposed downsides of globalization. In fact, toasters are an amazing example of the benefits of human cooperation from comparative advantage and free trade. Thomas Thwaites describes how difficult it is to make a toaster alone, from scratch. The amazing feat of decentralized trade delivering such a complex product so cheaply echoes the lesson of Leonard Read’s great “I, Pencil.”