In English, at least, and maybe also in Portuguese, if a naïve person accused of racism or some other shameful prejudice, such as against lawyers, she defends herself by declaring that “But some of my best friends are lawyers.” A sophisticated person makes the sentence into an ironic joke, as I am about to do: Some of my best friends are lawyers.
Honest. But I am an economist right down to my patent-leather shoes. Therefore I have spent most of my professional life arguing against lawyers. Kamala Harris, whom I dearly hope crushes Donald Trump and his neo-fascist Republican Party on November 5, is a good person and will be an excellent president. But she’s a lawyer, right down to her patent-leather shoes. She’s therefore proposing some pretty stupid policies.
Good economists know that passing a law “intended” to improve working conditions or wages, or to control the price of housing, or to “protect” American workers from foreign competition, have perverse effects, mainly to make poor people more poor and sometimes even rich people richer. Certainly “protecting” the one U.S. maker of solar panels from Chinese competition, which is what Trump’s lawyers did immediately on getting into office, hurts workers, and makes solar panels twice as expensive to install on your house. But Harris has similar ideas. She has law degree and worked for decades at a prosecutor.
Lawyers think that if there’s problem, the solution is to pass a law that coerces people into doing good. It makes some sense if private force or fraud is the problem, though such a mentality has worked extremely poorly in, say, the War on Drugs. Still, we do want coercive laws to stop private force and fraud. Or try to. Or intend to.
The trouble is that the state’s laws are commonly just public force and fraud—force because all laws are coercive; fraud because the lawyers don’t understand, or don’t tell you about, the indirect, unintended effects. Any good economist could. The War on Drugs, for example, has raised the price of drugs, corrupting every police force from Kabal to Kansas City, and giving gangs economic incentives to make stronger drugs and kill people.
Laws coerce. Before listening to the lawyers, listen to an economist.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.