FLOG

More Gas Bag

I should let this go, but I can't.

Turns out the previously alluded-to treatise on Oregon petroleum economics has attracted the attention of preening ponce Will Baude, whose blog I read whenever I find my forehead has lost its rosy glow.

Baude wastes no time proving his powerful intellect is as scintillatingly useless as a Ferrari in space. In comments he notes:

I had always thought that [laws such as Oregon's gas law] were kept around by those who owned large numbers of gas stations because the increased costs of having the attendants was supposed to be some sort of barrier to entry.

I'm no business owner, but I've met a few. I wonder if Baude has. Successful business owners do not sit around thinking things like: "It would be nice to slim down the payroll, after the licking I took last quarter, but on the other hand I appreciate having this law around as a barrier to entry." This is how economists at universities think. Business owners think: "How can I minimize my costs?"

At his own blog, Baude continues to trip over all those terms he picked up in college by drawing an analogy between gas station operators and, wait for it, lawyers:

[If] the bar exam might be good because it gives lawyers a "quasi-property right" in their profession, why not suppose that this sort of guild-protection legislation gives gas station owners a "quasi-property right" in the business of gas stations, encouraging them to, I don't know, participate in the development of the gas station industry or something.

I find unpersuasive the quasi-property right defense of guild legislation, but if one finds it persuasive for lawyers, why not for gas stations?

He later fleshes this out SAT-style:

Lawyers : their state's law :: gas station owners : the sale of gasoline in their state.

Er, so gas station owners maintain their control over the sale of gasoline in their state by requiring themselves to pay more employees? And this is analogous to what lawyers do -- requiring 3 years of professional school and 3 months of preparation for a 3 day test, as well as extensive background investigation of applicants and countless formal and informal rituals of admission large and small?

Hmm. Whose way is better?

Sorry about this. I will not rest until every tweedy East Coast* blogger involved in this discussion comes in for a little ad hominem. Why? Because.

UPDATE!!!! For the uninitiated who may be a tad flummoxed or befuckered by my strong and unhesitant antipathy for this Will Baude fellow, who I have of course never met and certainly dislike less than others, may I invite you to look at this:

It's not that I have anything against ketchup per se, it's just that I like having a few foods that I dislike. I don't have any really good reason for wanting to have a few hold-out foods, although I suppose it makes me feel a little more discerning, gives me something funny to talk about when chatting with food-lovers, and means people will take my "I like almost all real foodstuffs" declaration more seriously if I can say something like "except ketchup" or "except hard-boiled eggs". [A certain co-blogger of mine, for example, has never read Hamlet, and continues to not do so merely because of the meta-utility of being able to not-have-read it. I don't think Hamlet's worth the sacrifice, but ketchup would have been.]

Now, I'll admit that I am given occasionally to fits of too-cleverness; this very sentence that I am typing was included.** But things like the preceding are the reasons I wish at times that we had never come up with language. Flinging feces? Yep, better than this.

Another reason that I am suddenly so hostile to this Baude fellow is that it has been stewing for a while, and this weekend was rather whiskey-intensive. Camels, straws, etc.
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*Yes, Illinois in on the East Coast. You heard me.

**See, what happened was, during my typing of the sentence it turned 3 AM and by my own rules I had to begin referring to the sentence in the past tense and insert a semi-colon to maintain integrity. It makes sense if you look at it with your peripheral vision.

Posted by FLOG at October 11, 2005 12:40 AM