{"id":36026,"date":"2018-07-25T01:00:42","date_gmt":"2018-07-25T05:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36026"},"modified":"2018-07-05T09:36:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-05T13:36:26","slug":"qotd-how-can-you-tell-when-a-politician-is-lying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/25\/qotd-how-can-you-tell-when-a-politician-is-lying\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: How can you tell when a politician is lying?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This reality of outright lying during campaigns is so familiar that we excuse it. It\u2019s just what politicians do.<\/p>\n

But suppose that a business owner did the equivalent in the market. Such behavior wouldn\u2019t be tolerated by customers or by law-enforcement officials. For example, suppose that the owner of Acme Furniture, in a scheme to get more sales, outright lies with a radio ad that promises that everyone who buys any piece of furniture from Acme will get half of the purchase price refunded in 12 months. \u201cWow! Darn good deal!\u201d consumers think. They flock to Acme and buy furniture.<\/p>\n

One year later, Acme customers submit their applications for the refunds of half of the purchase prices they each paid. But these customers, rather than getting what Acme promised, instead get a note from Acme explaining that the promise of a refund was made in jest; it was designed only to get more consumers to buy furniture from Acme. \u201cBut don\u2019t worry!\u201d the letter from Acme continues, \u201cyou\u2019re still better off having bought furniture from Acme than from any of Acme\u2019s competitors. Trust me on this! Yours Sincerely,\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

From time to time unscrupulous (and, typically, also really stupid or myopic) business people pull fraudulent stunts such as this one. Yet \u2013 rightly \u2013 no one excuses these stunts as being par for the course in business. One reason, of course, is that such stunts are not par for the course in private business; far from it. But such stunts are indeed par for the course in politics. And yet, despite this reality, we are constantly told that businesses operating in competitive markets cannot be trusted to behave honestly unless they are regulated by politicians and bureaucrats operating in political \u2018markets.\u2019<\/p>\n

Politicians lie and such lying is excused because it\u2019s normal. But it\u2019s not normal; it\u2019s not normal in the private sector; it\u2019s normal only in the very abnormal world of politics.<\/p>\n

Don Boudreaux, “Politicians Lie Openly and Such Behavior Is Excused Because It\u2019s \u2018Normal\u2019”, Caf\u00e9 Hayek<\/em><\/a>, 2016-09-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This reality of outright lying during campaigns is so familiar that we excuse it. It\u2019s just what politicians do. But suppose that a business owner did the equivalent in the market. Such behavior wouldn\u2019t be tolerated by customers or by law-enforcement officials. For example, suppose that the owner of Acme Furniture, in a scheme to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,9,53,41],"tags":[194],"class_list":["post-36026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-law","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-fraud"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9n4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36027,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36026\/revisions\/36027"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}