I actually agree that there are situations where preventing an arms race is a good idea. (And I wish there were a realistic proposal for a government to do something about the education credentials arms race.) But look at the different justifications:
There is an arms race where each individual is doing what is in their own rational best interest, but the result is collectively damaging, we need a government to solve this coordination failure
Those poor people are too dumb to make their own decisions, we should ban them from doing X for their own good.
What I’m really strongly arguing against is anything which proceeds from argument 2. I think all the examples I gave are non-arms-race dynamics where most of the people arguing to take a bad option away are giving a version of the “too dumb to make their own decisions” argument, usually described in the language of exploitation. And like I said, I find those arguments offensively infantilising and wrong in principle as well as empirically causing avoidable harm.
People already try to outbid each other for limited housing or education. Recall how cheap mortgages and student loans have driven up the price of these things. We shouldn’t give people even more self-harming ways to overpay for these things.
Housing is actually a great example of what the original post argued against. The reason housing is expensive in some places is a limited supply (restrictions on building, restrictions on what kind of house can be built) combined with an increasing population. Preventing people from paying for housing in bad ways just makes them homeless instead. Fixing the real problem would involve building and legalizing more housing and then you’ll find that fewer people need to make hard decisions to pay rent.
I actually agree that there are situations where preventing an arms race is a good idea. (And I wish there were a realistic proposal for a government to do something about the education credentials arms race.) But look at the different justifications:
There is an arms race where each individual is doing what is in their own rational best interest, but the result is collectively damaging, we need a government to solve this coordination failure
Those poor people are too dumb to make their own decisions, we should ban them from doing X for their own good.
What I’m really strongly arguing against is anything which proceeds from argument 2. I think all the examples I gave are non-arms-race dynamics where most of the people arguing to take a bad option away are giving a version of the “too dumb to make their own decisions” argument, usually described in the language of exploitation. And like I said, I find those arguments offensively infantilising and wrong in principle as well as empirically causing avoidable harm.
People already try to outbid each other for limited housing or education. Recall how cheap mortgages and student loans have driven up the price of these things. We shouldn’t give people even more self-harming ways to overpay for these things.
Housing is actually a great example of what the original post argued against. The reason housing is expensive in some places is a limited supply (restrictions on building, restrictions on what kind of house can be built) combined with an increasing population. Preventing people from paying for housing in bad ways just makes them homeless instead. Fixing the real problem would involve building and legalizing more housing and then you’ll find that fewer people need to make hard decisions to pay rent.