Apropos of the earlier discussion positing the wearing of neckties in the summer as a collective action problem, the European Commission is banning Eurocrats from wearing ties during the Summer. Now, rather than each individual having to wear a choking, stifling accessory they'd all be better off ditching, no individual will get to wear one. I believe this is irrefutable evidence that the EU brass read, and make policy, based off this blog. Skeptics may say the fact that this decision was reached before my post makes this an odd conclusion, but they're skeptics. That's what you'd expect them to say.
As a sort of general point on these collective action issues, I was doing a BloggingHeads with Julian Sanchez today and was struck, in talking about some minor abrogation of individual freedom or another, by how much the protection of autonomy was masquerading for opposition to regulations. Take vacation time. Libertarians don't believe businesses should be forced to offer four weeks vacation, and don't believe individuals should have to have so much vacation. To impose such a regulation, Julian said, is to unduly advantage the preference for leisure over the preference for income.
But the absence of such a regulation doesn't create some sort of leisure/income equilibrium, wherein each choice is equally available. It makes four weeks of vacation an impossibility save for the most uncommonly advantaged workers. In other words, it too chooses, and advantages, a particular preference (that of businesses to maximize worker productivity, and, in some ways, for workers to maximize income), it just does so by blocking a regulation rather than imposing one.
