The Market Gives Privilege to No One
"Bankers' hours" is an old phrase that actually reflects monopolistic privilege. The 10AM to 3PM that banks formerly were open to serve customers was made possible by government regulation and the consequent lack of competition to force bankers to be more available when customers needed them. With modest deregulation (and the electronic bookkeeping that deregulation encouraged) banks today are open a little longer than the former hours and some are even open on Saturdays.
Doctors, dentists, lawyers, and professors, however — a distinguished group that enjoy government-granted privileges in the form of licensing and other regulatory protections — still do not usually work weekends. Free-market service firms must be open and available when their customers need them. Why should medical or educational services only be available Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM? The significantly unregulated computer industry's "24/7" indicates the ultimate in service. The free market gives privilege to no one.
Comments (6)
I never realized the fact that bank hours were the result of high regulation and privilege by government, but now that you mentioned, it makes perfect sense. Why is it that restaurants, supermarkets, electronic stores and many services open for business every single day except for banks, the doctor's office and (obviously) government offices?
Published: March 19, 2007 10:27 AM
I'm going to have to object to this part: "Earned rank does exist naturally in society — parents hold rank over children, teachers over students, and employers over employees — and more earned rank would exist in a truly free-market economy because bureaucrats would have to get jobs in business and compete for their positions of authority. "
Even to the extent that some sort of earned rank can arise on the free market, I'm not sure how these are examples. At the very least, Kirkpatrick isn't being interally consistent. If "employers outrank employees", that contradicts "teachers outranking students", because, as Kirkpatrick went at length to point out, the teacher is *also* an employee of the student. I'd add that where I work, this supposed ranking is even more ill-defined, since the subordinates (in the case of contract employees) make a lot more per hour than their bosses, and the bosses have to put up with a lot of grief from them because "it's hard to get contractors to work here".
Labeling one of the parties in any of these relationships as *necessarily* outranking the other tends to confuse the issue, and it's exactly this kind of thinking that leads to statist intervenions like employee harassment laws.
Published: March 19, 2007 10:50 AM
Where is the mention of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's "natural aristocracy" that will arise in the free market as recognition for those people whose natural merit-based superiority (and not inherited) rank leads others to treat them with special respect?
Published: March 19, 2007 11:01 AM
Person makes good points that situation is not always so clear as someone presents it.
Intelligentsia is often held to be superior in social order with respect to ordinary people, but it is not uncommon to good salesman to have a much better income than lecturer or researcher (at least in social sciences and humanities).
There was an article in wikipedia about the Yale physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs who developed much of mathematical physics and vector analysis. He was always theoretician first and article stated that Americans didnt respect men of theory much in those days; it was interest in practical applications which dominated. So he was unknown for much of his life.
Of course it is subjective beliefs which form much of this so-called social ordering.
Published: March 19, 2007 2:02 PM
My father, a private-practice dentist, worked for over a decade on Wednesday evenings until 8 pm. For two decades, he worked Saturdays from 8 am to 2 pm. He played golf on Fridays. This was a very successful business strategy, as he acquired patients who were unwilling to take off from their 9-to-5 jobs. Also, because it was an unusual practice, he advertised this competitive advantage.
Eventually, he wanted to spend more time with his kids, so he stopped working on Wendnesdays and cut back on Saturdays.
Of course, we spent time working with him on Sundays while we cleaned the office and cut the lawn for him.
He retired for eight years, got bored... and began working on Saturdays again a few weeks ago.
This personal example is to say although it's rare for private practice dentists and doctors to work weekends, if they choose to do so, it can be successful.
Published: March 19, 2007 2:11 PM
Iceberg: What you call "natural aristocracy" is best referred to as prestige, which need not be rank-based. Rank is a statist and militarist construct which would be out of place in a truly capitalist, non-coercive society - you seem to be engaging in the same kind of muddled thinking that Person decries.
Published: March 19, 2007 8:21 PM