Thomas Sowell explains how he turned from liberal — Marxist even — to more-or-less conservative:
What began to change my mind was working in the summer of 1960 as an intern in the federal government, studying minimum wage laws in Puerto Rico. It was painfully clear that as they pushed up minimum wage levels, which they did at the time industry by industry, the employment levels were falling. I was studying the sugar industry. There were two explanations of what was happening. One was the conventional economic explanation: that as you pushed up the minimum wage level, you were pricing people out of their jobs. The other one was that there were a series of hurricanes that had come through Puerto Rico, destroying sugar cane in the field, and therefore employment was lower. The unions preferred that explanation, and some of the liberals did too.I spent the summer trying to figure out how to tell empirically which explanation was true. And one day I figured it out. I came to the office and announced that what we needed was data on the amount of sugar cane standing in the field before the hurricane moved through. I expected to be congratulated. And I saw these looks of shock on peoples faces. As if: this idiot has stumbled on something that’s going to blow the whole game.
To me the question was: is this law making poor people better off or worse off? That was not the question the Labor Department was looking at. About one third of their budget at that time came from administering the wages and hours laws. They may have chosen to believe that the law was benign, but they certainly weren’t going to engage in any scrutiny of the law. What that said to me was that the incentives of government agencies are different than what the laws they were set up to administer were intended to accomplish. That may not sound very original in the James Buchanan era, when we know about Public Choice theory. But it was a revelation for me. You start thinking in those terms, and you no longer ask, what is the goal of that law, and do I agree with that goal? You start to ask instead: what are the incentives, what are the consequences of those incentives, and do I agree with those?
The interviewer notes that “people often prefer arguing over ideals rather than discussing what might work, or what might make incremental improvements,” and Sowell responds:
Ah, being on the side of the angels. Being for affordable housing, for instance. But I don’t know of anybody who wants housing to be unaffordable. Liberals tend to describe what they want in terms of goals rather than process, and not to be overly concerned with the observable consequences. The observable consequences in New York are just scary.
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A figure I ran across recently that struck me as illustrating the moral bankruptcy of rent control is this: the number of boarded-up housing units in New York City is four times the number of homeless people on the streets. To think of that! On winter nights there are people sleeping on the cold pavement and dying of exposure, when there are these buildings that are boarded-up as a consequence of economic protectionism.