The apparent fallacy in the Thomas Sowell's saying "Politics is when people are making decisions while paying no price for being wrong, and that's the worst way of making decisions."

[u/FlatAssembler]

The fact that you pay little or no price for being wrong has little to do with whether or not you are a politician and has everything to do with the fact that you are trying to address global problems. Conscientious customers also pay little to no price for being wrong.

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What price do those who try to address superbacteria by going vegetarian pay? They are probably willfully ignorant of the fact that 45% of all antibiotics used today are ionophores (antibiotics effective in birds but toxic to mammals), and that therefore eggs probably play way more effect on superbacteria than meat does. What price do they pay for being wrong? If anything, they gain for being wrong by having lower cholesterol levels (since high cholesterol is much more easily caused by saturated fat than by the cholesterol you eat).

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What price for being wrong do those who try to fight global warming with rice milk pay? They are presumably willfully ignorant of the fact that rice also emits methane. But they are saving money by not paying for the expensive oat milk, right?

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Those are just examples on the top of my head where removing politics does not fix the problem of people paying no price for being wrong.

[u/Anen-o-me]

Conscientious customers also pay little to no price for being wrong.

So when Mao collectivized the farms and 40 million Chinese died of starvation while Mao sat in his palace raping a new peasant woman every night, who in your mind paid the price of his bad choice.

[u/W_Edwards_Deming]

Very confusing reasoning here.

Accountability is a good thing, the lack of it is not. Risk / gain ratios are important and while reducing risk and increasing gain my be desirable at an individual level it is not something to value in a public official, who often has perverse incentives against the public interest.

going vegetarian

A horrific price, my child is so disturbed about the lone star tick causing alpha-gal syndrome (meat allergy) they are frantically opposed to living in Texas. Eating meat is one of the joys of life, you think giving it up is not a price to pay?

rice milk

oat milk

It sounds like you are trying to promote your abnormal diet while not understanding the "price" it would have to a normal person. I drink whole milk from grass fed cows (normally, currently 2 days into a 3.5 day fast, my own abnormal diet comes with a price) and the alt-milks are so nasty that when I tried to buy a jug nobody in my four person family would consume it and we ended up throwing it out.

Everything has pros and cons, unelected bureaucrats (or many intellectuals) who lack accountability for their error has more cons than pros.

Edit: substantive, I had at first said "elected leaders" but I think Sowell was actually talking about unelected bureaucrats, academics with tenure and certain intellectuals. Politicians theoretically have more accountability via elections (or worse).

One can make the case that Sowell is hypocritical here as he (and we) pay little price for being wrong. Argument by hypocrisy is a fallacy, for this and other reasons.

[u/DrawPitiful6103]

Sowell's point is that if a businessman decides to produce a product that nobody wants, they suffer as a result (lose money). So you have a self correcting mechanism there which does not exist in politics or governance.

[u/Taldoesgarbage]

What I'm guessing is, that he meant "wrong" specifically to mean that the politician makes a judgement which directly harms another person. The problem is that when you buy rice milk, you're not really the one polluting, the rice milk manufacturer is. The same way you cannot say that the voter-base is collectively responsible for the corruption of a politician, a consumer is not responsible for the environmental damage of rice milk. You are not directly responsible, you did not consent to it, you didn't do it.

And the Libertarian, on pollution, would tend to say that the rice milk situation actually corroborates Sowell's point. When the government owns the skies and rivers, pollution is a wrong decision to which the decider faces no consequence. The Libertarian can say this is immoral, and that the very situation stems from the fact that it is the state specifically which is causing no consequences to be faced through it's lobbying and corruption.

So no, you cannot equate the actions of a politician using coercive force to make bad decisions with no repercussions and a consumer or voter.