Sellers want to reduce your options

Sellers have an incentive to reduce buyers' options.

People born in the United States who sell their labor to employers want to reduce employers' options of who to hire by making immigration more difficult. Ford tries to make it difficult for people buying cars to get Toyota cars, perhaps by lobbying for tariffs on foreign cars. iPhones don’t charge with Android chargers, thereby reducing charger options for iPhone users so they are willing to pay more for the Apple charger.

 

For a more stark example, think of a partnership of three people, and two partners want to get rid of the third. The judge may give them two options: 1) they can offer to buy the third partner's share at a price the third partner is willing to accept, or 2) if the third partner refuses their price then the whole business will be sold at an auction and and the profits are divided among the partners. With option 2 we need to know whether the judge will allow the two partners to participate in the auction. The third partner is going to encourage the judge to exclude all the partners from the auction. This may be surprising, because the two partners who want to stay would be willing to pay more than anybody else (since they're already familiar with the business), and hence the third partner would end up with more money than if the business sold to people besides his old partners. The reason is that depriving his partners of the opportunity to participate in the auction (option 2) gives the the third partner more leverage in option 1, which will induce the two partners (buyers) to pay the third partner (seller) more in option 1. See Prentiss v. Sheffel, Ariz. App., 1973.

 

The third partner's preference, however, is less efficient in that it makes it less likely that a good transaction will happen. For the third partner to be able to really get extra money out of the others, he has to be willing to say no to their offer if it isn't high enough. If he does say no, then the partnership will be sold to people who value the business less than the two partners and cannot run the business as well as the two partners.

Tyrants in some sense have to "sell" or promote their country as their people's land of residence. I imagine tyrants are pleased when other countries close themselves off as options for emigrants, so that their people have few options besides continuing in their current state of oppression.

 

Quentin L. Cook points out that the "[adversary] and his emissaries declare that the real choice we have is between happiness and pleasure now in this life and happiness in a life to come (which the adversary asserts may not exist." Satan wants us to pay him a high price, our souls, so he tells us that we have two options: happiness now or misery now with a small chance of happiness in the uncertain future.

Of course, not every combination of choice and result is possible. We can't consume any drug while avoiding any addiction. Hence God teaches about true impossibilities, whereas Satan teaches lies that make our options seem fewer than they are.

 

Thomas S. Monson also taught about how Satan makes good choices seem undesirable, thereby making us more willing to sacrifice our well-being to follow Satan. "He cunningly calls: Just this once won't matter; everyone is doing it; don't be old-fashioned; times have changed; it can't hurt anyone; your life is yours to live. The adversary knows us, and he knows the temptations which will be difficult for us to ignore. How vital it is that we exercise constant vigilance in order to avoid giving in to such lies and temptations." The adversary wants us to think that having friends and avoiding sin at the same time is not an option, neither is being both up-to-date and principled nor being both free and righteous. If we think those are not options, we become more willing to give up good principles.

The key is remembering that we in fact have a lot of options even while avoiding sin. When I look at the world clearly, I see that there are all sorts of social people who avoid sin, up-to-date people who hold to certain principles, and people who have accomplished many goals of their own choosing while still making righteous living their first priority.

Photos from pexels.com

Do nonreligious couples have the freedom to contract with each other?

A contract is an agreement, typically between two parties, that 1) binds them to perform certain actions or give something and 2) creates the expectation of receiving something in return. Government-enforced contracts make the world a better place because they allow planning in a world of liars. For example, say I decide I want to go to Arizona for school and want to make sure I will have housing before I drive down there. If I don’t know many people in Arizona, then I want to have a contract with an apartment complex so that the complex doesn’t sell to somebody who shows up last minute and offers to pay $2 more per month than I would pay. The complex benefits from the contract as well, from the assurance that I won’t find a complex that is $2 cheaper last minute and leave them scrambling to find a new tenant. Both parties benefit from getting to know ahead of time what the other party will do.

Do only straight-up liars want to break contracts? I think there are a lot of people who, without the negative effects of bad credit or the threat of a lawsuit, would break contracts because their circumstances changed. Sometimes the court might allow a contract to be broken without having to pay damages because circumstances changed so much that keeping up your end was really impossible. But I think that even an honest party that want to break a contract will be prone to see circumstances making completion of a contract “impossible” much sooner than the party who wants the contract to be completed. So government enforcement of contracts prevents liars and people who give up too easily (all of us to some extent) from ruining the reliability of contracts.

Marriage is a contract in a sense. It creates expectations and reliance. For example, you rely on the fact that your marriage will work out by pulling yourself out of the dating pool when dating is the easiest. Many people give up certain career plans in order to have a more family-friendly lifestyle. This reliance is well worth it to people who are expecting to get in return the benefits that they married for (happy family, etc.).

The reliance is not worth it if those benefits are not received. In that case, somebody has forfeited exciting dating and careers for no reason. Contract law calls this detrimental reliance.

What if marriages were “enforced”? This would mean you can’t break them when there has been no fault, and theoretically this means people will not be relying in vain as often, because they will be more assured of getting the benefits they expected to get from marriage. The fact that marriages are not “enforced” could be a reason that fewer people get married in their twenties or at all; they are nervous that they will be giving up a career or their prime years for something that will just be broken down the road. Similarly, if the government stopped enforcing business contracts, people would stop making business contracts.

Chart from a 2015 Washington Post article.

You may be objecting: “The government forcing two people to stay together isn’t going to ensure them the benefits they hoped to get from marriage. The reason they are breaking up is because they have already seen that those benefits are not coming.” But the expectations that people have affect their behavior. In a world of unenforced contracts, both you and the person who has been contracted to build your pool are going to be nervous that the other person is going to break the contract, and so you want to pay/work as little as possible in order to minimize your losses in case the other party bails on you. Likewise in a marriage, if you’re nervous the other person will leave, you might be hesitant to put your all into creating a strong relationship, for fear that you’ll be hurt when the other person doesn’t care.

I have often reflected on how grateful I am that my wife and I know that we are in it for the long haul. I suppose you could be laughing since we just had our first anniversary on April 29th. But there are some strong influences pushing us towards staying together: our love (perhaps the most common thing that couples start out with), our spiritual obligation, and social pressure. I hesitate to say social pressure, because I don’t want you to misunderstand and think that our families and friends are cold-hearted or really judgmental. We know things happen, some that we might not understand, and are happy to love and support anybody who goes through a divorce. But there is a small part of me that wonders if Melanie would get invited to family events before me if I ever left her : ) As for the spiritual obligation, I was sealed (for eternity) to Melanie by God’s authority in a temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I believe that God expects me to stay with Melanie. I like to think that just our love would keep us together too, but I know that’s what most couples think and yet it only works out for half of them.

Can people without religious pressure achieve the same result of realistically expecting marriage will last? Probably hard to say, since so many people were religious before the change in laws. But I imagine some good econometrics could figure out whether social and legal influences can lead to equally low divorce rates. Certainly though, any influence that promotes the principle of keeping commitments will have some positive effect on the number of lasting marriages, thus allowing people to develop more correct expectations (the benefit of contract law) upon entering into a marriage contract.

I welcome your comments!

Thanks to freelyphotos.com for some public domain photos that I am starting to use : )