When we tell our limited-government friends that we have written a book … about how government can better accomplish what it sets out to do, the reaction is often horror. “I don’t want to make government work better, I want it to go away” … This way of thinking is deeply misguided. … This is not to disparage the argument that government is too large, for which the case is strong. But holding government in sneering contempt is a misinformed corruption of that sentiment.
As Dawkins pointed out in the Selfish Gene, coordination works best when the only way out is shared. If any of the cells could get away without coordinating with the rest of the body and still survive, the incentive for coordination would erode. Sci-fi concepts involving cloning are now popping into my mind. Thanks.
Businesses that fail to coordinate well often close their doors (in a capitalist system at least). Governments that fail to coordinate well stop... occasionally.
The $50k figure includes state & local, so I think your figure more or less confirms my figure.I agree. It's hard to believe, but there it is. Total government (state, local & federal) spending is somewhere near the size of the entire US economy in 1980.I appreciate your example of Switzerland. It's a great example of how government services should be much more effective & less expensive.If you respond, please try to be more civil. I think we more or less agree, but you seem angry.My basic point is that most of the time, the proposals I see about actual government activity involve spending another $1,000 per household & spending that $1,000 really well. Instead, I'd like to see the government do the things that Switzerland does for the same amount of resources, which generally means the government would be smaller.Is there a point where you would find my skepticism reasonable? Considering what we get from government, would $60,000/household be too much? $70,000? If we weren't boiling frogs here, I would think you'd be pretty discouraged even by your $32,000 figure. Surely there is some level, though, where you would accept the assertion that this government needs to show that it can be responsible before it goes tossing off new ideas.
"Figuring out and constantly renegotiating who does what and where the boundaries lie/should lie is how rational/empirical governance should work; we should have “empirical policymaking” wherever possible."
To some extent, federalism provides the needed laboratory environment. If you can make something work in one state, you have some basis (not necessarily a bullet-proof one, though) for arguing that it might work on a larger scale.
Governance is easy - good governance is hard, which is why we rarely see much of it.
I am an anarcho-libertarian, but have changed several times between that and minarchist libertarian. The key difference is an empirical matter and my evaluation/guesstimate has changed over time.
The justification for minimal government amounts to a reduction in transaction costs (economic, social, and physical risks) over having to buy or self-provide the necessary services (courts, police, military defense, roads, etc) separately. One of the main differentiations between minarchists and anarchists is whether the sum of the transaction costs is higher or lower than the costs and risks of keeping the government minimal and of failing to keep the government from growing.
Considering the current condition of the world, the cost of government growth is much, much higher than any possible transaction costs to buying and self-providing the services I want from the government, hence I am an anarcho-libertarian.
The thing the literature of decline all seemed to leave out is that Americans are really good at working around the stupid laws and regulations and adapting our actions to the problems. The reason I don't think this is necessarily going to keep working is the incredible growth of government over the past couple of decades - it was bad enough in the 1970s, but since the mid-1990s it has really taken off. And directly reduces the flexibility of the economy.
Did that South Korean actually go over to live in North Korea? I doubt it. I think many North Koreans would go south of the border if they had the chance. When it comes to "voting with their feet", freedom sells itself.
it seems to me that coordination is hard when you continually take resources from some subset and use it for things that subset vehemently disagrees with. coordination is easier among homogenous groups. therefore balkanization and competition among more smaller governments is highly desirable.
Poverty can be good for the spirit at least in the sense that abundance robs you of the factors that drive innovation. I recall some engineer saying that a lack of money and resources forces you to think differently and come up with novel solutions. So don't fund the struggling AI developers lest they lose their innovative edge! Just kidding. Give them all your money, NOW.
Yes, the so-called "natural monopolies" are where government has many legitimate roles.
jonathan: "Certain projects in response to the Depression – though of course not the overall response to it. .... You got troupes of actors putting on plays or bunches of workers cutting firebreaks."
I see that you're still under a certain impression of how New Deal deficit spending actually proceeded, as if it were mostly make-work. In fact, the overwhelming bulk of it went to infrastructure (roads and the like) with both immediate and enduring use-value. How can you judge the value of "the overall response" if you don't even know what that was?
kebco, $50K is about the average household income in the U.S. Do you honestly think that deficit spending is approaching that number? On the federal side (by far the largest portion), Obama proposes $3.8T for 2010. The U.S. now has about 110M households. Need help with the math? That's about $32K per household. And because of progressive taxation, your average household is not paying that much.
"Clearly government should be able to accomplish everything most of us would want it to, including many progressive services, for much less than this."
As, for example, the European experience with healthcare clearly shows: the Swiss have the system most private-sector involvement, but almost the highest per capita costs in Europe. (Highest: Luxembourg, a very rich country even by Swiss standards.) But the Swiss government-mandated system is still cheaper than ours by a wide margin. So clearly we should be in favor of European style improvements regarding the governing of health services. But, uh-oh, trying anything European (even Swiss-style, like Obamacare) would require (*shudder*) more government. And that defies your <del>dogma</del> "heuristic" of refusing more government at all costs.
The Axiomatic Libertarian: "Even good government is bad government, because it might persuade people that government can be good, which inevitably leads to more government, which is inevitably bad." Or as Reagan had it, at one point: a national health care plan could lead to Soviet America, so it's not worth the risk. What's happened since he said that is that Europe has beaten the U.S. handily in keeping health care costs down, while the Soviet Union has fallen. It would seem that the Road to Serfdom has more than a few forks.
Libertarians may object on the basis of freedom, but selling freedom - or even wealth - to a non-libertarian is another matter.
In the nineties I met South Korean students who believed that North Korea was morally superior to South Korea and that the two Koreas should be unified under the North Korean government. One South Korean student told me that poverty was good for the spirit, and that North Korea provided this needed factor.
I did not know how to reply, and didn't reply. I simply listened and was horrified.
Coordination is one of the government's problems, but it's not the only one, and there are other grounds for a libertarian to object to government on principle. To take an extreme example, I doubt very much that coordination was the problem in 1984. Abuse of power is something that doesn't go away as coordination tech improves.
As Dawkins pointed out in the Selfish Gene, coordination works best when the only way out is shared. If any of the cells could get away without coordinating with the rest of the body and still survive, the incentive for coordination would erode. Sci-fi concepts involving cloning are now popping into my mind. Thanks.
The problems with government are regulatory capture and elite capture.
The rest of us are correct to view government as worthless.
Businesses that fail to coordinate well often close their doors (in a capitalist system at least). Governments that fail to coordinate well stop... occasionally.
The $50k figure includes state & local, so I think your figure more or less confirms my figure.I agree. It's hard to believe, but there it is. Total government (state, local & federal) spending is somewhere near the size of the entire US economy in 1980.I appreciate your example of Switzerland. It's a great example of how government services should be much more effective & less expensive.If you respond, please try to be more civil. I think we more or less agree, but you seem angry.My basic point is that most of the time, the proposals I see about actual government activity involve spending another $1,000 per household & spending that $1,000 really well. Instead, I'd like to see the government do the things that Switzerland does for the same amount of resources, which generally means the government would be smaller.Is there a point where you would find my skepticism reasonable? Considering what we get from government, would $60,000/household be too much? $70,000? If we weren't boiling frogs here, I would think you'd be pretty discouraged even by your $32,000 figure. Surely there is some level, though, where you would accept the assertion that this government needs to show that it can be responsible before it goes tossing off new ideas.
"Figuring out and constantly renegotiating who does what and where the boundaries lie/should lie is how rational/empirical governance should work; we should have “empirical policymaking” wherever possible."
To some extent, federalism provides the needed laboratory environment. If you can make something work in one state, you have some basis (not necessarily a bullet-proof one, though) for arguing that it might work on a larger scale.
what a constraint!!!!!
I should have pointed out "the pragmatic justification" above. I am a consequentialist libertarian.
Governance is easy - good governance is hard, which is why we rarely see much of it.
I am an anarcho-libertarian, but have changed several times between that and minarchist libertarian. The key difference is an empirical matter and my evaluation/guesstimate has changed over time.
The justification for minimal government amounts to a reduction in transaction costs (economic, social, and physical risks) over having to buy or self-provide the necessary services (courts, police, military defense, roads, etc) separately. One of the main differentiations between minarchists and anarchists is whether the sum of the transaction costs is higher or lower than the costs and risks of keeping the government minimal and of failing to keep the government from growing.
Considering the current condition of the world, the cost of government growth is much, much higher than any possible transaction costs to buying and self-providing the services I want from the government, hence I am an anarcho-libertarian.
The thing the literature of decline all seemed to leave out is that Americans are really good at working around the stupid laws and regulations and adapting our actions to the problems. The reason I don't think this is necessarily going to keep working is the incredible growth of government over the past couple of decades - it was bad enough in the 1970s, but since the mid-1990s it has really taken off. And directly reduces the flexibility of the economy.
Did that South Korean actually go over to live in North Korea? I doubt it. I think many North Koreans would go south of the border if they had the chance. When it comes to "voting with their feet", freedom sells itself.
it seems to me that coordination is hard when you continually take resources from some subset and use it for things that subset vehemently disagrees with. coordination is easier among homogenous groups. therefore balkanization and competition among more smaller governments is highly desirable.
A human body coordinates 10 trillion cells. It seems as though coordination gets easier if all the agents concerned are clones of each other.
Poverty can be good for the spirit at least in the sense that abundance robs you of the factors that drive innovation. I recall some engineer saying that a lack of money and resources forces you to think differently and come up with novel solutions. So don't fund the struggling AI developers lest they lose their innovative edge! Just kidding. Give them all your money, NOW.
Yes, the so-called "natural monopolies" are where government has many legitimate roles.
jonathan: "Certain projects in response to the Depression – though of course not the overall response to it. .... You got troupes of actors putting on plays or bunches of workers cutting firebreaks."
I see that you're still under a certain impression of how New Deal deficit spending actually proceeded, as if it were mostly make-work. In fact, the overwhelming bulk of it went to infrastructure (roads and the like) with both immediate and enduring use-value. How can you judge the value of "the overall response" if you don't even know what that was?
kebco, $50K is about the average household income in the U.S. Do you honestly think that deficit spending is approaching that number? On the federal side (by far the largest portion), Obama proposes $3.8T for 2010. The U.S. now has about 110M households. Need help with the math? That's about $32K per household. And because of progressive taxation, your average household is not paying that much.
"Clearly government should be able to accomplish everything most of us would want it to, including many progressive services, for much less than this."
As, for example, the European experience with healthcare clearly shows: the Swiss have the system most private-sector involvement, but almost the highest per capita costs in Europe. (Highest: Luxembourg, a very rich country even by Swiss standards.) But the Swiss government-mandated system is still cheaper than ours by a wide margin. So clearly we should be in favor of European style improvements regarding the governing of health services. But, uh-oh, trying anything European (even Swiss-style, like Obamacare) would require (*shudder*) more government. And that defies your <del>dogma</del> "heuristic" of refusing more government at all costs.
The Axiomatic Libertarian: "Even good government is bad government, because it might persuade people that government can be good, which inevitably leads to more government, which is inevitably bad." Or as Reagan had it, at one point: a national health care plan could lead to Soviet America, so it's not worth the risk. What's happened since he said that is that Europe has beaten the U.S. handily in keeping health care costs down, while the Soviet Union has fallen. It would seem that the Road to Serfdom has more than a few forks.
Libertarians may object on the basis of freedom, but selling freedom - or even wealth - to a non-libertarian is another matter.
In the nineties I met South Korean students who believed that North Korea was morally superior to South Korea and that the two Koreas should be unified under the North Korean government. One South Korean student told me that poverty was good for the spirit, and that North Korea provided this needed factor.
I did not know how to reply, and didn't reply. I simply listened and was horrified.
Coordination is one of the government's problems, but it's not the only one, and there are other grounds for a libertarian to object to government on principle. To take an extreme example, I doubt very much that coordination was the problem in 1984. Abuse of power is something that doesn't go away as coordination tech improves.