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orcanwe

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orcanwe
·قبل 4 سنوات·discuss
If you’re being so cocky, I’m sure you would never type your secrets into any piece of software that auto-updates, right? After all, you’re trusting someone else not to release a software update that leaks your secrets. And I’m sure you do a full audit of the Chrome source code every time a new version is released. And for your locally hosted password manager software too, right?
orcanwe
·قبل 4 سنوات·discuss
And if they’re poorly run, the company goes bankrupt or gets bought out by a stronger company. The government isn’t subject to that kind of check, except in the most catastrophic case.
orcanwe
·قبل 4 سنوات·discuss
Who said anything about people being infallible? Amusing to nitpick market failures when planned economies have all led to mass poverty and famine. And market economies have created, in the last 200 years, unparalleled prosperity.
orcanwe
·قبل 4 سنوات·discuss
You’re assuming an infinite perfectibility of human nature. The problem with government planning is that it’s removed from the best, local information and inherently has broken incentives.

By the best, local information I mean that in the market, the people with the need for the good or service, and the people who bear the cost of providing it, are the people with the best information and also the ones making the decision to purchase and produce and at what price. The market automatically aggregates this information and produces a price level, which creates the incentive to produce and purchase the appropriate amount of something.

By broken incentives I mean the entire body of work that is public choice theory. Don’t think about government agents as benevolent actors. They are on the whole not good or bad, just about as self-interested as anyone else. They don’t make decisions based on what produces the best outcomes for the public. They make decisions based on what advances their own immediate and long term interests as individuals and social groups. Democracy tries to align those but it doesn’t do a very good job since most decisions do not rise to public political issues, the public can only have a limited understanding of, and elections are too blunt an instrument for adjudicating, the propriety of thousands or millions of public sector decisions.