1994-08-31 - Re: Bad govt represents bad people?

Header Data

From: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
To: perry@imsi.com
Message Hash: 2b9342bfddd8e19a93bf7963d56cde0b87da5d7c4adb209397ad60ec5e7f8625
Message ID: <199408310103.VAA26817@bwh.harvard.edu>
Reply To: <9408302312.AA14325@snark.imsi.com>
UTC Datetime: 1994-08-31 01:42:20 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 30 Aug 94 18:42:20 PDT

Raw message

From: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 94 18:42:20 PDT
To: perry@imsi.com
Subject: Re: Bad govt represents bad people?
In-Reply-To: <9408302312.AA14325@snark.imsi.com>
Message-ID: <199408310103.VAA26817@bwh.harvard.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



	Much of the interesting development of these ideas was done by
Mancur Olsen, in several good books, and was addressed again recently
by Jonathan Rochkind entitled Demosclorosis.  Both authors are worth
checking out.

Adam

Perry wrote:

| Actually, as public choice economic theory has shown, bad government
| tends to be the inevitable result of the evolutionary pressures on
| government and government officials. This is not to say that some
| government programs are not occassionally well run or that some
| government officials are not legitimately "trying their best", but
| that the pressure on the whole system is to go towards maximum
| corruption, just as the evolutionary pressure on organisms is to only
| follow survival-prone strategies.






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