From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 94 05:03:45 PDT
To: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: Bad govt represents bad people?
In-Reply-To: <199408310103.VAA26817@bwh.harvard.edu>
Message-ID: <9408311203.AA14854@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Not to denegrate either of those individuals, but the "original" work
on public choice economics was worth a Nobel Prize some years ago to
Buchannan (sp?). Its only been recently that the ideas have been
popularized by others. The concepts are more or less inherent in the
work of the Austrian school economists as well, so I suppose one
should credit Mises, Hayek, and the rest...

Perry

Adam Shostack says:
> 
> 	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.
>