From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 94 16:21:21 PDT
To: Rachel_P._Kovner@gorgias.ilt.columbia.edu
Subject: Re: Bad govt represents bad people?
In-Reply-To: <1994Aug30.130706.1176995@gorgias.ilt.tc.columbia.edu>
Message-ID: <9408302312.AA14325@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Rachel_P._Kovner@gorgias.ilt.columbia.edu says:
> It was once said that (and I quote -very- loosely) "The price of liberty is
> eternal vigilance", therefore, 'bad government' is probably not a result of
> some kind of evil or malicious people, but just people who do not guard
> their rights.

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.

As just one simple example, take subsidies. If you have a chance of
getting a $1,000,000 subisidy for your company, you can afford,
economically speaking, to spend up to $999,999 on lobbying to get it
and still have a profit on your hands. If, on the other hand, you are
Joe Taxpayer in a nation of 250,000,000 people, you are losing only
$.004 because of the subsidy -- it is not even economically worth your
while to spend a single stamp on trying to stop the subsidy.

For this and a myriad of similar causes, the evolutionary pressure on
governments is always towards evolution in an unsound direction. This
is not because anyone involved is evil but for the same sorts of
reasons that only organisms with healthy drives to reproduce are found
on the planet.

Perry