Video: Privatize Everything

Producing laws is not an easier problem than producing cars or food, so if the government's incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?

That's from the video interview of David Friedman, author, philosopher, and professor at Santa Clara University, from ReasonTv (hat tip: Econolog's Professor David Henderson)

Quote of the Day: Why the Precautionary Principle is a Mistake

Over my lifetime, more still over the past century, the cultural and political institutions of the U.S. have changed substantially, for reasons that have very little to do with immigration. Over the past million years, the climate of the earth has changed radically, time after time, for reasons that have nothing to do with anthropogenic CO2. A rise in sea level of a foot or two would create problems in some parts of the world, but not problems comparable to the effect of half a mile of ice over the present locations of Chicago and London. 

The conservative mistake comes with its own pseudoscientific slogan, "the precautionary principle." It is the rule that no decision should be made unless one can be confident that it will not have substantial bad effects—the lack of any good reason to believe it will have such effects is not enough.

I have long argued that the principle is internally incoherent. The decision to (for example) permit nuclear power could have substantial bad effects. The decision not to permit nuclear power could also have substantial bad effects. If one takes the precautionary principle seriously, one is obligated to neither permit nor forbid nuclear power…

I am not arguing that there is never a good reason to fear change—sometimes a change can be reasonably predicted to have bad consequences. I am arguing that much opposition to change, across a wide range of different topics and disputes, is based on the mistaken assumption that if only that particular change is prevented, the next year, the next decade, perhaps even the next century, will be more or less the same as the present.

That is very unlikely.

This profound insight is from Economic Professor David Friedman on his blog discussing why the political hand waving against change is a mistake.

Quote of the Day: On Public Property: Ask Not, How You Can Pursue What Government Tells You is Good

Under the institutions of public property, property is held (the use of things is controlled) by political institutions and that property is used to achieve the ends of those political institutions.  Since the function of politics is to reduce the diversity of of individual ends to a set of “common ends” (the ends of the majority, the dictator, the party in power, or whatever persons or group is in effective control of the political institutions), public property imposes those “common ends” on the individual.  ”Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”  Ask not, in other words, how you can pursue what you believe is good, but how you can pursue what government tells you is good.

I am sharing Café Hayek’s Professor Don Boudreaux’s David D. Friedman’s quote from the latter’s book (page 6 of of the 1978 Arlington House edition 1973 book, The Machinery of Freedom)