Why Government Entities Are Far Better Than Rothbard Contended

By -
Bryan Caplan explains. For my money, these are the two most important reasons:
3. Government employees take pride in their work. In many parts of government, workers would feel bad about themselves if they fully exploited the system. This is obvious for teachers, most of whom clearly like children. But even most mailmen seem to care about doing a decent job.

4. Government employees care about their co-workers' esteem. Government employees, like most human beings, don't want people around them to hold them in contempt. As a result, a solid core of motivated government employees can use peer pressure to squeeze effort out of their careerist co-workers. Some professors, for example, love teaching - and therefore look down on professors who teach poorly. Fear of this down-looking impels conformist professors to do a better job.
By the way, Bob Murphy sent me this link as a Christmas present. Thanks Bob: I will find one for you.

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell2:03 PM

    As someone who can add to your criticism of Rothbard, these are my instructions for libertarians who have become enamored with him: take everything he's said and written about history, law, and philosophy and just forget about it. I'm still amazed by how much he distorts reality.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ken B5:04 PM

      LK has a good series of posts on how rothbardians distort the history of banking, particularly in Roman law.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more