I’m still trying to minimize typing, but since it’s tax season I thought I’d capture two short aphorisms on government:

• “The government performs certain essential functions” is different from “It’s essential for the government to perform certain functions.”

• A “public good” is not simply something that’s good for the public.

I’ve been suffering from mild-to-moderate RSI due to recent job demands, so I’ve been making an effort to type less. Blogging was one of the first things to go. I’ll be back once my hands feel better.

I love The Economist, but even they fuck up from time to time. An article in the current Technology Quarterly really boiled my blood; I wrote a letter in response:

SIR – I was surprised and disappointed by the poor economics in ”Pulling the plug on standby power” (Technology Quarterly, March 11). You argued that “[e]quipment-makers do not have any incentive to use more efficient components, after all, since the cost (in higher power consumption) is borne by their customers.” But this is as absurd as claiming that auto makers have no incentive to make fuel-efficient vehicles because drivers, not manufacturers, bear the cost of petrol. Indeed, the entire article was awash in the principal fallacy of central planners everywhere: “The market has failed; we can fix it.” Thank goodness for the article that followed, in which economic development pioneer Iqbal Quadir noted that “[t]op-down approaches do not work. The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.”

Michael Hartl
Orange, California

I should note that the Quarterly was excellent overall, as usual. In one article they even got right the meaning of the term hacker.

As a kid I was heavily into “Greek mythology”; I was fascinated by the exploits of Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and the rest of the Olympian gods. Of course, I was never tempted actually to believe in them—and neither is anyone else, as far as I can tell. And yet, “Greek mythology” was, once upon a time, a living religion, complete with rituals, sacrifices, priests and priestesses, a holy book, and millions of real believers. Calling it mythology obscures this important fact; I prefer to call it “the religion of the ancient Greeks”.

I happen to have grown up in a highly religious area—Orange County, California—so I have quite a lot of specialized knowledge about the local religion, Christianity. I have a fairly deep understanding of Christianity’s claims, and why those claims are probably false (or at least unsubstantiated). But that knowledge is unnecessary; I am just as confident that Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and any of the many smaller religions are probably wrong—other than the tautology that living religions have adherents, I simply see no essential difference between living religions and dead ones. (I am much more sympathetic now than I was as a kid to why people believe—and, in particular, why they don’t stop believing—but that doesn’t change my underlying conviction that those beliefs are probably wrong.)

There are plenty of sophisticated arguments against religion in general, and the dominant religion in America in particular; some of them might well show up later in this blog. But—and I think I have some good company among the atheist/agnostic types out there—what it really boils down to is that it’s almost painfully obvious that all religions, though not provably false, are about as likely to be true as the religion of the ancient Greeks.

This realization about religion leads to some awkward situations. I know many intelligent, educated, thoughtful people who believe in a religion—not religion as community, or as metaphor, but as literal truth about our actual physical universe—which, as far as I’m concerned, might as well be actual gods living on Mount Olympus. Plenty of people have tried to convert me; I’m usually polite and even a bit coy. How do I tell them that they might as well ask me to worship Zeus or Apollo—that to me, believing in Christianity (or any other religion) is as absurd as believing in Greek mythology?

If any of those people are reading this: now you know.

In the comments to my post on privatizing the USPS, IdahoEv makes a thoughtful analysis to the effect that maybe the USPS monopoly is actually a good thing. I like his arguments, but I think they fail to clear the three hurdles from my previous post. It may be that the USPS reaches some global optimum by using force to exclude competition, but—even discounting the cost of the lost freedom—it’s hard to know a priori; such arguments read more like rationalizations for the status quo. Moreover, a love of such analyses lies at the heart of every good central planner—Markets might be good, they think, but markets are dumb; surely with a little intelligent intervention we can do even better. But, as counterintuitive as it seems, the failure of central planning suggests that you really can’t.

Indeed, the private sector routinely competes successfully with the government even in the face of deeply entrenched, subsidized competition. Private schools exist despite their public counterparts; private security agencies thrive even in the face of police competition; professional mediators and arbitrators ply their trade despite a monopoly court system. The glorious history of black-market postal services (including one run by Lysander Spooner, a hero of libertarians everywhere) and the success of UPS and FedEx suggest that mail is no different. And if private mail delivery does that well against a government monopoly, it’s not too much of a leap to anticipate even greater success in that monopoly’s absence. (Dangerous exercise: apply this argument to schools, protection agencies, and courts.)

When it comes to privatization, what I’m usually worried about is not that we’d be screwing up some beautiful public-goods global optimum, but rather that the government would botch the privatization. Turning the private sector loose on the thorniest problems of our time—security, say, or education, or traffic—could easily lead to disaster if done stupidly.* California’s energy ‘deregulation’ is perhaps the most dramatic recent example of this. But breaking the USPS’s monopoly is so simple that even the government could get it right: Homeowners—you now own your mailboxes!

*I wish that, rather than cockamamie public policy, optimal privatization were the policy wonk’s wet dream—Let’s figure out the best way to auction off the L.A.-area freeway system, and solve the traffic problem once and for all. Now there’s some ‘central planning’ I could get behind.