Monday, July 21, 2008

Spending someone else's money


http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGMyM2IxYjhlODc3NmUxOGEwNjE1YTNkODRhOGVhYzI=

Milton Friedman argued that government spending will always prove pernicious for the simple but profound reason that "nobody spends somebody else's money as well as he spends his own."  Has Brooks ever refuted Friedman?  No.  He writes instead as if Friedman had simply never existed.  Hayek argued that government intervention in the economy will always prove grossly inefficient because government planners can never acquire all the information they'd need to do a good job of allocating resources.  The price mechanism, Hayek argued—joined by Friedman, and George Stigler, and Gary Becker, and James Buchanan, just to name five scholars whose thought proved impressive enough to win them the Nobel Prize for economics—disperses knowledge throughout the marketplace in a way that government activity simply cannot.  Does David attempt to refute Hayek?  No.  Once again, he simply ignores the man.  

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