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We should be careful of falling into the trap of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail." It is the fundamental job of the go
by lkrubner 8y ago
We should be careful of falling into the trap of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail."
It is the fundamental job of the government to provide all of the essential services that a society needs -- healthcare, courts, police, housing, information gathering, transportation, mail, water, electricity, garbage collection, protection of the environment, flood control, social insurance, and so much more -- all human activity.
Some of the decisions regarding these activities should be handled by decentralized decision making. That is, sometimes the government governs best by outsourcing some of the decision making to other entities. But when we speak of the private sector, we are speaking of just one kind of decentralized decision making. It can be very convenient in some cases to make use of the private sector, but we should not make a fetish of it. There are many other forms of decentralized decision making, including all of those forms that have yet to be discovered, but which will be explored in the future. To say that this one particular form of decentralized decision making is the only form which should be allowed is the same kind of mistake that leads some computer programmers to insist that Ruby On Rails is the ultimate solution to all forms of computer programming, and therefore Ruby On Rails should be used to solve all problems of computing. That kind of fetish can only lead to bad results. Wisdom dictates that we examine the issue on a more general and broader level.
- dantheman 8y agoMany would disagree with your definition of the 'fundamental job of the government' Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia provides a relatively good argument for why that would be.
- lkrubner 8y agoI read and enjoyed most of Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia, however I don’t have the energy to post my full response today. I will write up my thoughts at some point and post them to my blog.