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More wisdom from my GMU Econ colleague – and EconLog blogger – Bryan Caplan [2]. Here’s a slice:
Governments rely on indirect coercion because direct coercion seems brutal, unfair, and wrong. If the typical American saw the police bust down a stranger [3]‘s door to arrest an undocumented nanny and the parents who hired her, the typical American would morally side with the strangers. If the typical American saw regulators confiscate a stranger’s expired milk, he’d side with the strangers. If the typical American found out his neighbor narced on a stranger for failing to pay use tax on an out-of-state Internet purchase, he’d damn his neighbor, not the stranger. Why? Because each of these cases activates the common-sense moral intuition [4] that people have a duty to leave nonviolent people alone.
Switching to indirect coercion is a shrewd way for government to sedate our moral intuition.
Here’s Arnold Kling on a paper on poverty by Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan [5].
My GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke points us to a fascinating paper by Samuel DeCanio [6]. And here’s a reaction by Richard Ebeling to Pete’s post [7].
John Stossel explains that [8]
In a free market, a symphony of desires comes together, and they’re met by people who constantly rack their brains to provide better services and invent solutions to our desires.
Shikha Dalmia explains the core problem with Pres. Obama’s “University scorecard” proposal [10].