… is from page 69 of Daniel Farber’s and Philip Frickey’s 1991 book, Law and Public Choice:
[T]he notion of public values is very far indeed from being self-explanatory.
DBx: Yep. Yet if you show me someone who proposes to use state power to significantly override market processes, I’ll show you someone who claims both to know in sufficient detail, first, just what millions of strangers want and, second, how to use state power to satisfy these ‘public values’ – that is, how to deploy threats of coercion (and, sometimes, actual coercion) to bring about this ‘common good’ – in ways that have no or few negative unintended consequences.
In short, if you show me someone who proposes to use state power to significantly override market processes, I’ll show you someone who believes either that social reality is a simple devise with only a handful of mechanical parts connected in obvious and visible ways to each other or that he or she is close to being godlike in access to knowledge, exercise of ability, and excellence of motives.
