Well well! Robin Hanson’s concept of idea futures is discussed today (though not by that name) in the New York Times: A Market Approach to Politics

Robin Hanson writes, on the Armchair Economists list:

Wouldn’t a privately organized fire department look a lot like a government one, with hoses and fire trucks and all that? Wouldn’t a private school look a lot like a public school, with desks and books and teachers and all that? Yes, of course. Governments aren’t complete idiots; they usually do things that seem at least to the untrained eye remotely similar to the way you’d want to do them to do them right. (Democracies insist on this.)

And of course you don’t want to wait until a fire breaks out to start to organize private responses to a fire. If only governments were able to anticipate problems and build institutions in advance to respond to them, then yes of course government institutions would be much superior in many cases.

But surely private organizations can anticipate problems, and surely the fact that government responses are remotely similar to best responses doesn’t settle the question of whether they are in fact better than private remedies.

G K Chesterton: The Uses of Diversity, 1921

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

Joe Fuhrig – golfer, economist, teacher, swell guy – died suddenly on March 3. His ashes were scattered furtively on a golf course. At the memorial service today, his family may have been taken aback at the size of the crowd.

Two brief articles from New Scientist about external costs of agriculture. Subsidies in the form of cash and irrigation are obvious, but I never thought of the cost of cleaning pesticides etc out of tap water.

I never hear the US debt limit mentioned except in the context of raising it. Why have a limit at all, if whenever it is approached Congress routinely raises it? I notice that it is already higher than the trigger of the “Ultimatum Resolution” that was going around State legislatures a decade ago.

I’m sorry I didn’t record where I got this link to The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp, an article published in 1945 by a British officer who had been a guest of the Reich.

It is thus to be seen that a market came into existence without labor or production. The B.R.C.S. [British Red Cross Society?] may be considered as “Nature” of the text-book, and the articles of trade – food, clothing and cigarettes – as free gifts – land or manna. Despite this, and despite a roughly equal distribution of resources, a market came into spontaneous operation, and prices were fixed by the operation of supply and demand. It is difficult to reconcile this fact with the labor theory of value.

Later: Joshua Burton finds another copy.