{"id":909,"date":"2003-05-07T14:54:14","date_gmt":"2003-05-07T22:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=909"},"modified":"2009-02-15T21:54:26","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T05:54:26","slug":"convert-politics-to-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=909","title":{"rendered":"convert politics to economics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=http:\/\/hanson.gmu.edu\/>Robin Hanson<\/a> writes, on the Armchair Economists list:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n Wouldn&#8217;t a privately organized fire department look a lot like a government one, with hoses and fire trucks and all that?  Wouldn&#8217;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&#8217;t complete idiots; they usually do things that seem at least to the untrained eye remotely similar to the way you&#8217;d want to do them to do them right.  (Democracies insist on this.)<\/p>\n<p>And of course you don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>But surely private organizations can anticipate problems, and surely the fact that government responses are remotely similar to best responses doesn&#8217;t settle the question of whether they are in fact better than private remedies.\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robin Hanson writes, on the Armchair Economists list: Wouldn&#8217;t a privately organized fire department look a lot like a government one, with hoses and fire trucks and all that? Wouldn&#8217;t a private school look a lot like a public school, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=909\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2209,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions\/2209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}