When the city council bans liquor sales on Sundays, the Baptists rejoice—it's wrong to drink on the Lord's day. The bootleggers, rejoice, too. It increases the demand for their services.

The Baptists give the politicians cover for doing what the bootleggers want. No politicians says we should ban liquor sales on Sunday in order to enrich the bootleggers who support his campaign. The politician holds up one hand to heaven and talk about his devotion to morality. With the other hand, he collects campaign contributions (or bribes) from the bootleggers.

Yandle points out that virtually every well-intentioned regulation has a bunch of bootleggers along for the ride—special interests who profit from the idealism of the activists and altruists.
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( Read more... )I am working on a long piece about the evolution of my political views from self-righteous natural-rights libertarianism to the more pluralistic, "libertarianism as a preference", consequentialist view it is now. This quote captures one of the key parts of my current views nicely: I believe that incidents like above are the rule, not the exception. That in a democracy, legislation is consistently biased to serve special interests, at a huge cost to everyone else. It's not that I'm against clean air, or all of the other many wonderful things we might like to do with government, but that I think almost anything done by government will be implemented with such waste that it is unlikely to be a net win.

One key element to this view is that it is system-centric not person-centric. I have observed that most people see such problems as being caused by having "the wrong guys" in power. I think this is a fundamental human bias towards seeing problems as human-caused, and that it is deeply wrong in the case of government. (Not that human's can't sometimes affect it, like that SOB GWB). And that bias leads towards us thinking that elections are the answer, vote those bastards out, when really they just give us the illusion of control without changing the system.

Sadly, I believe that the same reasoning that leads to this conclusion also inescapably leads to the conclusion that libertarian reform within current democracies is impossible. If anything, the systemic incentives are even stronger against abandoning central power than they are against implementing efficient central solutions. So, while I applaud the courage and vision of those who(say) think Ron Paul has a chance through the electoral process, I think democracy-supporting libertarians are even more wrong-headed than republicans and democrats. Getting the government to do something right may be hard, but getting it to do nothing at all is even harder.

So I'd be awfully discouraged if it weren't for dynamic geography.