The limits of liberty

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1. vezzy-fnordDec 2015
   Actually my opposition to regulation isn't an ideological default. It's borne out of my analysis weighing endogenous regulation (contracts signed by actors with judicial assistance to enforce them) against exogenous regulations, like that of a collective body of action, i.e. government. There's been a lot written on this subject.

   (To answer your statement, if there is a stalemate such that both government failure and market failure are inevitable, I would prefer the latter, for the simple reason that it entails less layers of indirection and that it doesn't impose any upper bound on heterogeneous consumer preferences.)

   That said, I do have some reading recommendations.

   James M. Buchanan was an eminent economist and political theoretician. I'd recommend his classic The Calculus of Consent co-written with Gordon Tullock, supplemented with his own The Limits of Liberty and Costs and Choice.

   William A. Niskanen wrote Bureaucracy and Representative Government presenting a budget-maximizing theory of government akin to a utility-maximizing theory of an economic actor. Both have limitations, but it's worth reading.

   Don Lavoie wrote great primers such as Rivalry and Central Planning and National Economic Planning: What Is Left? which equally apply to a mixed economy.

   R.H. Coase formulated the Coase theorem in his paper "The Problem of Social Cost," demonstrating how private property rights plus low transaction costs lead to endogenous self-regulatory actions.

   Oliver E. Williamson wrote a technical work on transaction cost economics entitled The Mechanisms of Governance. Another technical writer was Lester G. Telser, particularly his work on the "core theory" related to cooperation, coordination and collusion.

   Essays and papers by Armen A. Alchian, Harold Demsetz and Yale Brozen are also worth examining.

   For a bare introduction, see Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice, or a recent paper using behavioral theory to analyze public policy [1].

   [1] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/...

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2. rayinerSep 2018
   > “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.

   > Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.

   My primary recollection of K-6 was teachers shrieking "Just Say No!" Or policing what we said, what we did off school time, what we wore, implementing zero tolerance policies that punished victims, etc. Teachers don't have much power over adults, so it's easy to forget, but its a field that attracts power tripping authoritarians and conformists.

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