Ain't this the truth.
It still, after all these years, amazes me that most of the people who tremble at the "power" of Amazon et al., don't fear the power of government and government-protected entities a whole lot more.
I wasn't interested in Britney Spears, but this long New Yorker article seems--I'm very cautious about taking at face value virtually anything printed in the mass media--to point to some serious problems with the law and practice of conservatorship.
It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out.
Terrific answer--and the answer is "No!"--by Art Carden and the late Steven Horwitz. This, for example, is exactly on target:
Implicit in negative-externality arguments for intervention is the claim that the political process will actually do what economists say it should do. That is, politicians will impose the blackboard solution. However, the public choice5 revolution that began in the 1960s has challenged that assumption by showing how governments also fail. Politicians’ self-interest, combined with the limits to their knowledge, mean that they likely will not and cannot produce the ideal outcome. We are left to ponder which of two imperfect systems will serve us better: the “failed” market or the “failed” political process. We have many reasons to think that markets will outperform government in this regard, even in less-than-perfect conditions. One approach sees every “market failure” as an opportunity for entrepreneurs to solve a problem and discover, through profit and loss, how well they have done. Political processes do not have the requisite incentives and knowledge-conveying processes to do as well.
I well remember the dire forecasts of massive starvation from world population growth.
Is it any wonder that some people are kinda suspicious of similar apocalyptic predictions for manmade global warming?
Tyler Cowen does a nice job reviewing it. Conclusion:
So overall this is not great economics. It is good to see the Biden administration pick up on a few pro-competition issues, but much of the document is not clearly pro-competition either. The reasoning and evidence are pretty much politicized from start to finish.
Not my field, but a seemingly fine analysis from Alan Reynolds.
In the event that a group of U.S. senators cannot agree on committing enough money to a bipartisan infrastructure plan, Democrats are reportedly considering a $6 trillion plan of their own. It would probably be best described as a package full of progressive items wrapped in magical thinking paper.
From Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, titled "How to Lose to China".
Who says Progressives aren't right once in a while?
"The situation provides a perfect example of how government meddling can backfire. Measures sold as easy fixes to social problems, economic discrepancies, or other situations where central planners think it would be better if they—not employers—get to call the shots can end up leading to unintended consequences that set back the very folks they sought to help."