Daniel Grow, my records tell me that the only time I've ever written
about "good government" was when I criticized Susan Hogarth's favorite
candidate Michael Munger for saying "I want to restore good government".
The web gives you access to megabytes of my writing: many thousands of
forum postings, hundreds of blog postings, several entire web sites, and
an online book. It's fascinating that, in order to disagree with me,
you have to put in my mouth a noun phrase that I've never uttered except
critically.
The only other time I've glued those two words together was as an
adjectival phrase in an email you saw on PlatCommLP08: "Not having any
systematic mechanism for internalizing externalities -- specifically for
pollution of rivalrous non-excludable resources -- is guaranteed to
encourage and reward wastefulness. The existence of so many bad
government policies does not mean there cannot be good government
policies. The PERC paper I cited earlier describes some amazing
expectation-blasting successes of market-based environmental regulation
in the last few decades . More generally, the wild success of the
American experiment in minarchism and civil liberties (as opposed to
economic liberty) was nearly unfathomable only a century ago, given the
systematic government oppression of entire ethnicities and genders. To
say that we must now give up on the American minarchist experiment is
not only a profound failure of the imagination, but it's close to
historical illiteracy."
My actual positions are available on web pages like these:
http://libertarianmajority.net/what-empirical-evidence-supports-anarchism
http://libertarianmajority.net/what-empirical-evidence-supports-minarchism
http://libertarianmajority.net/do-markets-under-produce-public-goods
http://libertarianmajority.net/can-torts-police-all-negative-externalities
Feel free to disagree with what I actually advocate.
