Who'd Bet that the Government Will Get it Right?

Another excellent column by David Henderson at antiwar.com. This time he applies the economic thinking of Milton and David Friedman to provide an additional argument against an interventionist foreign policy. The argument, Henderson writes, is this: "Because there are costs even of conducting a foreign policy in which the government makes 'correct' decisions, for a government's foreign policy to be, on net, stabilizing, the government must be correct much more often than it's incorrect." How likely is that? Henderson's answer: not very. He then quotes a similar argument from David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. As Friedman the younger points out, however, what looks like a blunder may just be a policy with objectives other than the stated one, such as perpetuating the wealth and power of the policymakers and their "private sector" clients.

The column is definitely worth reading!