Americans are losing trust in government by Glenn Harlan Reynolds  in USA Today February 11, 2013

Excerpt:

Nobel-prize-winning economist Ronald Coase made that point in a 1998 interview:

“When I was editor of The Journal of Law and Economics, we published a whole series of studies of regulation and its effects. Almost all the studies — perhaps all the studies — suggested that the results of regulation had been bad, that the prices were higher, that the product was worse adapted to the needs of consumers, than it otherwise would have been. I was not willing to accept the view that all regulation was bound to produce these results. Therefore, what was my explanation for the results we had? I argued that the most probable explanation was that the government now operates on such a massive scale that it had reached the stage of what economists call negative marginal returns. Anything additional it does, it messes up. But that doesn’t mean that if we reduce the size of government considerably, we wouldn’t find then that there were some activities it did well.”

HKO

This is a good retort to the false choice that government is either good or bad.  Like any professional that exerts his expertise in areas foreign to his experience, the effectiveness of the marginal activity is often weak.We would think better of our government if we did not depend on it to solve every problem we encounter, but kept our faith in its ability to accomplish the few things that government is suited to do.

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