re: #114 Obdicut

You’re presenting a false dichotomy. Government is always going to be involved in business, in the courts at the very least. So, in any ‘market economy’, a large amount of effort is spent on politics as well, as can easily be seen by our vast lobbying industry.

Well, yes it’s a matter of degree. There must be government, if only to hold people to their contracts and constrain the predators. But there really is a difference, from one society to the next, to how much work goes into work that is not part of a zero-sum contest, and how much goes into various zero-sum contests, including politics.

Our vast lobbying industry is a symptom of having too much riding on politics already. Make politics yet more important, and the marginal utility of further spending on lobbying can only increase.

There can never be a pure market economy, and pure command economies tend to collapse, so much so that their failure may be deemed a feature of human nature. So we have to cut down the middle somewhere. Arguments for steering left often glide right past the costs of lobbying, of all the effort people will put into seeing that the government sees it their way, or they discount the connection between the extent to which things ride on politics and the scale of lobbying effort seen.