Bryan Caplan realizes he‘s been too generous to local governments, which really have two jobs:
- Provide K-12 education.
- Regulate construction.
And on reflection, local governments do both of these things terribly.
[…]
Voucher systems are clearly more efficient, yet virtually every locality continues to directly supply K-12 education.
[…]
Local governments’ construction regulations are usually quite strict, especially in the most desirable locations. The resulting draconian system of height limits, zoning, minimum lot sizes, minimum parking requirements, and beyond roughly double the cost of housing and greatly retard national economic growth.
[…]
While voucher systems’ effect on test scores is debatable, the effect on customer satisfaction is not.
[…]
While you can argue that housing regulations curtail negative externalities, the leading examples are parking and traffic. The optimal response to both is not construction regs, but peakload pricing.
[…]
Tiebout implicitly assumes that non-profit competition works the same way as for-profit competition. It doesn’t. If a business owner figures out how to produce the same good at a lower cost, he pockets all of the savings. If the CEO of a publicly-held corporation figures out how to produce the same good at a lower cost, he pockets a lot of the savings. But if the mayor of a city figures out how to deliver the same government services for lower taxes, he pockets none of the savings. That’s how non-profits “work.”
With non-profit incentives, neither the number of local governments nor the ease of exit lead to anything resembling perfectly competitive results. The “competitors” simply have little incentive to do a good job, so they all tend to perform poorly.
Second, voters are deeply irrational, even at the local level. […] Even at the local level, the probability of voter decisiveness is so low that the expected cost of voter irrationality is approximately zero. If you have more than a hundred voters, “Your vote doesn’t count” is basically correct.
In 1982, as a young doctor, I discovered that Medicaid was paying a hospital $192 for the same service they paid me $8 for.
Aha! If only Stalin knew!
I went downtown to see the Man. “Have I got a deal for you! My office visit costs me $26. You pay me $8. Pay me $46, send all the currently $192 visits to me, you win, I win”.
Well, most of you can write the rest. If they did that, my $20 share “leaves the system”. When they pay the hospital $192, and the mayor needs a hire, or a contractor buddy needs a job, all $192 stays in the system.
Undoubtedly, today the figures are vastly higher.
Bryan Caplan, like many libertarian theorist parasites, does not work in the private sector, but in the public sector, supported by the tax payers. So it does make sense that he and his sort aim to protect their iron rice bowl from competitors who might seek such incidentals as education for their children and a nice locality in which to live, without worrying that some Caplanesque character will set up a hog feed lot next door to their church.
And of course, many of the other libertarian theorist parasites are supported in their occupations by plutocrats who get their money’s worth in accolades and lolbertarian papers telling us all that the plutocrats are just so darn awesome, we should be grateful the plutocrats support open borders and tax cuts for the billionaires. A REASONable exchange of services, indeed.
“…all $192 stays in the system.”
Bingo.
It’s property tax time around here. More money for less service is the ruling orthodoxy. A while back I sat through a meeting with one of the more boring people on the planet explaining how they need automatic funding increases each year because of inflation. Now, his and other positions have been eliminated, but a parallel dept. got salary increases that sucked up all the savings and more; even less is done from them compared to earlier because, “well, we have more compliance requirements now.”
There’s efforts to reorganize the sheriff’s dept. because of the usual suck.
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If you have more than a hundred voters, “Your vote doesn’t count” is basically correct.
Then Caplan should advocate organizing ourselves into clans of 100 persons. But he’s a big advocate of immigration and population growth so his kids can have more playmates. Then he wonders why the nice things are going away.
I always say, when I see my local council promoting something useless like ‘climate emergency’ or insisting on LGB-alphabet flags (sorry, I can’t keep up with those twists and turns) on public buildings — my town has at least ten of those for every union flag — that they have two jobs:
Maintain the streets (lighting, fixing the surface and monitoring who digs them up and why) though I’d throw in the parks and any grass verges too;
Empty the dust bins and waste bins (garbage, trash or whatever) and take it all away.
(Note: I would like to add provide libraries but that is pretty low down the list for our councils as they would prefer people to be uneducated, or more accurately, not find things out for themselves.)
For the two ‘must haves’ my household pays a great deal for an awful lot of people who don’t either work on the bins or even know how to fix street lights. But they know how to send memos to each other and attend ‘conferences’ to discuss pressing matters such as bike lanes for the hard of hearing, or something like that.
Oh, I mustn’t forget: They have to employ people to demand we pay more for even fewer services next year. Now that is a growth industry, right there.
I’m glad someone else noticed most Libertarians are in the public sector.
Paul Ryan, former House Speaker, GOP, now lobbyist, leech for life kept a copy of The Fountainhead on his desk.
I think they’re just psychopaths laughing at the rest of us.
Caplan is a Nihilist, but he wants a soft, safe, comfortable life.
People like Caplan make me glad we’re entering the time of troubles. He’ll melt.
“Caplan is a Nihilist…”
Never thought of him that way, but that explains a lot.
At least some of the inefficiency in both building regulation and public schooling is a feature not a bug: given that we can’t just come out and say we are trying to segregate ourselves from negroes and other undesirable people, we instead drive up property value hence property tax artificially so that we can have “good schools”.
That’s a very astute observation, The Scary Black Hundreder. Indeed, just like car loans, house mortgages, the various insurances (especially medical insurance), undischargeable student debt-bondage, and 20% YoY inflation, completely reorganizing the national infrastructure around the suburban principle of cryptic negro self-segregation is a key driver of the GDP, stock market, and economy of America EZ (Economic Zone).
God bless America EZ, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above
God bless America EZ, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans white with foam
God bless America EZ, my home sweet home
God bless America EZ, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans white with foam
God bless America EZ, my home sweet home
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans white with foam
God bless America EZ, my home sweet home
God bless America EZ, my home sweet home
After all, the business of America-EZ is business.
My former comment was less perfect than it might otherwise have been. Let this be its canonical form:
That’s a very astute observation, The Scary Black Hundreder. Indeed, just like car loans, house mortgages, the various insurances (especially medical insurance), undischargeable student debt-bondage, and 20% YoY inflation, completely reorganizing the national infrastructure and civilizational folkways around the essential suburban principle of plausibly deniable negro self-segregation is a key driver of the GDP, stock market, and economy of America-EZ (Economic Zone). After all, the business of America-EZ is business.
God bless America-EZ, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above
God bless America-EZ, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans white with foam
God bless America-EZ, my home sweet home
God bless America-EZ, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans white with foam
God bless America-EZ, my home sweet home
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans white with foam
God bless America-EZ, my home sweet home
God bless America-EZ, my home sweet home
Xin Loi: “In 1982, as a young doctor, I discovered that Medicaid was paying a hospital $192 for the same service they paid me $8 for. … Aha! If only Stalin knew!”
https://i.ibb.co/vVXHBhC/stalin.jpg
Roo_ster: “Bryan Caplan, like many libertarian theorist parasites, does not work in the private sector, but in the public sector, supported by the tax payers. So it does make sense that he and his sort aim to protect their iron rice bowl from competitors who might seek such incidentals as education for their children and a nice locality in which to live, without worrying that some Caplanesque character will set up a hog feed lot next door to their church. … And of course, many of the other libertarian theorist parasites are supported in their occupations by plutocrats who get their money’s worth in accolades and lolbertarian papers telling us all that the plutocrats are just so darn awesome, we should be grateful the plutocrats support open borders and tax cuts for the billionaires. A REASONable exchange of services, indeed.”
Wonderfully acidic prose with a payload of hilarious truth. I like the cut of your jib.