Underestimating long-term consequences of cryptoanarchy

[Steve Schear]

At 18:08 2003-05-12 -0400, John Kelsey wrote:
>At 10:03 AM 5/10/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>[Talking about government-assisted projects and businesses going broke]
>>Which is all evolution in action, except that government should not be in 
>>the construction and business development business. (I would go further 
>>and say that nothing in the U.S. Constitution, which states and 
>>localities are bound by, justifies taking money from citizens to give to 
>>businesses. No matter "how smart an investment" it looks to be. Ditto for 
>>governments running gambling operations, but I digress.)
>
>It's very clear that this is bad policy, though I'm not too sure it's 
>actually unconstitutional.  Didn't the states finance and run some of the 
>early canals?  The big problem is that the state has to have all kinds of 
>coercive powers to do its main jobs, and those powers are awfully handy 
>when the state is trying to protect its state-run businesses from 
>competition, or buy land for its favored new project that the owner 
>doesn't really want to sell, or whatever.  A secondary problem is that 
>there's no limit to how much the business can lose, when it simply can't 
>go broke because the state owns and protects it.  Just look at 
>AMTRAK.  (And as many of us have learned to our cost in the last few 
>years, there's almost no limit other than bankruptcy to how quickly a 
>badly-run business can lose money.)


The Whig Party's platform was called, by Clay, the American System.  Today 
we call it mercantilism.  The Whigs pushed their internal improvements 
agenda (building unneeded and/or grossly overpriced roads, bridges or 
canals supplied by political contributors) across all the states in the 
early 1800s.  Everywhere it was a disaster bankrupting several.  So much so 
that by 1850 all state constitutions banned internal improvement 
activities.  This was the downfall of the Whigs, but many of its leaders 
resurfaced in the Republican party whose first presidential candidate was 
Lincoln.


"A Jobless Recovery is like a Breadless Sandwich."
-- Steve Schear