George Will on the exaggerated importance of government and the political class
An excerpt from George Will’s latest Newsweek article, entitled Pencils and Politics:
Capitalism…is a profit and loss system. Corfam—Du Pont’s fake leather that made awful shoes in the 1960s—and the Edsel quickly vanished. “[T]he post office and ethanol subsidies and agricultural price supports and mediocre public schools live forever.” They are insulated from market forces; they are created, in defiance of those forces, by government, which can disregard prices, which means disregarding the rational allocation of resources. To disrupt markets is to tamper with the unseen source of the harmony that is all around us.
The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation—the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize—is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.
