Brilliant from my freshman roommate Robert Waldmann: Robe...

Brilliant from my freshman roommate Robert Waldmann: Robert Waldmann: The Transformation of Left Neoliberalism: "The correct assertion that bureaucrats are too dumb to centrally plan also implies that they are too dumb to design efficient and incentive compatible mechanisms. The correct (and more important) argument that public servants can���t be trusted to be purely public spirited... applies in order of increasing force...

...to a night watchman state which allows people to starve, a public agency... which provides some service, a public agency where lowly paid civil servants negotiate with profit-seeking firms and... ignore any prospect of being hired at much higher salaries... and a Stalinist centrally planned economy.... Inefficiency... in the public sector... is most extreme at the edges where public service meets the profit motive. We should want a small state, but the key is a small surface area not a small volume. Shrinking the state by drilling so there are private sector salients worsens the problem. This wasn���t at all obvious in 1992, but the evidence is now very solid...

#noted