Government Is Efficient.

[StrangeLoop]

@bcyclwutztht

@StrangeLoop

Essentially, Stigler has broadened our viewpoint: instead of morally isolating the government as separate from the spontaneous self-ordering of society, the government (its statute laws, etc.) must be understood as the product of rational individuals and must be understood as a social outcome wherein inefficiencies are doomed to perish. Rather than, as Hayek did, view the government as the foundation for a spontaneous order, Stigler is asserting that there is a social continuum: all institutions have arisen by the same actors behaving rationally and self-interestedly.

And he has narrowed our minds. The basis of his argument is a logical fallacy.

(1) If efficiency, then persistence.

(2) Persistence.

(3) Therefore, efficiency.

He’s affirming the consequent. This is incorrect, because while efficiency is a sufficient condition for persistence, persistence can occur with or without efficiency.

You’re oversimplifying the argument. You’re excluding the role of rational individuals who we assume are maximizing their benefits and minimizing their costs; that’s why persistence becomes crucial. This is, essentially, the same argument Austrians assume when they claim that economies, left alone, will become wealth-creating: individual agents will act self-interestedly and will minimize costs when doing so.

@bcyclwutztht

Further, a truly spontaneous order is one which is created, through individual action (to be sure), but without the intention of creating the order or institution. A NON-spontaneous order may also be created through individual action, but is the product NOT of the UNWITTING accretion of individual actions, but the WILLFUL creation of a group of individuals, consciously choosing and creating the institution AS A GROUP and WITH ONE VOICE, at ONE PARTICULAR TIME, and in ONE PARTICULAR PLACE.

When you originally claimed that common law was a spontaneous order, you don’t think that such an adjudication process contradicts your current definitional limitations?

Before even Hayek and Mises, other thinkers were already considering the self-organizational properties of human communities, without such libertarian fault lines. Let me quote John Stuart Mill (who is comparing two philosophical camps, one of which represents thinking akin to Stigler), "To these stand opposed another kind of political reasoners, who are so far from assimilating a form of government to a machine, that they regard it as a sort of spontaneous product, and the science of government as a branch (so to speak) of natural history. According to them, forms of government are not a matter of choice. We must take them, in the main, as we find them. Governments cannot be constructed by premeditated design. They “are not made, but grow.” Our business with them, as with the other facts of the universe, is to acquaint ourselves with their natural properties, and adapt ourselves to them. The fundamental political institutions of a people are considered by this school as a sort of organic growth from the nature and life of that people: a product of their habits, instincts, and unconscious wants and desires, scarcely at all of their deliberate purposes. Their will has had no part in the matter but that of meeting the necessities of the moment by the contrivances of the moment, which contrivances, if in sufficient conformity to the national feelings and character, commonly last, and by successive aggregation constitute a polity, suited to the people who possess it, but which it would be vain to attempt to superduce upon any people whose nature and circumstances had not spontaneously evolved it.

[…]

They do not pretend that mankind have absolutely no range of choice as to the government they will live under, or that a consideration of the consequences which flow from different forms of polity is no element at all in deciding which of them should be preferred."