If you ventured outdoors, you exposed yourself to the risks thereof; since you didn’t expend resources to mitigate certain risks (e.g., robbery), then you acted in an efficient manner. Likewise, the robber (as Becker demonstrated, also can be explained rather easily in a choice-theoretic framework). If you are choosing between an inconvenient legal parking spot or an illegal but convenient spot, it is not necessarily inefficient to choose the illegal option.
Neither do I. I believe we are handicapped in this regard by the State’s monopolization of legal and other services related to conflict resolution. Moral sense plays a large role in how conflicts arise in the first place and how moral conflicts get resolved in a natural order law system is the closest thing we could ever have to an objective morality. Nevertheless, through introspection and discussion with others, I think it is fairly easy to arrive at a basic catalog of some behaviors that are just simply immoral, no matter which way you look at it. Raping a child is immoral, no matter what. I’m not going to say it’s “objectively” or “absolutely” or “necessarily” immoral but I don’t need to. Everyone except sociopaths understands that child rape is immoral. We can tack on murder, torture, and many others quite easily. Some actions - like chattel slavery or ritual human sacrifice - have been accepted by some cultures in the past but are largely rejected by people today. I believe this moral progress, if you will, is ultimately down to a grindingly slow process of evolution of law that is occurring in the larger natural order despite the State, not because of it. I am a long-term optimist in this regard despite being short-term pessimist, at least, for the prospects of moral progress in the West until we have another social cataclysm. Market winners can try to stop the process of evolution as they might but they cannot win. Competition will prevail or we will all be destroyed trying to stop it. Those are the only two possible outcomes.
</rambling rant>
Clayton -
If you believe that certain moral claims are indisputable due to widespread consensus, then shouldn’t you advocate a public sector?
By your reckoning, then, slavery* was efficient… until it wasn’t. The problem with this is that we have no basis then to provide suggestions for improvement to social institutions. We’re just left with a big que sera, sera. By contrast, I believe that slavery is not efficient** and that the abolition of slavery represents genuine moral (legal, social, etc.) progress. Just as the abolitionists were right when they pointed out that slavery was wrong and detrimental to human welfare (and they have been proven right by historical experience), so I believe that anti-statists today are right when we point out that governments have immoral ends, employ immoral means to achieve those ends and are detrimental to human welfare in almost every conceivable way.
As for accounting for the lack of actionable alternatives to government, I think that is a consequence of human nature. I have a whole theory involving primates, alpha males, tribal reproduction and so on. I will grant that you could say, “Governments are efficient given human nature” but only in the same sense that you could say, “The amount of rapes that occur is efficient given human nature”. It might be true but it’s not an argument against opposing the existence of governments. Humans have a definite nature but we are not slaves to our nature (unlike our primate ancestors, we have a frontal lobe 
and this is what law is all about… internalizing the costs of acting out your nature in ways that are to the detriment of your neighbors. Hopefully, law and moral philosophy will one day advance to the point that the costs of attempting to govern others are better internalized on those who try.
Clayton -
*I’m not trying to pull a cheap ad populum here and accuse you of implicitly supporting slavery… just to be clear
**Please note that even if it were efficient, it is still more importantly immoral
Well, note that I am not advocating morality-by-majority… it is possible that we could all be wrong about everything and it is certain that we are all wrong about some things (e.g. government, taxes, war, etc.) But if moral sense evolved like other human cognitive capacities, then we’re most likely right about most things and wrong about some things. A lot of our moral mistakes are only revealed by technological advances. But I think that, despite the presence of “moral noise” around the boundaries, I think we can be pretty sure that we’re not mistaken about some morals (i.e. child rape is wrong) even while offering criticism of other widely held mores (e.g. “you should pay your taxes”).
Clayton -
grunch
The confusion stems from the premise of Stigler and Cowen’s arguments, which is that our system of representative government is an efficient mechanism for expressing the desires of constituent citizen voters (who, presumably, always seek the most economically efficient policies).
Forgive me for saying so, but the idea wrong on both accounts, and is simply ludicrous.
Isn’t your basic argument that everything is efficient?
In that case, overthrowing the government is efficient.
@Nonfederal nonreserve: But only if you succeed. 
I appreciate your acting as devil’s advocate, but if you’re not going to bother playing it fairly, then it gets boring. If we assume the person knows that fatty foods cause weight gain, then we would have to conclude he is insincere in saying he wants to lose weight. The issue here is the assumption: does he know that fatty foods cause weight gain? If he does not, then our conclusion may be wrong.
It’s always tricky to start arguing, “Well, if it is better, why hasn’t it happened?” I may agree that ‘inefficient’ practices don’t tend to last indefinitely, but that doesn’t mean what the state does today or has been doing for 200 years is efficient. Maybe it will be corrected tomorrow, or a hundred years from today. What is the cut-off point at which we can say something has stood the test of time, given that time keeps on moving?
The state is not the marketplace. That’s the point. There is an equilibrating tendency given certain assumptions. If property and contract is respected, money exists as a unit of account, etc., then I expect there to be a tendency towards “equilibrium.” In the political realm, property is not clearly defined, there exists no principal property owner, many goods are not subject to money prices, costs are separated from benefits, etc. Under such assumptions, I expect there to be a tendency towards disorder.
Once again, that’s all entirely normative:
Nope, it’s more so factual. Voters have disincentives to inform themselves of economic policies’ consequences because a) their benefits are concentrated b) their costs dispersed and marginal relative to the costs of removing these policies and c) their votes are of very little significance to the political system, and as such even if they did undergo the costs of educating themselves on the policies, there’s precious little they could do. There is no option of simply not spending a dollar and thus not consuming as there is with the market. There is no “normative” claim in there.
BTW, where does Austrian econ claim people have perfect knowledge (it only argues that the perception of ex ante mutual benefit induces trades and that people act in the expectation that a given means will bring about their end, not that the trade necessarily will be mutually beneficial ex post or that the means are actually conducive to bringing about the end; hence the function of the market in providing a corrective mechanism for such errors)? The whole function of advertising is to alert consumers to possibilities they were hitherto ignorant of… so what it suggests is that the liberty movement needs to better advertise the benefits of removing the state and thus lower the perceived opportunity cost of removing it. It is all a matter of changing perceptions of the means-end fit people have in their mind with regard to the state and therefore preferences.
To reiterate: all you’ve shown is that the opportunity cost of “do nothing” with regard to these policies is lower than “do something” (e.g. lobby for their removal.) It is that action which is more efficient, not the activities of the government. Why the opportunity cost of the former is lower is what the above seeks to address. Witness…
If you ventured outdoors, you exposed yourself to the risks thereof; since you didn’t expend resources to mitigate certain risks (e.g., robbery), then you acted in an efficient manner. Likewise, the robber (as Becker demonstrated, also can be explained rather easily in a choice-theoretic framework). If you are choosing between an inconvenient legal parking spot or an illegal but convenient spot, it is not necessarily inefficient to choose the illegal option.
lol
If you take efficient to be the least-cost alternative, perhaps (because this relies on your prediction actually panning out; incorrect predictions and thus utility losses are certainly possible.) The robber acted in a way conducive to attaining their ends (hence others asked “efficient for whom?”) What this whole argument does not prove is that government provision of a service is a superior alternative in meeting consumer ends to private provision. All it proves is that the perceived opportunity cost (remember, these are subjective too) of removing it is lower than that of not doing so and exceeds any benefits that might accrue from a fully private market order. It certainly lends no support for the notion that the government is better at providing certain goods than the market, which is the argument a statist would want to make when suggesting the government in the market’s stead. They’re not saying people find it too costly to remove the state or X policy, because then they’d be admitting it is inferior in meeting consumer ends and only remains because consumers view it as too cost-prohibitive to do so. Its removal is a transaction cost to be planned around, reduced and overcome.
just my two cents. most of the replies seem to fundamentally misunderstand the argument under consideration.
What this whole argument does not prove is that government provision of a service is a superior alternative in meeting consumer ends to private provision.
that is not at all what the argument is about.
Then what is it about, because it seems like a rather trivial argument as it is.
If we presume that individuals acting in their own self-interest (i.e., in a manner where benefits outweigh costs) produces coordination that generates spontaneous orders (à la Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek), then I don’t believe a clear demarcation between public and private sectors is warranted; that is, the social arrangement as it exists can only be understand through the previously mentioned lens: self-interested individuals coordinating their actions in the pursuit of benefits, creating relationships that produce the social system as we see it. To reject the public sector outright, as an illegitimate child even if formed by a social process of individuals, seems to be ideologically-driven rather than logically necessary.
The claim that government qua public policy is an inefficient monstrosity presupposes omniscience; it’s akin to socialists claiming that workers’ councils are more efficient than hierarchical private management. If your ideology is correct, then our social process would have led to such an efficient outcome. Rational individuals pursuing their own interests have produced what we now see, yet you claim to possess a superior knowledge that is wiser than the dispersed information of social participants? What if income redistribution prevents lower classes from more frequent violent actions (e.g., riots) and hence is efficient in reducing costs? I’m not suggesting that as a true hypothesis, but as a possibility. We should presume ignorance, not omniscience; we should not merely refrain from judging market outcomes, but refrain from judging social outcomes altogether. If alternative, more efficient arrangements are feasible, individuals will tend toward those arrangements (much like goods gravitate to those that value them most).
Who here has claimed that it was not spawned by the social process?
NAZI death camps were spawned by the social process. Certainly not by any God.
DD5, what has been implied is that persistent fixtures of the social process are radically inefficient (e.g., public policy in toto).
Austrians typically assert than only a portion of the social process, the marketplace, generates efficient outcomes persistently. The Stigler critique, on the other hand, applies the principle of rational decisionmaking even further: all social acts are made to generate benefits and all social orders that emerge are, as a result, efficient.
P.S. I mistyped that comment and have since corrected it: I know we all agree that governments are a result of social interaction; my assertion is that society is a continuum of spontaneously-generated order, not a fragmented menagerie where certain outcomes are the result of individuals persistently making inefficient choices.
Rape and murder is efficient to some people. Those are pretty persistent fixtures in the social order. Do yo have a theory about how such action contributes to the total efficient outcome of the spontaneously-generated order?
All that Austrians are saying is that theft, rape, murder,etc… are anti-social behaviors that lead to a net loss in welfare. Not that the rapist is not enjoying the agony of his victim and therefore, it is not “efficient” for the rapist.
Deep thoughts: Whatever is is efficient? If X exists, then X is efficient? And people write books/articles about this?
Z.
Yes. We also have pollution. The optimal amount is clearly not zero. Likewise, diverting resources to exterminating certain social problems (e.g., murder) actually isn’t cost-effective.
z1235, if you don’t believe it is an efficient social arrangement, then you’ll have to revise certain basic assumptions in economics, especially the Austrian sort. Mises asserted that “rational action” is pleonastic–all action is rational insofar as it relies upon a means-end analysis wherein ends are subjective values. If we accept these conditions, then we must presume that people do and will continue to act for the sake of greater satisfaction. If the ex post utility did not mach the ex ante expectation, then rational individuals will surely learn and revise their actions (e.g., if hitting your head didn’t relieve dissatisfaction, it is incredibly unlikely you’ll keep hitting your head throughout the day). Hence, over time, only efficient institutions can persist.
The Austrian commitment to markets (as an efficiency-maximizing arrangement) is based upon a foundation that can be applied to the entire social order.