I’m reading “Democracy: The God That Failed” right now, by Hoppe… it is pretty interesting and goes to show that history, per se, is almost meaningless, unless illuminated by the light of theory and reason.
Subsidies?
Broken Windows?
They raise the cost of window replacement as far as I can see.
The state certainly reduced the costs of sanitation in the 19th c. through the construction public works, and in ancient Rome through the building of both public aqueducts and bathhouses. Of course, that is by the process of redistributing resources from one area of society to another, but here we still have examples of how the state can reduce costs.
But what is not seen?
you are obviously not thinking of opportunity costs. i.e. about consumers more urgently felt wants that were not being met so that less urgent wants might be services.
Did you bother reading the entire post before coming up with a response I already answered in my post?
I do not see how your statement even makes sense, your first clause is not congruent with the elucidation for opportunity costs are merely the value of the next-best alternative. Due to the fact that I am discussing costs, and since all costs are in essence opportunity costs, it thus follows that by speaking about costs, I am also necessarily speaking about opportunity costs. If you meant something different, please rephrase your sentence so that it is more understandable, for instance: Why am I “obviously not thinking of opportunity costs”?
consumers want bread and milk in whatever relation. government think they are wrong, and force the creation of less bread and more milk. you think the government thereby reduce the cost of milk. make milk cheaper. you then acknowledge that costs are opportunity costs and that you are necessarily talking about them. you seem to miss that the opportunity cost of the extra milk is the lost bread. and from the POV of the consumers they would rather have had the bread than the milk. ergo. the government have made an avoidable cost, real.
Bread, and milk are goods that are both exclusive, and rivalrous as a result they cannot be used in analogy with sanitary systems which are non-rivalrous, and non-excludable up to the point of congestion. Furthermore, the conditions of the cities in which sanitary reform was enacted did not have markets for sanitation, nor was there the institutional capacity for such markets as a result there were no sanitary-prices to even gauge consumer demand through price-levels. In the end, what you have just said, does not even bother to take into account the situation in which sanitary reform was enacted, and it simply ignores the difference between public and private goods thus I reject it.
1)both providing bread and milk and providing sanitation, requires the employment of scarce factors of production which are exclusive and rival.
- Perhaps you should read some Hoppe on the notion of public goods.
p.s. Does your support for monopoly government stem from you fear of an un-derprovision of so called public goods? and do you believe it is legitimate to levy taxes against your neighbours in order that they pay their share for the public good?