Richard Taylor tells us why public policies always go wrong…
https://philosophynow.org/issues/37/Uncertainty_and_Public_Policy
Uncertainty and Public Policy
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Science Fan
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Re: Uncertainty and Public Policy
This reminds me of Bastiat's broken-window fallacy, or Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Now, in the context of those works, and many others like them, the argument is that free-markets are natural, and government intervention always unnatural. In other words, it's a purely ideological, ahistorical claim. I'm not sure if that is what the author of this article intended, because the title introduction stated that all public policy fails. That would also include the public policy of doing nothing, and letting so-called free-markets work, which means that, if the claim of the author's is correct, that all free-market solutions also fail.
Of course, free-markets are not natural, they only occur within a governmental framework, and can fail for a wide variety of reasons, including negative externalities, information asymmetries, natural barriers to entry, etc. So, if the author's claim really was to promote the ideological claim that markets are the magical solution to every problem, then we have a great deal of evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, if he really meant it literally, then this would mean doing nothing would also end up being a failed policy. In which case, wouldn't one need to figure out the costs of doing nothing compared to the costs of doing something? And wouldn't that make the author's claim self-refuting?
Of course, free-markets are not natural, they only occur within a governmental framework, and can fail for a wide variety of reasons, including negative externalities, information asymmetries, natural barriers to entry, etc. So, if the author's claim really was to promote the ideological claim that markets are the magical solution to every problem, then we have a great deal of evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, if he really meant it literally, then this would mean doing nothing would also end up being a failed policy. In which case, wouldn't one need to figure out the costs of doing nothing compared to the costs of doing something? And wouldn't that make the author's claim self-refuting?