| HN Mirror

> That's not what happened though. I pointed out that bureaucrats aren't prudent when spending other people's money, and that's self-evidently true.

It's also a sweeping generalization, both:

-- as to what counts as a "bureaucrat" (of whom I know more than a few); and

-- as to what counts as "prudent" --- a public servant must take into account more than your, or my, personal preferences.

> you know would not be prudent with other people's money either, or with $1000 you found on the street.

Evidence, please. (I happen to think I'd be prudent in each case.)

> since everyone uses someone else's money less prudently than his own, using someone else's money results in 'waste' compared to using one's own, and therefore, all public spending results in 'waste'.

Another sweeping generalization. It also depends on your definition of waste. Is it waste for "bureaucrats" to spend money on, say, enforcing traffic laws that prevent you from going as fast as you want through a school zone? (Feel free to pick another example; I really don't like the "but think of the children!" argument, or rather, so-called argument.)

> So it's clear that the free market actually is 'always better' in that sense. It's better in all other senses too.

I used to think that way. I assume you know about "negative externalities" [1]. If you remember the days before the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, then recall what the air and water were like in the U.S. when "the free market" allowed businesses to dump their wastes in the air that the rest of us breathe and the water that the rest of us drink.

Some key limiting factors of "the free market":

1. People tend to have tunnel vision --- they want what they want, and they want it now. (This, I suspect, is a trait developed by natural selection [2].)

2. In a so-called free market, we assume that buyers of goods and services will individually make rational choices that, in the long term, will promote the common good. But that assumes two facts not in evidence:

First, it assumes that people will take the time to investigate the choices available to them. That doesn't always happen. For example, I don't know a lot of people who study the terms of click-wrap agreements and decide whether they want to proceed. Most people simply click on "I agree" and hope that they aren't giving away their first-born; they also unconsciously count on the legal system not to enforce terms that are too onerous.

Second, it assumes that people are rational in their choices. That assumption is increasingly being challenged in behavioral economics [3].

> Quote the two assertions I claimed constitute your premise.

Okay --- what you said was this: "But whatever your complaint there is, it's based on the flawed premise [A] that there is some One True Way <X> should be, and [B] that central planning intervention is necessary to make it so." I don't believe either of these things a priori, but neither do I rule out the possibility that in a particular case one or both of them might be true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

[2] http://www.questioningchristian.com/2006/03/good_news_bad_n.... (a self-cite)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus