Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
All general remarks on the role of government tend to be wrong much of the time.

This age is an age of difficulties - as probably every age before, too.
You cannot set up a maxim/ideology/rule and expect to be right more than about 60% of the time.

Example (de)regulation:
There's no simple answer. You need to look at the issues on a case-by-case basis and take many, many second order effects into account.
Sometimes you'll end up discovering the need for more regulation, sometimes one for better one, sometimes for less.


There's little hope that governments will be gotten right until people (at least the powerful ones) understand that simple maxims and rules are nonsense.
Simplification allows laymen to discuss things, but applied at actual decision-making it merely means that the decision-maker flips a coin and is essentially ignorant.


The whole small government - big government debate is thus a huge display of ignorance.

Btw, this small government - big government thing is a fixation of the anglophone world, most evidently of the U.S.. It's not among the top 100 memes of many, many developed countries world-wide while Americans appear to even go crazy about it.
Nope. Here is my general simplistic theory. America largely grew to such prominence because after WW2 we developed all the advanced German technology when we gained access to the German Scientific Archives. If it hadn't been for that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. Science is the real creator of wealth and it dosen't care what your politics/or economic philosophy are.