Russell Roberts has a nice post today about the perplexing romantic ideas of government provision of services that imagine that things are better that way than they would be if private people did them (coerced collective action = Good, private cooperative action = Bad or Unimaginable).

I often express my gratitude that the government didn’t decide early on that it must be the major provider of food, because food is so important (especially to the poor!). If they had, we’d probably be stuck with very few choices of mostly crappy food that would be incredibly expensive to produce and distribute. We’re all very lucky that this didn’t happen; especially the poor.

Now, if we could just get the government out of the education, health care, retirement, transportation, scientific research, art (and many other) businesses we’d be much better off.

Especially the poor.