Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Sunday, March 18. 2007

Candidate for Best Essay of the Year: What does government care about?

This is a re-post from 2005

Hawthorne, from Anchor Rising blog, with a piece on public policy decision-making entitled: A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning nor Focused on the Public Interest. Quote:

...the question arises regarding whether American citizens should continue to assume the actions of government are well-meaning and focused primarily on the public interest. The answer is no.

Why this claim? Just think about it. Most American citizens have personal stories about how various public sector players (politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other parties with an economic stake in government actions like corporations and unions) act in their own self interest and not in the public interest. In fact, the bottom of this posting contains numerous previous postings which provide examples of such behavior.

The balance of this posting will elaborate on public choice theory, which explains why we cannot assume government is either well-meaning or focused primarily on the public interest. The posting then concludes with specific recommendations in a Call to Action.

Read entire.

Posted by Bird Dog in Best Essays of the Year at 07:32 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

I look forward to reading it. Related: check this out (ht instapundit), from Brussels Journal, "Native Revolt":
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1980

A Declaration of Independence, strongly thought and written.
#1 buddy larsen on 2007-03-18 09:07 (Reply)
Good piece, Buddy. Love the way that EU minister says, essentially, too bad we have to bother with these votes.
#2 BD on 2007-03-18 11:26 (Reply)
Yep--that sentence that caught my eye, too. The referendums are just too unpredictable, said the guy. Wow. This is the real thing, before our very eyes, metamorphing.
********
Ok, joke email just rec/ --

The population of this country is 300 million.
160 million are retired. That leaves 140 million to do the work. There are 85 million in school. Which leaves 55 million to do the work. Of this there are 35 million employed by the federal government. Leaving 15 million to do the work.
2.8 million are in the armed forces Which leaves 12.2 million to do the work. Take from that total the 10.8 million people who work for state and city governments. And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work. At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals. Leaving 1,212,000 to do the work. Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons. That leaves just two people to do the work.

You and me

And there you are,

sitting on your ass,

at your computer, reading jokes.

Nice. Real nice
#3 buddy larsen on 2007-03-19 00:59 (Reply)
LOL Buddy!
#4 Luther McLeod on 2007-03-19 09:44 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.