James Buchanan says that "the loss of faith in the socialist dream has not, and probably will not, restore faith in laissez-faire. But what are the effective alternatives?"
That gets you thinking. James Buchanan was a Nobelprize winning economist, and economists, I know, love to talk about the "prisoner's dilemma." I've never really understood the significance of this tale. For don't we always know what the prisoner will do? For whom is it a dilemma? In fact why do the economists make so much of this? Very few in the situation described would be facing a dilemma. Most would simply "defect," or betray the other, knowing that from that action they had the most to gain. In any case that explains the "loss of faith in the socialist dream," that's why socialism didn't work, and will never work. For self-interest is still the single greatest motivating force in the world. And that's why, in spite of its obvious imperfections, the free market does work, more or less, because it depends on that self-interest. And the "more or less" explains why the failure of socialism doesn't completely restore our faith in laissea-faire. Self-interest alone is not good enough.
Wouldn't the situation where there is some government, that is our own situation, be an "effective alternative?" For isn't the proper role of government to tame and temper people's self-interest, still the dominant motivating force in the lives of human beings, and thereby make up for the imperfections of the free market by doing so? Why would anyone, having experienced his or her own excesses, and weaknesses, ever think that we could live productively and profitably with our neighbors without a government "regulator" of some sort?
Why, it now seems to me that government may very well be the single greatest creation of mankind. If you don't believe that you need only to look back at man when there wasn't any government, although that's not an easy thing to do, given that early man left almost no traces of his passage on earth other than his bones and some paintings on the walls of caves. But is there anyone among us, even any diehard anti-government libertarian/anarchist who would want to turn the clock back 10,000 years or more ago, before the first bits of our history, before the first governments? I don't think so.
And today, what we see happening in Iraq is no government, and that's why even a bad government, such as that of Mao, Stalin, or Saddam, did and still does have its adherents and defenders. Why can't our leaders understand this, and not be so quick to overthrow a bad government without having a good one waiting in the wings to take its place?
