I went off and read the blog for a bit. I concluded that he was a liberal who hadn't found Masonomics.
Then I went back and read Gibson who says:
Based on Wilson’s string of posts, he fits squarely into what Arnold Kling describes as the MIT mantra: markets fail, let’s use government.
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However, a lot of his posts seem blissfully unaware of public choice problems, almost as if there could never be government failure or democratic fundamentalism. I begin to wonder–is Wilson willing to apply his model of human behavior to regulating government failures? Hard to ascertain, which is too bad, because his thinking here seems better adapted to what Kling calls the GMU view of economics: sure, markets fail, but let’s use markets.I'm getting suspicious of whether anyone who argues for government action but isn't familiar with the public choice topic shouldn't just be laughed out of the room.
Gibson, blogging at LaTNB, unsurprisingly suggests that Mr. Wilson think on competitive government.
Kling, having been cited, also pipes up, mostly unimpressed, though fond of at least a few points.
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Speaking of getting laughed out of the room, I had a conversation on Saturday with 3 people that labeled themselves as follows: Liberal, Very Liberal, and Extremely Liberal with the last openly calling himself a socialist.
Here are some of the howlers that were actually spoken:
- No one has a need for more than 1 fork. Any more than 1 fork per person or 1 type of fork is waste.
- The reason people want more than they need is because they live in a capitalist system that convinces them to buy stuff.
- Walmart should be taken from the current owners and given to the workers
- The government should take all our earnings and then redistribute them evenly across the population
...the list goes on. It was painful. These were intelligent people. One was an engineer with a masters degree working on designing nuclear power plants. One is a 3rd year med student. One was pursuing a masters in philosophy.
My final recommendation was that they listen to EconTalk.
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