Of course not. Nobody is saying it should. But the fact is that resources _are_ limited, even for the public sector. All universal health care systems, for example, have to make tough allocation decisions, which means that some people who need operations get them right away, others have to wait for years, and others will never get them. An efficient system, as I see it, does this in a way that maximizes the general health and well being of the population for a given amount of expenditure.
I think that allowing free marketeers to define and hold uncontested the concept of efficiency is a very terrible mistake.
>
> We should not hang ourselves with the rope of "efficiency."
>
We don't have too. We can beat them with it. We just have to redefine it.
> Mat
-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 758 8962 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique