>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Brad DeLong" <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU>
>
>> >Governors are about governments, which can't be trusted, since they
>> >have their own interests, unlike juries, which dissolve upon
>> >delivering a verdict. Ralph doesn't seem to believe that agents can
>> >be trusted or that it's possible for principals to discipline them.
>> >You could call his POV anarchism, but I suspect there are a lot of
>> >people at George Mason that would agree with him.
>> >
>> >Doug
>>
>> To rely on personal-injury lawsuits as your *only* tool of governing
>> the market seems... absurd... like something that only a
>> narrow-minded and unobservant lawyer could entertain for a second as
>> a desirable mode of social organization.
>>
>> It leads straight to something one might call right-wing corporate
>> libertarianism...
>>
>>
>> Brad DeLong
>
>
>================
>
>You really like strawmen don't you?
This is hardly a straw-man version of Ralph. He's hostile to regulatory agencies because he thinks they inevitably get captured. He prefers lawsuits for just the reason I cited - because juries are self-dissolving bodies. He & his raiders contributed a lot to the political energy behind dereg in the 1970s because of their critiques of the ICC etc. He has a lot in common with the corporate libertarians. It's too bad his early-1960s attack on public housing has disappeared from the web - it was a beaut.
Doug