WS.... Yeah, you are right. It's not worth getting into a huff over them.
My point was (and I should have been more explicit), from the depression, to the recurrent financial crises of the late C20 there have been infinitely more "market failures" than government failures.
I guess if we removed Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Pinochet etc... as these may be described as individual leadership failures .... government failures may seem rarely as severe, or serious and frequent as market failures. by market I simply refer to financial (banking and currency), economy-wide etc (http://www1.worldbank.org/finance/html/fp-financial_crises_and_financ.html) by government I refer to increased poverty, inequality in capitalist countries, because it is in those countries where "the market" is generally considered/expected to be the final arbiter.
Governments are, at any rate, too diverse a collective to attach any single notion of failure to them as a group- which comes back to your point. if i read it correctly, even if government "worked" they would oppose it on ideological grounds because they are fundamentally opposed to government spending - and not whether government can, actively, and with success operate in the economy.
I have often wanted to calculate the total cost (an impossibility, to be sure) of bailing out banks, corporations and other villains, defaulters etc, during crises in capitalist societies over, say, the C20... to help advance the argument that without direct government capitalism, may be a horrendous failure. But I suppose there really is no issue
I
----- Original Message ---- From: Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Monday, 10 September, 2007 6:43:36 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Market Failure vs Government Failure
Ismail:
>From De Long. An old review, but the claim that market failure is less
damaging than government failure is a laugh -
[WS:] So what is your point? He is arguing against that claim, no?
PS. It is difficult to take the anti-government rants claims of the US political establishments for their face value or even seriously. What they really object to is government social spending, not government per se. What they would really want is welfare state for business, socialism for the wealthy and market capitalism for the rest of the population - but they cannot openly admit it, so instead they use government as the code word. It makes no sense debating these ratfuckers - just ignore them like dog's barking or show them to the door if you are in a position to do so.
Wojtek
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