Political Metrics

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 31 Jul 2011 14:20:06 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Bill St. Clair at The Libertarian Enterprise - a letter I wrote after reading last week's edition.

The back-and-forth between DataPacRac and Paul Bonneau in issue #629 elicted this:

Attempting to use a metric to measure the utility of state action is absurd. Yes, people assign numbers to things they care about, but each of us measures what's important differently. As Mr. Bonneau elucidated, even "lifetime discretionary income" isn't an agreed upon metric. Some things, e.g. liberty, are more important to some people. Bottom line: only the individual actors in each individual transaction are in a place to decide whether that transaction is beneficial to them. Transactions that benefit both parties will be completed. Those that don't won't. Nobody in the city, county, state, or federal government has enough information to do ANYTHING that will benefit anybody but themselves and their buddies. So that's exactly what they do. And why I don't want their decisions to have any effect whatsoever on mine.

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