Commentary
Let me acknowledge to my libertarian friends that the title of this article makes a debatable concession in that it implies that some government policies are productive. Other readers of this newspaper may find the common libertarian assertion that “Everything the government touches turns to garbage” too cynical.
In this article, I’m not going to make any absolute pronouncements about government competence or lack thereof. I have written before that blind faith in government competence is one of the meta-errors of progressivism. I’ve also written about the inherent deficiencies of the bureaucratic model that dominates American government—defects that Ludwig von Mises so masterfully explained in his 1944 book, “Bureaucracy.”…