Talk:Dark Arcadia

Notes

They keep coming to us with questions: "Should we have a tariff?" "Should we have rent control?" We answer, "Should? Economists don't know anything about 'should'; go talk to a philosopher. If you have a tariff, such and such will happen; if you have rent control,..." "No, No," they say. "We don't want to know all that. Is it good or bad?" The economist finally answers as follows:

I have no expertise in good and bad. I can, however, define something called efficiency that has the following characteristics. First, it is an important part of what I suspect most of you mean by "good." Second, economics helps answer the question of whether a change leads to greater efficiency. Third, I cannot think of any alternative measure closer to what you want that also has the second characteristic.

The rest of this chapter will be spent explaining what economists mean by "efficiency." By the end, you should understand why our response to the question "What should we do?" is less than adequate, but substantially better than no answer at all - or the answers given without the use of economics.

- David Friedman, Hidden Order

There are several ways in which it is easy to misinterpret the idea of economic improvement. One is by conclusing that since net benefits are in dollars, "Economics is only about money." Dollars are not what the improvement is but what it is measured in. Money is no more the only thing with value than yardsticks are the only things with length.

- David Friedman, Hidden Order

No, the only situation in which human rights could truly obtain would be one where an independent global judiciary, duly and constitutionally constituted by the sovereign will of all humanity, was able to judge violators who had been arrested by an equally incorruptible international police force.

Since we have considerable difficulty in creating such a state of affairs even in our right, tight, democratic little island, I hardly think the aspiration to such a world government - which, as I say, is implicit in the UN Charter - is worth the paper it was written on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17866473