Whenever there is a desire for “better” goods and services, do you typically expect the best approach to be the support of a monopoly on these goods and services?

Next time, I want a better thief who doesn't make such a mess.

Reagan was absolutely, fundamentally wrong: government is not the problem. Bad government is the problem.

A certain amount of government (and associated redistributive policies) is necessary for a modern, prosperous, high-productivity economy to operate. (The only way to maintain aggregate demand and avoid meltdowns.) All evidence suggests that the proper amount requires taxes in the 30-40% of GDP range–slightly to significantly north of the U.S. at 28%.

For a century we've teetered at the bottom edge of that workable amount. We fell off the edge catastrophically once before, and now we've done it again. In both cases we crashed everybody else, too–even those with responsible levels of government who would have gone along fine except for our irresponsibility.

It's time for libertarians and conservatives to put aside childish things and magical thinking, and contribute creatively within the context of what is actually workable, reasonable, and prosperity-generating in a modern political economy.

The Federalists were dead wrong and the Anti-Federalists were right in all their predictions about how the new Constitutional government would act. So why do we still hold them in such adulation as master architects of fault-proof government? Why does nobody remember their correct opponents?

What do you mean by better government?

Do you want, as Tim suggests: “Obviously, given that the government is going to perform a certain task, we should prefer that it do so more rather than less effectively.” ?

Do you want government to be more effective at enforcing victimless crime laws, tax collection, ridiculous regulations, immigration laws, etc?

If not, then what does “better” government mean to you, and how does that differ from what Horwitz and Munger want?

I agree that the goal is better government and better politicians. The question is how do we get there? Assuming that only politicians can reform the current system, we are forced to start by picking better politicians. Yet I don't have much faith in that approach. I think politicians are hopeless. Maybe a better approach would be to reclaim the lost checks-and-balances from outside the system, by reinforcing civil-society, private agreements, the judiciary etc…as much as possible. It's not as glamorous but I don't see other ways.

Do we know they are below average? The big question seems to be how much of it is institutional, and how much chalked up to “bad people.” I'd bet heavily on the former, since I believe in environmental factors and incentives as a primary cause of human good and bad deeds.