"Government can not efficiently do these things."

My colleague Bill Boyes blogs over on Liberty in response to Megan McArdle's view of the safety standards:

"Government can not efficiently do these things."

I tend to read the evidence on standards in much the same way. That is standards are a cost the are imposed, rather than a response that emerges. As such, this type of tops down approach falls victim to The Fatal Conceit.

I cannot envision a standard writer would would have the knowledge in order to construct a standard to ensure safety. The regulatory burden then, is much greater than the overt cost, it includes the perverse consequences that result from the "crowding out" of decentralized agents and the process that allows solutions not designed to emerge.

But I think Bill's comment leads us to a much bigger concern - the increased scope and scale of government action in civil life. As I suggest, this increased scope and scale does tend to have the effect of eroding the underlying motivation for participants to seek solutions and to internalize the costs of their own behavior. I suppose I am trying to argue that the government efficiently does replace private and civil association as a fully functioning component of society, leaving behind a vacuum to be filled by the centralized power.

To the Higgs perspective, and I agree, that the imposition of standards is perhaps, short of war, the most effective way that the government can increase it power.