Wilfred Dolfsma: Government failure: society, markets, and rules

摘要

Government Failure is a compellation of work from Wilfred Dolfsma on the topics of market and society, government failure, and institutional analysis. It consists of eleven chapters from introduction to conclusion that introduce the concept of government failure and provide applications to policy issues related to intellectual property rights and healthcare. He starts with an outline of the book, and notes several philosophers and economists who have historically addressed the issue of the role of government or government failure. He highlights Hobbes, Macchiavelli, More, Popper, Mill, and Locke on their views of government. He cites Hayek and Mises on their distrust of government and its inability to centrally plan an economy. Dolfsma argues that the role of government is to set the rules, by which we are governed. He suggests economists look beyond public expenditures for examples of government failure. Instead, he proposes that government fails when setting the rules. However, there is no mention of the public choice concept of government failure developed over the last half of the twentieth century including Coase (1964) and Buchanan (1983).