Really good essay. I'm tired of statists assuming that markets are flawed but government interventions work as planned. As you point out, it's even worse than poor correction of market "failures"; governments frequently increase externalities. I'm current at a conference on beneficial artificial intelligence and seeing the same shortsighted thinking when it comes to AI regulation. Fortunately, there are a fair enough of us who point out the problems with these bureaucratic approaches.
It's true that governments don't always solve market failures. The market doesn't always solve market failures either. But then who should? Couldn't we argue that even if governments don't always solve market failures, they are still the best positioned authority to do so? (And sometimes do, as in the case of The Clean Air Act!)
More than not solving market failures, governments often make them worse. The state of West Virginia is well positioned to solve the market failure of coal production but it will not do so because it goes against the interests of the politicians and bureaucrats running the state.
In cases where governments exacerbate market failures, we'd rather let the market do its best.
The conclusion I want to uphold here is not about who we should defer to to solve market failures but what we need to solve them. Deciding that govt is the best positioned authority and identifying the market failures they could fix is not sufficient. Fixing market failures requires fixing government incentives.
Right, but you are using one specific case in which the state is failing to regulate coal production as your case study. Which totally makes sense for the sake of an essay, I often do the same thing. But you could make the exact opposite case by choosing to use one specific case in which the state has succeeded correcting a market failure. For example: https://www.healthyrich.co/p/ozone-layer
Also I'm curious to know how you would fix government incentives? (Maybe that's a post for another day haha!)
For every one case of market failure that the government corrects, we can find many more cases of supposed market failure that the government causes.
At least 10x more. And likely closer to 100x.
All of the cost of healthcare, e.g.
Other than grazing cows and clean water and air, I challenge you to find 5 or 10 more success stories for government intervention (only partial credit for mandatory information disclosure; some of these I will agree are indeed good, and even where I disagree the harm is rarely severe).
And remember they must be market failures, not problems caused by government in the first place addressed by other government actions.
Yes, I think so. Existence proof in transition from monarchy to democracy. Although perhaps starting new governments rather than fixing old ones is where most of the progress happens.
But the pollution case is just a demonstration of how difficult it is to maximize long-term welfare at the cost of short-term interests. The market obviously isn't going to do that, at least not very well and consistently, because that's not what this social technology is supposed to do, so you need the other proven social technology, which is government, but because government is made up of people, be they politicians, voters, activists, and others, this is also difficult.
However, the history of the carbon tax, or the lack thereof, is an example of how governments can work around almost impossible constraints to maximize long-term welfare. What do I mean? A carbon tax would have to be huge if it were to take into account all the future risks of pollution and climate change, and that would have been both politically impossible and economically damaging. So instead of taking on this Quixotic fight, governments just subsidized low carbon technology like solar and it worked. Solar energy is now cheap even without subsidies, and is being built in China, Europe and the US at tremendous speed. Same thing happened with electric cars. Governments subsidized these technologies, which in the beginning had zero chance of competing in the market, and now thanks to scale and improvements in the manufacturing process and other things, these technologies have a great chance of beating polluting technologies in the market.
You also cite housing regulation and immigration restrictions, and leaving aside whether there are good arguments for these things, the fact is that these things are caused by people being naturally tribal, territorial and particularistic, not by governments somehow imposing alien attitudes on people. In fact, what we often see is that governments play the role of moderating these instincts. You can see this now in California, where the state government, realizing what a giant problem the housing shortage has become for the state's economy, will now begin forcing localities to allow more housing. This is a classic example of central government or more central government increasing freedom by crushing petty tyrants.
“ Deciding that govt is the best positioned authority and identifying the market failures they could fix is not sufficient. Fixing market failures requires fixing government incentives.”
This is an excellent point. But of course there are still more points beyond that. EVEN ASSUMING the best intentions AND proper incentives for the politicians, there are still at least:
- the Hayekian knowledge problem
- the “law” of unintended consequences
- the reality that people will try - and usually succeed - to game whatever system results from the interventions.
"Couldn't we argue that", you could, the problem is people don't.
We don't normally argue about if the government is the best placed to solve problems, with voices on both sides, evidence for and against, pros and cons enumerated and weighed. Far too often the fact that governments (say they) intend to fix market failures is taken as all you need to know.
I took Melei's comments literally, i.e. don't "endorse" the idea of market failure, but no more no less. He didn't say "don't acknowledge" (I assume from the translation). I initially thought he meant to treat it as a necessary evil.
Also, I highly recommend you do a little digging into what these orgs classify as "fossil fuel subsidies". Just off the top they obviously don't include the special taxes and regs energy companies must comply with, but 'use of depreciation on taxes' is included in the list of subsidies.
I don't think the case I make in this post relies on either of these though.
I'm not trying to make a good vs evil judgement on market failures or on Milei. Instead I argue that the binding constraint on solving market failures is apathy and interference from governments. The standard idea of market failure obscures this.
That's one specific case in a basket of cases that applies to multiple instances of government regulation gone wrong.
Anti-trust during Standard Oil created cartelization. The EPA's relationship with multiple oil and gas related businesses. The FDA's relationship with multiple food companies (and the toxic foods they let slip by).
I might write a paper and cite nearly a thousand papers on government created failures.
On god, I feel like "market failures" and "negative externalities" is the anti-market bias pareto strategy--that is, people find the 20% that is imperfect about markets to make up 80% of all anti-market arguments.
The anti-market bias was (obviously) there first and "market failure" is just a way to justify all other anti-market views. No bueno!
1). Jawboning. Most people, including owners of coal companies, like clean air.
2). Instead of unfunded mandates, maybe spend government money to fix externalities. This allows for an honest political debate concerning how much clean air we want.
3). Wealthier societies enjoy buying cleaner air.
4). Don’t get married to an expert analysis that an externality exists. We must then still balance interest.
5). Don’t be impatient. Innovation and invention alleviate some problems.
6). Rewards, both private and government funded, for innovation. These minimize externalities and have fewer public choice problems.
Anyone who is not willing to reckon with 'Government Failure' in the same way is simply an apologist for special interests—even, and maybe especially, if they think they're not.
The fun is that we have to consider all of these facts and incentives when trying to think about policy in a rigorous way. A good bit of differentiation on complex topics is just around what kinds of risks you want [others] to take. I am not always less worried about 'Market Failure' than 'Government Failure', but today on most issues I am.
This long-winded libertarian rant against the very idea of market failure is just more tedious ideological posturing detached from reality. As Habermas would point out, it stems from a distorted communication environment where the legitimating "liberal" myths of pure market efficiency have become reified and shielded from critique.
Piketty and others are attempting to inject some reason into this systematically skewed discourse by empirically demonstrating how unrestrained market forces inevitably lead to socially destructive concentrations of power and wealth (hello, climate crisis!). But instead of engaging substantively, this diatribe just regurgitates the tired old scripts about gov't failure as if that's some checkmate argument.
Hello? Recognizing the reality of market failures doesn't negate gov't failures too. The whole point is we need pragmatic, balanced policies that harness markets while mitigating their pernicious externalities through democratic governance. This bad-faith framing of an all-or-nothing choice is just Bourdieu's theory of symbolic violence in action - using supposedly "objective" economic theory to legitimize the perpetuation of capitalist class interests.
As Jeffrey Friedman details, this libertarian ideology exists primarily as a blank slate for the wealthy to project their own interests, not a coherent ethical framework. It fundamentally cannot grapple with the reality of market failures precisely because those serve the interests of entrenched capital holders.
So please, spare us the disingenuous hand-wringing about gov't imperfections and join us in the actual work of building inclusive, accountable institutions that can intelligently counter-balance market pathologies when needed. Or just admit you're simply shilling for billionaire self-interest - at least that's an honest ideological stance.
I can't really see the author's writings as a rant nor diatribe. His writings are important for us people in third-world countries who need those pragmatic things but are testing grounds for what are actually pragmatic. Government failures are just called corruption, but politicians and government employees are rarely accountable. Whatever rich company there is can easily be forced into submission by the government, e.g. a decades-long journalism and TV conglomerate was shut down by a local President at a whim. After that, it was the first time I've ever seen Chinese-style leftists and American-style liberals wish for a decrease in government power.
“Governments don’t automatically care about market failure!” I cry out against the people who are pushing for the government to tackle known market failures
"Europe, China, and the US subsidize their fossil fuel industries."
In this otherwise really good piece the author propagates this false leftist trope
I won’t speak to the Europe part, since I’m not familiar with the details (though I strongly suspect it is quite similar). But the overwhelming amount of so-called “subsidies” for the U.S. fossil fuel industries that are ever cited is the tax code allowing oil and gas depletion allowances.
Sorry, but calling such depletion allowance "subsidies" is simply leftist bullshit.
The depletion allowance is a standard cost-recovery mechanism, similar to depreciation deductions available to other industries. It allows companies to account for the declining value of their reserves over time, just as businesses in other sectors depreciate assets like equipment or buildings.
If you sell some of the gold in your vault inside a building you own, the value of your property - land, vault, gold - has been reduced by the sale of the gold. Your assets are now worth less than before. Recognizing that is all that is going on here.
In fact in the U.S., such depreciation allowances are if anything *less* generous than the current tax code that allows you to immediately expense capital investments using bonus depreciation or Section 179 expensing, often allowing for 100% write-offs in the year of purchase. By contrast, oil and gas depletion deductions are spread out over time, making them less favorable than these immediate expensing options available to other industries.
But other-than-Marxists don't seriously claim that allowing depreciation of some sort for capital expenses is "subsidizing" all industry.
And even if you are a leftist who wants tons of money in government coffers to redistribute and hand out to “the more ‘deserving'” and to your leftist cronies, it would indeed be very bad public policy to eliminate depreciation laws (in the name of eliminating “subsidies”) and thereby harm investment.
Leftists who claim that oil and gas depletion allowances are a *subsidy* to fossil fuel companies either misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent basic tax principles.
But in your discussion of the danger of government intervention to address market "imperfection", IMO you miss the related even bigger issue.
The biggest reason why Milei is correct to say "Don't endorse the idea of market failure." is captured pretty well in the well known saying that economists have predicted 12 of the last 3 recessions.
It's not that market failures don't exist.
It's not even that government intervention isn't sometimes appropriate to address market failures
And it's not even the public choice problem that the actual politicians supposedly addressing market failures face incentives causing them frequently to do harm rather than good with their interventions.
It's because leftists cite "market failure" as justification for authoritarian government intervention *way* more than is justified....
...and most often of all for failures CAUSED BY government and government regulation, rather than actual failure of the free market.
And it is the LAST point that is imo the biggest reason that Milei's slogan is fundamentally correct.
This is an excellent point. Governments are poorly incentivized to solve local knowledge problems, and the problems are often difficult enough to solve even with aligned incentives.
That said, I think a big source of the trouble is the mechanism of elections and perhaps voting in general. After all, voters have very little incentive to be well-informed, given that their individual influence is so small. Why would I, as a rational voter, devote hours of my time to understanding complicated political issues just to have a 1/100,000th chance (if that) of influencing the outcome?
However, I think a system such as citizens assemblies or elector juries (https://www.electionbyjury.org/) could work much better at creating sensible regulations. A small number of randomly selected citizens, given time and resources to research and deliberate, could be empowered to either come up with some solution to a market failure or appoint and oversee some official to do so. Obviously there would still be potential for institutional capture, but overall incentives would be far better aligned. Perhaps a high consensus threshold could be required to approve any proposed regulation. If 80% of a panel of 30 or 40 random citizens think it's a good idea after several weekends of research and structured deliberation, it likely is.
"But look at West Virginia in the real world ..............
.................expense of many West Viginians"
Not "government".
Republicans. Conservatives.
You'll point to Manchins and Rockerfeller, and Byrd as counterexamples,...but they were like Bob Dorgan, Nelson from Nebraska....they were GOP basically. Max Bauchus screwed over Obama during Obamacare negotiations.
This is the real world.
Not "Government"..., it's Republicans.
Don't conflate "government" with " "Republicans" using an empirically demonstrable metric of "reality" , since your whole fuckin article depends upon it,and you fucked it up by proving exactly the opposite is true.
If the government is listening to you (or the voting public or whatever) then you can tell them to fix market failures.
If the government isn't listening to you, your criticisms of it don't do much.
Governments sometimes fix market failures and sometimes pass dumb rules.
If we could remove all cases of both government fixing market failures and governments writing dumb laws, then sure that sounds like a reasonable deal.
But if we don't keep reminding the government to fix market failures, we will get just as many dumb laws.
Government interventions into free markets are the CAUSE of the problem far more often than they are the solution.
Government interventions in the name of “market failure” but in truth in service to some other - usually crony, but occasionally just vote-seeking - cause are the CAUSE of so many more problems.
Really good essay. I'm tired of statists assuming that markets are flawed but government interventions work as planned. As you point out, it's even worse than poor correction of market "failures"; governments frequently increase externalities. I'm current at a conference on beneficial artificial intelligence and seeing the same shortsighted thinking when it comes to AI regulation. Fortunately, there are a fair enough of us who point out the problems with these bureaucratic approaches.
Thanks for reading and for the kind comment!
It's true that governments don't always solve market failures. The market doesn't always solve market failures either. But then who should? Couldn't we argue that even if governments don't always solve market failures, they are still the best positioned authority to do so? (And sometimes do, as in the case of The Clean Air Act!)
More than not solving market failures, governments often make them worse. The state of West Virginia is well positioned to solve the market failure of coal production but it will not do so because it goes against the interests of the politicians and bureaucrats running the state.
In cases where governments exacerbate market failures, we'd rather let the market do its best.
The conclusion I want to uphold here is not about who we should defer to to solve market failures but what we need to solve them. Deciding that govt is the best positioned authority and identifying the market failures they could fix is not sufficient. Fixing market failures requires fixing government incentives.
Right, but you are using one specific case in which the state is failing to regulate coal production as your case study. Which totally makes sense for the sake of an essay, I often do the same thing. But you could make the exact opposite case by choosing to use one specific case in which the state has succeeded correcting a market failure. For example: https://www.healthyrich.co/p/ozone-layer
Also I'm curious to know how you would fix government incentives? (Maybe that's a post for another day haha!)
For every one case of market failure that the government corrects, we can find many more cases of supposed market failure that the government causes.
At least 10x more. And likely closer to 100x.
All of the cost of healthcare, e.g.
Other than grazing cows and clean water and air, I challenge you to find 5 or 10 more success stories for government intervention (only partial credit for mandatory information disclosure; some of these I will agree are indeed good, and even where I disagree the harm is rarely severe).
And remember they must be market failures, not problems caused by government in the first place addressed by other government actions.
“Fixing market failures requires fixing government incentives.” — is that even possible ?
Yes, I think so. Existence proof in transition from monarchy to democracy. Although perhaps starting new governments rather than fixing old ones is where most of the progress happens.
Afuera!!
But the pollution case is just a demonstration of how difficult it is to maximize long-term welfare at the cost of short-term interests. The market obviously isn't going to do that, at least not very well and consistently, because that's not what this social technology is supposed to do, so you need the other proven social technology, which is government, but because government is made up of people, be they politicians, voters, activists, and others, this is also difficult.
However, the history of the carbon tax, or the lack thereof, is an example of how governments can work around almost impossible constraints to maximize long-term welfare. What do I mean? A carbon tax would have to be huge if it were to take into account all the future risks of pollution and climate change, and that would have been both politically impossible and economically damaging. So instead of taking on this Quixotic fight, governments just subsidized low carbon technology like solar and it worked. Solar energy is now cheap even without subsidies, and is being built in China, Europe and the US at tremendous speed. Same thing happened with electric cars. Governments subsidized these technologies, which in the beginning had zero chance of competing in the market, and now thanks to scale and improvements in the manufacturing process and other things, these technologies have a great chance of beating polluting technologies in the market.
You also cite housing regulation and immigration restrictions, and leaving aside whether there are good arguments for these things, the fact is that these things are caused by people being naturally tribal, territorial and particularistic, not by governments somehow imposing alien attitudes on people. In fact, what we often see is that governments play the role of moderating these instincts. You can see this now in California, where the state government, realizing what a giant problem the housing shortage has become for the state's economy, will now begin forcing localities to allow more housing. This is a classic example of central government or more central government increasing freedom by crushing petty tyrants.
“ Deciding that govt is the best positioned authority and identifying the market failures they could fix is not sufficient. Fixing market failures requires fixing government incentives.”
This is an excellent point. But of course there are still more points beyond that. EVEN ASSUMING the best intentions AND proper incentives for the politicians, there are still at least:
- the Hayekian knowledge problem
- the “law” of unintended consequences
- the reality that people will try - and usually succeed - to game whatever system results from the interventions.
Etc., etc…
"Couldn't we argue that", you could, the problem is people don't.
We don't normally argue about if the government is the best placed to solve problems, with voices on both sides, evidence for and against, pros and cons enumerated and weighed. Far too often the fact that governments (say they) intend to fix market failures is taken as all you need to know.
I took Melei's comments literally, i.e. don't "endorse" the idea of market failure, but no more no less. He didn't say "don't acknowledge" (I assume from the translation). I initially thought he meant to treat it as a necessary evil.
Also, I highly recommend you do a little digging into what these orgs classify as "fossil fuel subsidies". Just off the top they obviously don't include the special taxes and regs energy companies must comply with, but 'use of depreciation on taxes' is included in the list of subsidies.
Fair enough on both points.
I don't think the case I make in this post relies on either of these though.
I'm not trying to make a good vs evil judgement on market failures or on Milei. Instead I argue that the binding constraint on solving market failures is apathy and interference from governments. The standard idea of market failure obscures this.
Yet another case where I wish I remembered which one is the motte and which is the bailey in order to understand a Max argument *sigh*
I would have "liked" it twice if possible.
That's one specific case in a basket of cases that applies to multiple instances of government regulation gone wrong.
Anti-trust during Standard Oil created cartelization. The EPA's relationship with multiple oil and gas related businesses. The FDA's relationship with multiple food companies (and the toxic foods they let slip by).
I might write a paper and cite nearly a thousand papers on government created failures.
Mises.org, Reason.com, Cato.org, are your friend in the meantime.
On god, I feel like "market failures" and "negative externalities" is the anti-market bias pareto strategy--that is, people find the 20% that is imperfect about markets to make up 80% of all anti-market arguments.
The anti-market bias was (obviously) there first and "market failure" is just a way to justify all other anti-market views. No bueno!
1). Jawboning. Most people, including owners of coal companies, like clean air.
2). Instead of unfunded mandates, maybe spend government money to fix externalities. This allows for an honest political debate concerning how much clean air we want.
3). Wealthier societies enjoy buying cleaner air.
4). Don’t get married to an expert analysis that an externality exists. We must then still balance interest.
5). Don’t be impatient. Innovation and invention alleviate some problems.
6). Rewards, both private and government funded, for innovation. These minimize externalities and have fewer public choice problems.
Anyone who is not willing to reckon with 'Government Failure' in the same way is simply an apologist for special interests—even, and maybe especially, if they think they're not.
The fun is that we have to consider all of these facts and incentives when trying to think about policy in a rigorous way. A good bit of differentiation on complex topics is just around what kinds of risks you want [others] to take. I am not always less worried about 'Market Failure' than 'Government Failure', but today on most issues I am.
Thanks for distilling this so effectively, Max.
This long-winded libertarian rant against the very idea of market failure is just more tedious ideological posturing detached from reality. As Habermas would point out, it stems from a distorted communication environment where the legitimating "liberal" myths of pure market efficiency have become reified and shielded from critique.
Piketty and others are attempting to inject some reason into this systematically skewed discourse by empirically demonstrating how unrestrained market forces inevitably lead to socially destructive concentrations of power and wealth (hello, climate crisis!). But instead of engaging substantively, this diatribe just regurgitates the tired old scripts about gov't failure as if that's some checkmate argument.
Hello? Recognizing the reality of market failures doesn't negate gov't failures too. The whole point is we need pragmatic, balanced policies that harness markets while mitigating their pernicious externalities through democratic governance. This bad-faith framing of an all-or-nothing choice is just Bourdieu's theory of symbolic violence in action - using supposedly "objective" economic theory to legitimize the perpetuation of capitalist class interests.
As Jeffrey Friedman details, this libertarian ideology exists primarily as a blank slate for the wealthy to project their own interests, not a coherent ethical framework. It fundamentally cannot grapple with the reality of market failures precisely because those serve the interests of entrenched capital holders.
So please, spare us the disingenuous hand-wringing about gov't imperfections and join us in the actual work of building inclusive, accountable institutions that can intelligently counter-balance market pathologies when needed. Or just admit you're simply shilling for billionaire self-interest - at least that's an honest ideological stance.
I can't really see the author's writings as a rant nor diatribe. His writings are important for us people in third-world countries who need those pragmatic things but are testing grounds for what are actually pragmatic. Government failures are just called corruption, but politicians and government employees are rarely accountable. Whatever rich company there is can easily be forced into submission by the government, e.g. a decades-long journalism and TV conglomerate was shut down by a local President at a whim. After that, it was the first time I've ever seen Chinese-style leftists and American-style liberals wish for a decrease in government power.
“Governments don’t automatically care about market failure!” I cry out against the people who are pushing for the government to tackle known market failures
"Europe, China, and the US subsidize their fossil fuel industries."
In this otherwise really good piece the author propagates this false leftist trope
I won’t speak to the Europe part, since I’m not familiar with the details (though I strongly suspect it is quite similar). But the overwhelming amount of so-called “subsidies” for the U.S. fossil fuel industries that are ever cited is the tax code allowing oil and gas depletion allowances.
Sorry, but calling such depletion allowance "subsidies" is simply leftist bullshit.
The depletion allowance is a standard cost-recovery mechanism, similar to depreciation deductions available to other industries. It allows companies to account for the declining value of their reserves over time, just as businesses in other sectors depreciate assets like equipment or buildings.
If you sell some of the gold in your vault inside a building you own, the value of your property - land, vault, gold - has been reduced by the sale of the gold. Your assets are now worth less than before. Recognizing that is all that is going on here.
In fact in the U.S., such depreciation allowances are if anything *less* generous than the current tax code that allows you to immediately expense capital investments using bonus depreciation or Section 179 expensing, often allowing for 100% write-offs in the year of purchase. By contrast, oil and gas depletion deductions are spread out over time, making them less favorable than these immediate expensing options available to other industries.
But other-than-Marxists don't seriously claim that allowing depreciation of some sort for capital expenses is "subsidizing" all industry.
And even if you are a leftist who wants tons of money in government coffers to redistribute and hand out to “the more ‘deserving'” and to your leftist cronies, it would indeed be very bad public policy to eliminate depreciation laws (in the name of eliminating “subsidies”) and thereby harm investment.
Leftists who claim that oil and gas depletion allowances are a *subsidy* to fossil fuel companies either misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent basic tax principles.
Nice piece. I agree with most of it.
But in your discussion of the danger of government intervention to address market "imperfection", IMO you miss the related even bigger issue.
The biggest reason why Milei is correct to say "Don't endorse the idea of market failure." is captured pretty well in the well known saying that economists have predicted 12 of the last 3 recessions.
It's not that market failures don't exist.
It's not even that government intervention isn't sometimes appropriate to address market failures
And it's not even the public choice problem that the actual politicians supposedly addressing market failures face incentives causing them frequently to do harm rather than good with their interventions.
It's because leftists cite "market failure" as justification for authoritarian government intervention *way* more than is justified....
...and most often of all for failures CAUSED BY government and government regulation, rather than actual failure of the free market.
And it is the LAST point that is imo the biggest reason that Milei's slogan is fundamentally correct.
This is an excellent point. Governments are poorly incentivized to solve local knowledge problems, and the problems are often difficult enough to solve even with aligned incentives.
That said, I think a big source of the trouble is the mechanism of elections and perhaps voting in general. After all, voters have very little incentive to be well-informed, given that their individual influence is so small. Why would I, as a rational voter, devote hours of my time to understanding complicated political issues just to have a 1/100,000th chance (if that) of influencing the outcome?
However, I think a system such as citizens assemblies or elector juries (https://www.electionbyjury.org/) could work much better at creating sensible regulations. A small number of randomly selected citizens, given time and resources to research and deliberate, could be empowered to either come up with some solution to a market failure or appoint and oversee some official to do so. Obviously there would still be potential for institutional capture, but overall incentives would be far better aligned. Perhaps a high consensus threshold could be required to approve any proposed regulation. If 80% of a panel of 30 or 40 random citizens think it's a good idea after several weekends of research and structured deliberation, it likely is.
"But look at West Virginia in the real world ..............
.................expense of many West Viginians"
Not "government".
Republicans. Conservatives.
You'll point to Manchins and Rockerfeller, and Byrd as counterexamples,...but they were like Bob Dorgan, Nelson from Nebraska....they were GOP basically. Max Bauchus screwed over Obama during Obamacare negotiations.
This is the real world.
Not "Government"..., it's Republicans.
Don't conflate "government" with " "Republicans" using an empirically demonstrable metric of "reality" , since your whole fuckin article depends upon it,and you fucked it up by proving exactly the opposite is true.
If the government is listening to you (or the voting public or whatever) then you can tell them to fix market failures.
If the government isn't listening to you, your criticisms of it don't do much.
Governments sometimes fix market failures and sometimes pass dumb rules.
If we could remove all cases of both government fixing market failures and governments writing dumb laws, then sure that sounds like a reasonable deal.
But if we don't keep reminding the government to fix market failures, we will get just as many dumb laws.
Sorry, but the above is illogic given reality.
Government interventions into free markets are the CAUSE of the problem far more often than they are the solution.
Government interventions in the name of “market failure” but in truth in service to some other - usually crony, but occasionally just vote-seeking - cause are the CAUSE of so many more problems.