A Feature, Not A Bug

Privatizing liquor would increase revenue and decrease consumer costs, but it would result in government layoffs:

As I noted in August, privatization advocates also have been known to argue, with a logic familiar to fans and foes of President Obama’s stimulus package, that the business of distributing alcoholic beverages should be designed to maximize jobs—i.e., to be as inefficient as possible.

Why do we have to be ruled by economic ignorami? And why is it that only places like Reason point things like this out? Why can’t the lame-stream media think, just a little, when they report this stuff?

5 thoughts on “A Feature, Not A Bug”

  1. Why can’t the lame-stream media think, just a little, when they report this stuff?

    Because it might harm their Marxist assumptions, obviously.

    But seriously, the WSJ reports economic sanity usually.

  2. If the goal is to maximize jobs regardless of cost, why stop there? For example, you could create a lot of laborer jobs by outlawing machinery like backhoes. Instead of one guy on a backhoe, you could hire about 50 people with shovels to accomplish the same amount of digging. Likewise, outlaw IT equipment and go back to human computers for math calculations, manual bookkeepers for accounting, scribes for writing (typewriters would be too efficient), etc.

  3. …what will become of brilliant ideas like the wine kiosks they just started to roll out?

    I guess that, after being thrown into the Delaware, they would sink to the bottom.

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