{"id":48872,"date":"2019-10-07T13:22:36","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T18:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=48872"},"modified":"2019-10-07T13:22:40","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T18:22:40","slug":"markets-rely-on-accurate-and-honest-information-but-governments-want-the-opposite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=48872","title":{"rendered":"Markets Rely on Accurate and Honest Information \u2014 But Governments Want the Opposite"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/wire\/markets-rely-accurate-and-honest-information-\u2014-governments-want-opposite\">Markets Rely on Accurate and Honest Information \u2014 But Governments Want the Opposite<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Have you ever worked with people you couldn\u2019t trust to tell you the truth? It isn\u2019t pretty. Without the ability to rely on what you\u2019ve been told (or that you\u2019ve been told everything relevant), effective cooperation at almost every margin of choice is reduced, because its foundation has been undermined. A new episode of&nbsp;<em>To Tell the Truth<\/em>must precede every decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That problem of effective cooperation is exponentially increased when we expand our horizons to the many margins of choice at which people in society, the vast majority of which do not even know each other, interact. In a modern economy, all of us are dependent on multitudes of strangers not just for our prospering, but our survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The reason people don\u2019t always communicate truthfully is that our reason serves our self-interest. Sometimes we perceive a strategic advantage at other people\u2019s expense from intentionally deceiving them. Our words are also often ex post rationalizations to ourselves and others of why whatever we chose or did was a good idea. But that often makes what people say a frail reed to rely upon. And when political power is involved, the incentives for such deception and self-delusion are put on steroids, because the payoffs are far greater when backed by government\u2019s coercive power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As a consequence, accurate information about the issues most important to our ability to co-operate with others is often among the scarcest and most valuable of goods. Making it worse, the unknowably vast amount of potentially useful information\u2014the infinite permutations of who, what, when, where, why and how&#8211;exceeds any individual or group\u2019s ability to comprehend and integrate it. But voluntary market arrangements based on private property rights provide a powerful mechanism of cutting that problem down to manageable size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Markets Rely on Accurate and Honest Information \u2014 But Governments Want the Opposite Have you ever worked with people you couldn\u2019t trust to tell you the truth? It isn\u2019t pretty. Without the ability to rely on what you\u2019ve been told (or that you\u2019ve been told everything relevant), effective cooperation at almost every margin of choice [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[15083,7617,27318,5591],"class_list":["post-48872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-gary-galles","tag-mises-institute","tag-misinformatioin","tag-self-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48873,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48872\/revisions\/48873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}