MCViewPoint

What they overlook is the basic economic concept of rivalrousness. My use of English—a language that isn’t my mother tongue and that I have thereby thoroughly “appropriated”—does in no way prevent another person from using English, or changing English in any which way they prefer (think teenager neologisms). My applying a decades-old recipe for tonight’s dinner in no way strips someone else from the pleasure of using that same recipe.

If all you wield are government solutions, everything looks like a private-sector nail in desperate need of a hammering.

https://mises.org/wire/cultural-appropriation-nontheft-something-no-one-owns

Joakim Book

When I was at the university, I once objected to a classmate’s lazy use of “public goods.” He had used it to favor his policy position, as a shorthand synonym of what’s good for society—only a thinly veiled euphemism for what I want to happen.

“Public goods are things that are nonrivalrous and nonexcludable,” I said, almost sputtering off a nearby economics textbook. “The ones you’re talking about are neither.”

He rolled his eyes in boredom. “Yes, yes, but that’s not what people mean when they say, ‘public goods.’”

Strangely, I think he’s right. These days, the economist’s clear and rather demanding criteria of so-called public goods are largely swept aside in favor of something like “What I think would be good for the public.” And that little linguistic slip opens up a world of economic policymaking from which we still haven’t recovered.

Everything these days are public goods. In a New York Review of Books piece by Helen Epstein we learn that money printing isn’t just important for government spending but “for improvements in health care, education, transportation, the power grid, and other public goods that might foster development.”

To proponents of government services, everything that carries even a whiff of external benefits to someone, somewhere, is therefore transformed into a “public good”—which must be provided by government. We might have excused such convictions, chalking them up to ignorance, if it weren’t for economists at the pinnacle of the profession embracing those views; Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus is a case in point.

We have to dig about three hundred pages into Nordhaus’s book The Spirit of Green before we get an admission that government failures can be worse than the failures that ostensibly run amok in private markets. Otherwise they’re just technocratic solutions: rainbows and unicorns, public goods this, public goods that. Everything is an uncorrected externality—from the keyboards we write on to gas stations, hospitals, landlords, and the English language.

See the rest here

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