ARNOLD KLING ASKS AN INCONVENIENT QUESTION:

Go through a mental list of major government programs, and ask how many of them you would enact today in their current formats.

Social Security? Even if you like the concept, if you had it to do over again you would make it less susceptible to demographic imbalances.

Medicare? Agriculture policy? Energy policy?

If you step back and look at it, the problem of fragile by design that I wrote about concerning Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is widespread in top-down solutions. And yet, like Charlie Brown getting ready to kick a football, we seem to have an infinite capacity to believe that it will be different this time. We think that the next top-down design introduced by government will work fine, it will never degrade, and we won’t find ourselves ten or twenty years down the road wondering how such a mess was created.

Plus, related thoughts on the American welfare state: “Each program was designed. But together they add up to something than no one would have intended–a hodgepodge of subsidies and credits that allow some poor people to fall through the cracks and provide many subsidies to the affluent.”