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matt comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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Nothing is often a pretty good alternative. Government action always comes at a cost, even if only the deadweight loss of taxation (keyphrase "public choice" for reasons you might expect the cost to be higher than that). I'm not trying to turn this into a political debate, but you should consider doing nothing not necessarily a bad thing, and what you do not necessarily better.
When I said "better than nothing" I was referring to advice, not the actual actions taken. My background is in economics so I'm quite familiar with both dead-weight loss of taxation and public choice theory, though these days I lean more toward Bryan Caplan's rational irrationality theory of government failure.
I agree that nothing is often a good thing for governments to do, and in many cases that is the advice that Cabinet receives.
Politicians' logic: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”