Serenity in Markets and Government

Arnold Kling refers to Soros’s talk yesterday at Cato

Soros framed the choice as one of believing that markets always work or believing that markets sometimes fail and therefore we need government. Afterwards, a few people said to me that they wanted to intercede with the line "Markets fail. That’s why we need markets."

The Masonomic taxonomy is:

• The Chicago school says markets work so lets use markets
• The Cambridge School says markets fail so lets use government
• The George Mason School says markets fail so lets use markets

I have tried to push the notion that sometimes markets and government simultaneously fail, so lets get drunk. A higher status interpretation might be the serenity view. One of my favorite expressions of it

For every ailment under the sun

There is a remedy, or there is none;

If there be one, try to find it;

If there be none, never mind it

Whether bad things are happening is in-and-of-itself of no consequence. Whether we have the power to make things better, whatever their current state, is everything.