Beyond Politics: How to Think about Government Failure

The next Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Randy Simmons on his recently revised and updated book, Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Failure. Serious policy analysis frequently begins with the unspoken assumption that government must fill the gaps in the marketplace. Markets are vastly imperfect and require for their proper functioning the precise, i.e., perfecting, commands of the regulatory state. Not content with this narrative’s iron-clad belief that government rules and regulations live and move in rational operation, having their being serving the commonweal 24/7, Simmons provides a comprehensive way to think about the giant suck of political reality. The truth, Simmons tells us, is that markets are rarely corrected by government diktat (what would that mean, anyway?), but are frequently distorted, minimized, if not corrupted by the machinations of public law. Listen and learn from Randy Simmons.