Time for Term Limits

JAMES MICHENER recently wrote a charming defense of “knee-jerk liberalism,” meaning sympathy for the underdog. What really distinguishes Left from Right, though, is not compassion, but an unshaken faith that political decisions about who should produce what for whom are superior to individual decisions in the marketplace. Michener thus writes that taxes have been the best money he has spent, because “governments have spent their share of my money more wisely and with better results than I have spent my own funds.” This idea, that those in government offices are wiser and more charitable than ordinary taxpayers, is now the defining core of what passes for “liberalism.”

From the other side of the political spectrum, free-market economist Robert Barro of Harvard recently wrote that it is a bad idea to limit the number of years that congressmen can serve, just asitisa bad idea to limit consumer choice in the marketplace. I rarely disagree with Professor Barro, but do so this time for roughly the same reason I must disagree with Mr. Michener—namely, that any analogy between economic and political choice is fundamentally flawed. Once we understand how markets work, it becomes easy to see why government almost never works.

About the Author

Alan Reynolds

Alan Reynolds, National Review’s economics editor from 1972 to 1976, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Income and Wealth.

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JAMES MICHENER recently wrote a charming defense of “knee-jerk liberalism,” meaning sympathy for the underdog. What really distinguishes Left from Right, though, is not compassion, but an unshaken faith that political decisions about who should produce what for whom are superior to individual decisions in the marketplace. Michener thus writes that taxes have been the best money he has spent, because “governments have spent their share of my money more wisely and with better results than I have spent my own funds.” This idea, that those in government offices are wiser and more charitable than ordinary taxpayers, is now the defining core of what passes for “liberalism.”

From the other side of the political spectrum, free-market economist Robert Barro of Harvard recently wrote that it is a bad idea to limit the number of years that congressmen can serve, just asitisa bad idea to limit consumer choice in the marketplace. I rarely disagree with Professor Barro, but do so this time for roughly the same reason I must disagree with Mr. Michener—namely, that any analogy between economic and political choice is fundamentally flawed. Once we understand how markets work, it becomes easy to see why government almost never works.