Government Failure and Wiretaps

At some point, some people argued for unfettered markets. They used economic analysis to argue that markets were a superior method of resource allocation. Then, as economics progressed, it became clear that this must be qualified in many cases (this was probably clear all along to most economists). We started to talk about "market failure" and the need for government intervention.

This pissed off conservatives, so they started grumbling about "government failure." The argument goes, "Sure, markets are imperfect, but the solution is always worse than the problem, because the government is incompetent."

It's a decent point, though of course it's overstated. The government has strengths and weaknesses just like the market. At times I'd prefer an imperfect market solution to an imperfect government solution, but at other times the government is better.

Anyway, conservatives are remarkably blind to government failure in the areas of law enforcement, rights protection, and national security. Lately we've been getting a bunch of arguments about how the government (particularly the executive) should be unfettered in its espionage, detentions, coercive techniques including what most of us would call torture, etc. There is a certain logic to their arguments, since we have enemies who would love to destroy us.

The problem is that governments don't stop failing when national security is on the line. Martin Luther King, Jr. was taped and blackmailed by the FBI for no legitimate law enforcement or national security purpose. The question, then, is not how much power we would give the government in a perfect world, but rather how much power we want to give to an institution with a history of serious abuses. Conservatives can grant all of this and still argue for broad executive power, but they shouldn't pretend that government failure only applies to economic policy. They should show that the abuses we know are likely to follow are tolerable and worth the purported gain in security.