This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 9, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One Libertarian argument for free markets is that markets fail and then regularly correct.

The same cannot be said for most government interventions according to Cato Senior Fellow Jeffrey Myron.

He spoke at Cato University last year.

So I want to talk about a consequentialist case for markets over government.

That just

mildly imperfect, but so are interventions.

It takes an incredibly sort of narrow Ivy Tower

academic to think that the right comparison is between

a theoretically pure market and the, sorry, the real world markets and the

theoretically pure intervention, of course all interventions, all rules, regulations, taxes, subsidies mandates have some negative consequences of their own.

They don't work perfectly, they are enforced by imperfect people who have their own agendas in many cases

so the right question is always not which is perfect or not the right question is

which is less bad we should all agree. We could all agree. Markets suck. Government sucks more.

And that is the consequentialist case in a nutshell. Now, I haven't proven that to you yet, but

that's the nature of the argument.

Now, a different view along the, again,

the issue of whether markets do things better than government

is the following.

At least in textbook economics,

you of course can argue that no market is really perfect.

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