Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Stationary Bandits

DON BOUDREAUX borrows a term from Mancur Olson that you will read about later in the semester:
I wish that each government would on its own refuse to inflict trade restrictions on its subjects. But that's not what governments do. At root, governments are stationary bandits, skilled chiefly at creating and extracting rents from innocent people.