With all the talk about Government being best able to solve life's problems today I am reminded that limited government works best. And if I were to point to one modern day source for material on the benefits of the free market and government failure from someone in the same political system as The Bahamas it would have to be Arthur Seldon.
"Seldon was for thirty years the editorial director of the IEA from the late 1950s until the late 1980s. At the IEA he directed a publishing programme that included some of the world’s most eminent economists, among them Milton Friedman and FA Hayek, as they advocated radical and innovative policies, such as less government intervention, control of inflation by monetary means, and reduced power for trade unions. Seldon was a prolific author, and his Collected Works occupies seven volumes." More...
More from Colin Robinson about Seldon:
"Summarising the contribution of Arthur Seldon to classical liberal thought and to policy analysis is difficult because of the great range of his work. But two of the outstanding characteristics of his writings, as demonstrated in these seven volumes, are how clearly and for how long he has seen and understood the principal economic problems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Because his work is based on unchanging economic principles, the solutions he offers, particularly for the problems caused by state welfare, are still as relevant as when he first suggested them, in some cases decades ago. His success in analysis and policy prescription, without the need for complex modelling, should be a great encouragement to young economists unsure what their subject can contribute to economic and social welfare." More...
If I were to recommend a path to absorbing Seldon's work I would begin with the following two volumes:
First is Government Failure and Over-Government...
"Seldon explains how the results of government programmes are always at odds with what the people would have chosen for themselves, because governments seek to impose taxes and legislature based on their own agendas.
"Seldon purports that any government that continues to force its own views and desires on the unwilling public will lead to its own demise as the public searches elsewhere for a more representative democracy.
Second is Capitalism: A Condensed Version...
"...Arthur Seldon explains why, despite its apparent imperfections, the market system is infinitely preferable to the alternatives. The market system has, since the eighteenth century, brought enormous gains in living standards, in contradiction to the Marxist theories that predicted capitalism’s collapse."
If you are feeling adventurous The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon...
What better than to leave you with a quote Seldon himself:
"The difficulty with limited government that liberals have yet to resolve is that its functions must be exercised through the imperfect political process that distorts and manipulates individual preferences. Who makes the rules that politicians are to enforce in the public interest if not the politicians themselves? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Limited government implicitly supposes that government will perform faithfully the main functions allotted to it even though it is judged incompetent in performing other functions. The notion of limited government lacks the indispensable instinctive scepticism of government taught by the classical liberal economists that led them to want government confined to its unavoidable minimal functions of public goods rather than to the indeterminate limited functions that could be decided by government itself. If government cannot be expected to perform acceptably the services it can leave to the market, it cannot be expected to devise neutrally the rules that decide the services it must perform itself."