Abstract
In the fifties, I worked as a specialist on China for the Department of State. I lived in Nationalist and Communist China and in President Rhee’s Korea.1 Although at the time I did not think about rent seeking (indeed, I would have simply called these regimes corrupt),2 undoubtedly this experience had a lot to do with my eventual discovery of rent seeking.
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Notes
I had also lived, while in college and while briefly practicing law, in the Chicago of the Kelly-Nash regime. In some ways, this rather resembled President Rhee’s Korea.
Also Chicago.
Incidentally, the same is true of Monaco. On the streets that make up the boundaries of that principality, average height of the buildings on either side of the street differs.
Either the Nationalist or the Communist mayor. The Communist mayor, as a matter of fact, lived better than the Nationalist mayor, but this reflected the fact that the Nationalist mayor was, by the not very stringent standards of the Nationalist government, a rather Spartan type.
Under the Imperial regime, merchants and, in particular, bankers were among the group called outcasts listed with actors, prostitutes, and so on. Some wealthy merchants connected with foreign trade in Hong Kong and Macao were, however, able to get around these barriers.
I do not think any location economist believes he/she can make perfect decisions of this sort, but he/she can do better than the average politician.
There apparently were some cases in the early days of modern industry in which some particular company actually had enough advantage in efficiency so that it effectively obtained a monopoly by underselling everyone else. But if this happened occasionally, in spite of the Austrians, we should not depend on it.
The basic criticisms of governmental health service are mainly concerned with the efficiency with which it operates, not with its rather modest egalitarianism. To paraphrase Milton Friedman: it is a requirement that everyone buy a particular insurance contract, and not a very good one.
The transfer from the poor comes from the fact that the truthfully poor would have, in fact, been receiving state aid even if the old age pension system did not exist. The same, incidentally, it true of the government medical insurance. Thus the poor are relatively no better off in their medical treatment and their old age pension than they would be if these programs had not have been created and they had depended on the more traditional forms of aid to the poor. On the other hand, their taxes are considerably higher than they would have been under the anci’en regime. All of this is discussed in detail in my Economics of Income Redistribution ( Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1983 ), 111–136.
Given the fact that there is risk attached to both governmental and private insurance, risk aversion would point to splitting insurance between them.
R. Kenneth Godwin (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers House, Inc., 1988 ). The billion dollars is a measure of the whole industry, not its effect on a given election or proposed bill.
The third chapter deals with the metaphysical problem of whether it is actually a cost. Subjectively, I think it is a cost. Certainly the growth of the economy would be slower with this kind of thing than without it.
Towards a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society, James M. Buchanan, Robert D. Tollison, and Gordon Tullock (eds.)(College Station: Texas AandM University Press, 1981) and The Political Economy of Rent-Seeking, Charles K. Rowley, Robert D. Tollison, and Gordon Tullock (eds.)(Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988).
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© 1989 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Tullock, G. (1989). Concluding Thoughts. In: The Economics of Special Privilege and Rent Seeking. Studies in Public Choice, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7813-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7813-4_10
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