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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (553198)	3/4/2010 7:45:36 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574055

Good gov'ts encourage wealth production. By taking care of security, and settling disputes in the courts, by respecting and protecting property rights, and by funding some important infrastructure where there is a major free rider problem for private efforts. Beyond that they can build some useful infrastructure even when there isn't a real free rider issue, and it could have been built by the private sector and run for a profit. This can still be useful for wealth creation, but its likely to be more expensive to produce and maintain, and some of it will be inefficient investment because of lack of demand. And they can support education (although state education systems with little competition, and with no school choice isn't the best way to do this, which is perhaps the reason why a number of other wealthy countries support student/parent choice for government funded eduction than we do). Beyond that the best way they can encourage wealth production is to stay out of the way. There are some important things for them to do, that are worth the cost for other reasons, but that's not encouraging wealth production, but achieving some other goal. Also governments (more specifically politicians and/or the special interest they listen to) are likely to see all sorts of things as worthwhile that in reality aren't.