Government doesn’t have customers, who can use its products or try a competitor’s instead, so it’s difficult to decide when government is doing a good job

From Cafe Hayek.

"from page 255 of David Boaz’s excellent new (2015) book, The Libertarian Mind (original emphasis):

Government doesn’t have customers, who can use its products or try a competitor’s instead, so it’s difficult to decide when government is doing a good job.

People on the left fancy that they are devoted to science and reality-based thinking – or are at least that they are more devoted to science and reality-based thinking than are their political and ideological opponents.  While the right has no shortage of people who are irrational and hold positions unsupportable by science – likewise for the political middle, by the way – I have no interest in offering my own opinion on which group wins the rationality contest.  But I will point out that people on the left, by so often decrying market competition and seeking to displace it with one-size-fits-all diktats from government, decry and displace the only dispassionate and most objective test for how best to allocate scarce resources among their multitude of possible uses.  If science requires empirical tests – rather than reliance on dogma or the pronouncements of pooh-bahs – then those people who fail to appreciate the incredibly rigorous and objective tests that take place every moment in private-property markets are not as devoted to science as they think."