Interesante debate entre Robin Hanson y Bryan Caplan sobre el binomio libertad-eficiencia.
"Liberty" is the heuristic of always preferring outcomes that minimize government involvement. As cheap and easy-to-apply heuristics go, this one is pretty good. Given two random deals the freer one is probably more efficient. Given two actually proposed deals, instead of two random ones, my guess is that the freer deal tends to be more efficient. But this is not a claim that economists as a whole endorse; this is just my personal guess. And freer deals are clearly not always more efficient; governments can solve real and important coordination problems.
(...) [I]n my role as economic adviser, a role I admire and embrace, I will try to fairly and consistently suggest the most efficient deals, as the availability of such advisers offers a great opportunity for everyone to get more of what they want.
I accept that such deals may not always contain the most liberty possible, because while people do usually want liberty, all else equal, they often want other things that conflict with liberty. In my role as a neutral adviser, it is not my place to tell people they should want something other than they do want; my job is just to get them more of what they want. Since this is exactly what I would want an expert adviser to do for me, it is what I will do for them. If loving them in this way is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Bryan Caplan también hace una introducción previa al debate:
I think it's ridiculously easy to construct counter-examples showing that it is often wrong to do the efficient thing. Robin, in contrast, stands by efficiency no matter what counter-examples I throw at him. I think that moral philosophy should begin with simple, concrete cases, and cautiously build from there. Robin, as far as I can tell, thinks that moral philosophy should begin with sweeping generalizations (e.g. "Always do the most efficient thing"), and throw our intuitions about simple, concrete cases to the dogs.
