Coase

Got up way too early and went to church. Thought I was going to help with the sound set up, except it turned out to be an acoustic set up, which took about ten minutes. So in my remaining ninety minutes before service started, I read 'The Problem of Social Cost',* by Ronald Coase. Key passage:

It is clear that the government has powers which might enable it to get some things done at a lower cost than could a private organization. [...] But the government administrative machine is not itself costless. It can, in fact, on occasion be extremely costly. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that the [...] regulations, made by a fallible administration subject to political pressures and operating without any competitive check, will necessarily always be those which increase the efficiency with which the economic system operates. [...]

All solutions have costs, and there is no reason to suppose that government regulation is called for simply because the problem is not well handled by the market or the firm.

One would think this was obvious, but the paper has several remarks about economists who say, in effect, "There's a problem, therefore we need more government."

Coase won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Economics.