Government Is a Death Machine

My friend Carolyn recently retired as a secretary of the business school at Loyola where I am employed as a professor. She was one of the sweetest and kindest persons I have ever met, and very helpful to me when I first arrived at Loyola in 2001. I didn’t know her husband Rodney all that well, but on the few occasions that I met him, he was the perfect match for her: also a lovely human being (I had a kinship with him as he and I were almost exactly the same age). As Murray Rothbard would have said of these two people were he to have met them, they were “sweetie pies.”

Tragically, her husband Rodney died last week, under tragic and infuriating circumstances. This television clip tells the really disgusting story. To make a long story short, this good man passed out on the sidewalk in the Garden District of New Orleans. Several Good Samaritan passers-by called for an ambulance to help this man, who was unconscious, almost immediately. It took almost an entire hour for help to time from a private competitive ambulance – fire department industry would have been a few minutes, not almost an hour. If we had had a private competitive ambulance – fire department industry instead of a government monopoly “providing” this service, this good man might still be alive. If we had had a private competitive ambulance – fire department industry, comprised of, oh, ten firms, and one or two of them didn’t send help within five minutes, the others almost certainly would have. And the ones that did not would SOON GO BANKRUPT, and not be able to inflict their incompetence on good people.

On this “weeding out process” of competition that probably would have saved his life, see Hazlitt, Henry. 2008 [1946]. Economics in One Lesson. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute;

I am taking the liberty of copying, also on this, my present class in economics. Maybe this real world example of the necessary incompetence of government will better teach them than I can about the importance of economics, free enterprise and privatization. How many good people has this government monopoly killed? That would make a good topic for research; that would make a good term paper. Students, do indeed watch this short video. It will sicken you, just as it sickens me. I take this personally.