Antony Davies

“In both the public and the private sectors, one can find people who are altruistic, selfish, smart, stupid, capable, incompetent, and just about every other description. They are all drawn from the same mass of people in roughly the same proportions. What is true of all of these people is that they pursue what they believe will make them happy, and they respond to the incentives that surround them. When those incentives are tied directly to their job performance, people’s quest for happiness encourages them to behave in ways that satisfy the people for whom they perform their jobs. But when people’s incentives are tied to something else, like voters avoiding the cost of becoming informed, or politicians attracting more voters, or bureaucrats making their jobs less difficult, the outcomes that emerge can be very different from the outcomes people had in mind when they empowered government to pursue those outcomes in the first place. Consider the typical experiences with the Post Office versus FedEx, Amtrak versus Southwest, applying for a driver’s license versus applying for a credit card, or applying for federal financial aid versus applying for a bank loan.”
― Antony Davies, Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics

“Bureaucrats work for government, and government faces no competition. People who work at the post office - as kind and thoughtful as they may be - have less incentive than do workers at the local grocery store to be concerned with customers having a good experience and coming back. If the post office cannot earn enough money from customers who use its service (as it hasn’t for more than the last decade), it can turn to the federal government for increased funding. The government, in turn, will coerce the funding from taxpayers. By contrast, a grocery store would just go out of business to be replaced with one that served its customers better.”
― Antony Davies, Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics

“Compare Socrates then, one of the smartest men who ever lived, to just about every member of the political class today. Political orientation scarcely matters. Nearly everyone, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, who aspires to any sort of political office from small town mayor to President of the United States, begins his political journey with the belief that he knows best how other people should live. And it is the goal of every politician to inflict his knowledge on the rest of us. And why wouldn’t it be? If they really know how people should live, why wouldn’t they try to impose their ideas on the rest of us?”
― Antony Davies, Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics

“Finally, the money to pay for an increased minimum wage must come from somewhere, and there are only four places from which it can come: other minimum wage workers, in the form of layoffs and reduced hours; higher wage workers, in the form of static or reduced compensation; investors, in the form of lower profits; or customers, in the form of higher prices. How much each of the groups pays for the minimum wage hike depends on how competitive the various marketplaces are.”
― Antony Davies, Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics