I can recall economists’ arguing that bandwidth should be far more strictly metered than it has been. Just think where the Net would be if individual users hadn’t been free to experiment within bounds and invent new technologies that justified the R&D investment to drive down costs. How primitive we’d all be if the meaner of the economists had reigned supreme. Why, we might all be poking along with 28.8Kbps. Too many economists are less interested in advancement of technology than in advancement of regulation for their benefactors.

Now we’re up against the same mindset in the area of intellectual property. The world would be better off if we worried less about “efficiency” and more about the good of society as a whole. As an illustration of this, see Sick on the Great Plains: The perils of “efficient” information policies.

Two caveat: First, exceptions exist among economists; you can’t write off an entire discipline. Second, I speak only as a layman. I have not undertaken a formal study to document my belief–apparently shared by Goff–that so many economists are either myopic or whores or mixes of the two. I can only go by general impressions from afar.

Still, I can think of something much worse the present reality of government by lawyers, and I don’t have to leave you guessing. It’s government by economists. Too bad we have so much regulation by them.