Economics Will Never Compensate for Irresponsibility
Brad Edmonds over at the Mises.org Blog writes that there are a few messages that we really need to garner from the bridge collapse in Minnesota. He writes that one message we should take from the collapse is that it was a rare event. He is correct. The Federal Highway Administration has the total count of bridges in the US currently at 597,340.[^1] With more than half a million bridges in the US and five years since the last collapse, we are talking about a rare event. But Edmonds then goes on to argue that this another example of the kinds of failures that occur due to the bureaucratic negligence, misplaced incentives, and all-around laziness that private markets could solve so much better for us than the government. There’s a logical problem with that argument and an important distinction that needs to made.
