Markets are nimble and efficient, gathering the collective but disbursed intelligence of the economy's players and communicating up-to-the-minute realities of prices, product availability, etc. Government is typically cumbersome, plodding, and slow.

Markets respond not to political pressures channeled through various committees, subcommittees, lobbies, and special interests but to the immediacies and exigencies of the economy - in other words, what's happening now.

With its brutal excesses and reliance on snitches and finks as informants, I don't think it's far off-kilter to describe the modern-day drug war as oddly similar to the Salem witch trials.

Bureaucracies typically move slowly, clumsily, and without much regard for the wants and needs of the people they supposedly serve.

The government doesn't create wealth of its own; it can only take it from some and distribute it to others or dictate particular public uses of private resources.

To best serve the public happiness, government shouldn't do things it cannot do well - anymore than Wal-Mart should provide goods and services that people don't like.

Money spent in complying with a regulation cannot be spent again on marketing or product research.