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.

Markets help people pursue their happiness more efficiently and effectively. Because they are so effective, markets provide benefits right here and right now, even while government is busy batching the protection of happiness.

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.

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.

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.

Instead of doing more badly, government should focus on doing less well.

Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that very often have little to do with securing general happiness but instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.