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 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 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.

Advocacy groups, politicians, and bureaucrats use the government to advance their private good instead of the common good.

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

The more government does, the greater chance that its efforts will be tilted toward a particular group's good, instead of the common good.

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.