Not the official QOTD, but pretty great anyway:
“If prices are information, then subsidies are censorship.”
– Russ Nelson
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A more precise analogy might be that subsidies are the drone of a jamming signal.
This is just me proving that it is a lot easier to be a critic than to produce something original!
Or lies.
Maybe i can improve even on Natalie:
if prices are information, then subsidies are propaganda.
Could we have a link to the original, to check the context?
PS:
if prices are information, then price controls are censorship.
if prices are information, then subsidies are dissinformation.
I’m with Jacob (but I would spell “disinformation” with only one “s”!).
If information increases wealth, then disinformation decreases it.
I’m with Snorri Godhi: Subsidies are propaganda.
Snorri Godhi: the original, sadly, was a status message on Facebook, but it consisted just of that one sentence. Russ is a libertarian and clearly meant it in the way we are interpreting it.
It is a nice quotation.
I like it – and agree with it.
‘If prices are information, then subsidies are information about the subsidizer’.
Not a very graceful epigram, but maybe more accurate.
… subsidies bias your estimators… or …
subsidies reduce the capacity of your price communication channel by biasing your estimators
(ala Shannon style information)
Lots of other things the government does garble up the capacity of the price communication channel…