Carefully Choked Geese

clipped from pajamasmedia.com In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez pushed through a new law in December 2004 allowing him to ban news reports of violent protests or of government crackdowns and to suspend the broadcasting licenses of media outlets that violate any of a long list of broadly phrased regulations. And in Vietnam, the government has imposed strict controls on religious organizations and branded the leaders of unauthorized religious groups (including Roman Catholics, Mennonites, and some Buddhists) as subversives. Each of these cases has involved the restriction of what might be called coordination goods—that is, those public goods that critically affect the ability of political opponents to coordinate but that have relatively little impact on economic growth. The recent Federal Government economic interventions, as exemplified in TARP and the Chrysler bankruptcy, have highlighted the question of how far you can choke the goose without keeping it from laying the Golden Egg.