Government failure versus market failure

John B. Taylor looks at Government Failure versus Market Failure at his blog Economics One. He writes,

Cliff Winston of the Brookings Institution carefully reviews three decades of empirical research on a wide range of microeconomic policy studies in his important book Government Failure versus Market Failure. He comes to the same basic conclusion; as he puts it "thirty years of empirical evidence... suggests that the welfare cost of government failure may be considerably greater than that of market failure."

Taylor makes the point that government failure should be at the top of the list of what went wrong in the recent financial crisis,

My Forbes magazine column this week reviews the latest empirical evidence on why government actions and interventions--government failure rather than market failure--should be at the top of the list of what went wrong in the recent financial crisis. Some continue to be surprised by my finding. While I focus on macroeconomic policy, mainly monetary policy and fiscal policy, my finding that government failure rather than market failure rises to the top of the list is not at all unsual in the broader context of empirical policy evaluation research.

This last sentence is supported by the Winston book.