Quotation of the Day
2nd February 2015
The same person who would never trust an optometrist to repair her car’s transmission, or trust an automobile mechanic to prescribe contact lenses to correct her myopia, routinely trusts strangers who specialize in winning popularity contests called “elections” to interfere into her and her neighbors’ lives in many intimate and expansive ways.
And then, when a skeptic of the pretensions of politicians (and of their entourages) suggests that these politicians (and their entourages) address the problems they diagnose, not with government force, but by themselves risking only their own money and effort toward correcting the alleged problems, the response is one of utter dismissal. ”Ha! We don’t know anything about actually running actual businesses. We have no experience at hiring and managing workers. We haven’t the training or business connections or professional demeanor to, say, profitably employ the low-skilled workers who we nevertheless assure you are currently underpaid. We have no ability, say, to persuade private investors to risk their funds on alternative-energy projects that we nevertheless assure you will be amazingly profitable. We have no practical abilities at all! Yet because we’ve won the most recent election, or because we’ve earned PhDs and read lots of books and academic-journal articles and know what a chi-square test is, we are uniquely qualified to force people to act in ways that we prescribe but which we, on our own, would never dare undertake. We are paid to rule, not to risk; we are paid to demand of others, not to do of ourselves.”
The fact that such people continue to be called “Progressive,” continue to be considered to be unusually humane and (amazingly) empathetic, and continue to be taken seriously baffles me to no end.
— Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist
February 2nd, 2015 at 10:16
Very well said.