WOW!
Finally someone said like it is and whadda you know, it turn's out, it's it a girl, Deirdre McCloskey who did it. :
... The master narrative of High Liberalism is mistaken factually. Externalities do not imply that a government can do better. Publicity does better than inspectors in restraining the alleged desire of businesspeople to poison their customers. Efficiency is not the chief merit of a market economy: innovation is. Rules arose in merchant courts and Quaker fixed prices long before governments started enforcing them.
I know such replies will be met with indignation. But think it possible you may be mistaken, and that merely because an historical or economic premise is embedded in front page stories in the New York Times does not make them sound as social science. It seems to me that a political philosophy based on fairy tales about what happened in history or what humans are like is going to be less than useless. It is going to be mischievous.
How do I know that my narrative is better than yours? The experiments of the 20th century told me so. It would have been hard to know the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or Matt Ridley or Deirdre McCloskey in August of 1914, before the experiments in large government were well begun. But anyone who after the 20th century still thinks that thoroughgoing socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labor unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other thoroughgoing 19th-century proposals for governmental action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention.
... Lots more wow.
... Yes, I know, you want to reject all these factual findings because they
are “right-wing” or “libertarian.” All I ask you to do is, once in a
while, consider. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.
2 comments:
Have you read "Bourgeois Dignity" by McCloskey? If you liked that article by her, I imagine you might like her book.
I personally find her tediously overly wordy - never use one word where you can use 30! But her insights are unique and interesting, even if her narrative (which she's certain is better than other narratives) is far from proven.
I don't mind wordiness when it's amusing or artful and engrossing (see Dickens) and no I haven't read any of her books. I've read so much over the years, that everything seems just seems like a rehash.
What I liked about this article is that she lays it out similarly to what I've been saying for decades -- the left's narrative is wrong and destructive any which way you measure it. The French haven't even learned that when you're in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.
Fairness is Harrison Bergeron.
I could go on for days on this subject, but to simply my philosophy is benign self-interest. If my little corner of the world is well managed, pleasant, safe and confortable others will want to join in ...
That's why millions of people from all over wanted to come here.
Now that is no longer the case and I very much regret it.
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