… is from page 24 of Larry White’s hot-off-the-press The Clash of Economic Ideas; here Larry is writing about Richard T. Ely, Irving Fisher, and a large cadre of other late 19th and early 20th-century economists who deluded themselves into believing that they successfully escaped their own value judgments in order to use only objective science as their basis for prescribing government policies:
Many of the Progressive economists favored alcohol and drug prohibition, and even eugenics (immigration barriers against and sterilization of “inferior races” to prevent “race suicide”), as scientific means to social betterment.
Progressive indeed.
