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… is from page 204 of George Will’s excellent 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility:
With the Declaration, Americans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and began asserting rights that are universal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flourishing of creatures with our nature.
I happened just now, quite by accident, to run across this Quotation of the Day from September 4th, 2011. I post it again here given the bad history that today seems to be all the rage:
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 126 of David Freeman Hawke’s 1988 book, Everyday Life in Early America; here Hawke is writing about the 17th century:
Peter H. Wood found little discrimination in early South Carolina. “Common hardships and the continuing shortage of hands,” he writes [in 1974], “put the different races, as well as separate sexes, upon a more equal footing than they would see in subsequent generations.” Many scholars now conclude that discrimination set in only during the last quarter of the century when a “series of court decisions and statutes began closing the gates of freedom along racial lines,” changes that finally became codified in Virginia’s slave code of 1705.
Other scholars who’ve contributed important research along these lines include Robert Higgs – especially his 1976 book Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914 – and my former GMU Econ colleage Jennifer Roback-Morse.
Sovereign-state power and legislation can be very dangerous institutions.
UPDATE: Here’s a short note from Phil Magness, who reacted on Facebook to the above post:
Note that the state is conspicuously absent as a discriminatory institution in the 1619 project.
In my August 13th, 2006, column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I made a case against enlisting government to combat global warming. You can read my case in full beneath the fold.
More than once has an ad very much like the one shown here appeared on my Cafe Hayek home page. This ad appeared on my screen just moments ago.
Seeing it literally – and, yes, I here use the word literally – makes my stomach queasy. The thought of grabbing a beer, cup of coffee, or whatever with Elizabeth Warren is appalling and nauseating.
I know that millions of individuals would relish the opportunity to meet a person so famous, so powerful, and so greedy for yet more power. Me, I’d rather drink water from a dog’s bowl while listening to the barking of Spot, Rover, or Fido. (And I’m not especially fond of dogs.) Spot, Rover, or Fido would neither insult my intelligence nor attempt to enlist my support for predatory schemes against innocent human beings.
… is this November 18th, 2019, Facebook post by Bob Higgs:
The obsession with equality — not equality under the law, not equality of human dignity, but equality of income, wealth, esteem, social standing, and countless other things that cannot possibly be equalized — is a demonic force in the modern world.
DBx: And this obsession is loved by power-mad monsters. What could better serve their purposes than to be given power to achieve outcomes that are practically unmeasurable and in principle open-ended and, thus, unachievable? Easily finding evidence that reality remains short of the heavenly ideal, power-mad monsters demand yet more power to right the alleged wrong. There is no limit to the amount of power that will be demanded when an obsession with these sorts of “equality” reins.
… is from page 4 of the original edition of my late colleague James M. Buchanan’s insightful 1967 book, Public Finance in Democratic Process:
The omniscient and benevolent despot does not exist, despite the genuine love for him sometimes espoused, and, scientifically, he is not a noble construction. To assume that he does exist, for the purpose of making analysis agreeable, serves to confound the issues and to guarantee frustration for the scientist who seeks to understand and to explain.
DBx: Although these words from Buchanan likely seem, read here in isolation, to be too trivial to feature, they are, in fact, relevant. Nearly all proposals for this or that government action rest on the implicit assumption that the government is godlike – that the flesh-and-blood human beings who are ‘the’ government both miraculously have access to knowledge and information denied to individuals acting privately, and can be expected to behave angelically.
These twin assumptions – each absurd on its face and down to its marrow – are used by politicians, professors, and pundits left, right, and center. Faith in the omniscience and benevolence of the state (at least when controlled by one’s preferred party) is a dangerous dogma that will not die.
Here’s a letter to the editor of Law & Liberty:
Editor:
Because I’m no expert on the works of Edmund Burke, I can only trust that Gregory Collins is correct that “the idea that trade can, and should, be used as an instrument of leverage and power against hostile foreign countries – such as those, like China, that wage economic warfare and cyberwarfare against you – was not anathema to Burke’s economic thought” (“Burke’s Political Economy Reconsidered,” November 21). But having some expertise in economics, I am justified in issuing a warning against any such use of protectionism.
First, history – which Burke correctly understood to be an excellent teacher – teaches that protectionist policy is almost never carried out scientifically and with the aim of promoting the public welfare. In reality, protectionist policy is overwhelmingly designed to further the narrow interests of politically powerful domestic producers, all without regard for the good of the general public. (For the United States, see Douglas Irwin’s definitive history of U.S. trade policy, Clashing Over Commerce.) These producers and their political champions, of course, never hesitate to wrap themselves in the flag in order to con the public to support their predations.
There’s an irony here: protectionism carried out in the name of strengthening national security risks weakening it by making the domestic economy less innovative and less prosperous. Protected producers, after all, have fewer incentives to improve their products and to operate as efficiently as possible.
Second, any writer who deploys, as does Mr. Collins, the term “wage economic warfare” alerts economically literate readers that the writer likely is confused about economics.
As used in trade-policy discussions in the U.S., “economic warfare” almost always refers either to policies – specifically, foreign-governments’ subsidies of their countries’ exports – that bestow on Americans positive benefits, or to policies – specifically, foreign-governments’ use of protective tariffs – that deny to Americans nothing to which any American has a right. And in all cases these foreign-government policies inflict far more economic damage on their own citizens than they inflict on Americans.
There’s an irony here, too: protectionist weapons unsheathed by the U.S. government in the name of defending against “economic warfare” waged by other countries are weapons that the U.S. government wields chiefly against Americans. “Economic warfare” is war waged by each government against its own citizens, with each belligerent pursuing the economically harmful goal of increasing as much as possible its country’s exports and decreasing as much as possible its country’s imports.
The fact that Mr. Collins apparently believes that the U.S. government should take up economic arms in such an absurd and self-destructive “war” means that, while his expertise in Burke’s writing might be impeccable, his understanding of economics clearly is not.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
You can read the column beneath the fold.
The point has been made, in many different ways, repeatedly by economists of an Austrian bent (whether they wear that label or not). Philip Wicksteed, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, F.A. Hayek, Ronald Coase, Armen Alchian, Yale Brozen, James Buchanan, Donald Dewey, Vernon Smith, Israel Kirzner, Harold Demsetz, Elinor Ostrom, Dominick Armentano, and Deirdre McCloskey are among some of the more notable economists who understand that part of the very essence of markets is the entrepreneurial search for ways to profit from arranging for markets to work better.
Unfortunately, although the full list of such economists is longer than the one offered above, it’s not long enough, not by a long shot. Far too many economists simply do not understand the market process.
Here, however, is a small example of the market process at work. It’s a start-up company trying to earn profit by better arranging for people to work remotely in non-urban areas. (I thank my dear friend Lyle Albaugh for alerting me to this entrepreneurial venture.)
Who knows if this entrepreneurial venture will work? I hope it does, but for purposes of this post, this company’s eventual failure would be just as significant as its eventual success. The future is uncertain, and so to make it better, it’s best to have as much entrepreneurial speculation and experimentation as possible. Only some experiments will succeed; many will fail. Indeed, in open and innovative markets, failure is evidence of the success of those markets. After all, if only one firm – say, Acme Inc. – is allowed to experiment with new ideas, Acme Inc. is more likely to succeed (that is, to earn sufficient profits to remain in business) than it is if there are no restrictions on other firms trying out new ideas in competition with Acme Inc. Yet Acme’s ‘success’ in a restricted market would be no great victory for consumers, given that entrepreneurs with better ideas or abilities were prevented from competing against it.
Where politicians, pundits, and poor economists see markets failing to perform ideally, entrepreneurs see profit opportunities, and good economists see lures for entrepreneurs whose actions make the market process work. Good economists see not market failure but sparks for market success.
