My friend Larry Reed, President of the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, is one of the most energetic and able activists for a free society. The New York Times — yesterday and today — profiled Larry’s important work. (I believe that these links are free.)
Two things of special note. One is this comment, from yesterday’s report, about people such as Larry who understand the power of markets to create widespread and lasting prosperity:
“Their philosophy encourages selfishness and greed,” said Iris J. Lav,
who runs the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative, a network of 29 liberal
state-level groups organized in part as a countervailing force. “If you
have problems, they don’t care — just too bad.”
Of course, this accusation is nonsense. We market advocates might be mistaken, but it’s an old and shop-worn — but still galling — allegation that we "don’t care." People, such as Ms. Lav, who level this accusation cannot seem to see beyond the immediate and the visible.
It’s interesting that few people would accuse Ms. Lav of not caring, despite the fact that, if we market advocates are not mistaken in our analyses, the policies that she endorses will lead to more and deeper poverty and hardship.
It’s much easier — and probably more viscerally gratifying — to accuse those with whom you disagree of moral failings than to grapple with the content of their arguments.
The second thing to note is from today’s article: I cannot understand why Jeffrey Sachs seems to learn nothing from the works of William Easterly and Peter Bauer. If Africans are to become prosperous, they’d better follow the lead of James Shikwati rather than that of Professor Sachs. (Africans can also learn a thing or two from my wife’s recent work there.)
Easterly, by the way, recently defended Hayek from Sachs’s utterly misinformed reading of The Road to Serfdom. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of Bill’s superb essay:
Scientific American, in its November 2006 issue, reaches a "scientific
judgment" that the great Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek
"was wrong" about free markets and prosperity in his classic, "The Road
to Serfdom." The natural scientists’ favorite economist — Prof.
Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University — announces this new scientific
breakthrough in a column, saying "the evidence is now in." To dispel
any remaining doubts, Mr. Sachs clarifies that anyone who disagrees
with him "is clouded by vested interests and by ideology."
….
Mr. Sachs is wrong that Hayek was wrong. In his own global antipoverty
work, he is unintentionally demonstrating why more scientists,
Hollywood actors and the rest of us should go back and read "The Road
to Serfdom" if we want to know what will not work to achieve
"The End of Poverty." Hayek gave the best exposition ever of the
unpopular ideas of economic freedom that somehow triumph anyway,
alleviating far more national and global poverty than more fashionable
Scandinavia-envy and grandiose plans to "make poverty history."
Tonight at dinner (at a Liberty Fund conference on property rights) I’ll raise a glass to the memory of Milton Friedman and Peter Bauer, to Bill Easterly, to James Shikwati and June Arunga and Karol Boudreaux and Larry Reed and to everyone working to slay the superstitious belief that force, rather than freedom, is creative.
