Bonus Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on April 7, 2017
… is from Deirdre McCloskey’s new essay “Excuses for Statism, and for Staying Poor”:
One answer you hear [to the question ‘Why not laissez faire?’] from good but frightened people of the left is “Chaos.” You hear it from the good people of the right, too, because it is a lawyer’s theory of the economy, and lawyers come in all flavors. An economy of 324 million people, the lawyers claim, will require masses of regulation. The claim is mistaken, of course, since regulatory interference in the trillions of decisions made in such a country will have unintended, unlegislated, and often disastrous consequences. Such interference regularly kills trade-tested betterment. The young CEO at the retailing app company Infor, Corey Tollefson, points out that in his space the regulators have not caught up. When he imagines a betterment, he can just do it. Not so in electricity generation or auto manufacturing.
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