Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on September 14, 2018
… is from page 24 of Razeen Sally’s 1998 book, Classical Liberalism and International Economic Order:
The market order, more than any competing economic order or any realistically conceivable political order, facilitates and vastly expands the individual’s choice of means and ends by recourse to ‘exit’ – in economic terms, the consumer rejecting the products of one supplier in favor of those for another. As argued before, such individual choice allows for the powerful expression of individuality and diversity – ‘pursuing his own interest his own way’, as Adam Smith puts it, or ‘using own knowledge for own purposes’, according to Hayek. It is important to stress here that the freedom of the individual not only is concerned with the creation of material wealth, but also is more generally concerned with the freedom of expression in all aspects of life, political, economic, social and cultural, which is the essence of an ‘open’ society.
DBx: Sound principles should be generalized. Of course all sexual activity should be consensual; each of us has the right to say “no” whenever and however often we choose to the offer of sexual encounters, and this right ought to be universally respected. But the right to say “no” is a splendid thing and so it should to be celebrated and respected in all aspects of life rather than only in those aspects that are currently the obsession of the Politically Correct crowd. I support a much-expanded right to say “no” – for example, the low-skilled worker’s right say “no” to the state that demands that he or she refuse to work for less than the state-mandated minimum wage, and the right of each individual to say “no” to the state that demands that he or she subsidize politically powerful corporations.
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