Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on December 11, 2018
… is from page 235 of Randy Holcombe’s 2018 book, Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power is Made and Maintained:
Ironically, those who are most likely to promote the idea that the government needs to make decisions for the masses because they will not make good decisions on their own are most likely to promote the idea that the masses should choose the public policies that apply to everyone. They argue that public policy should make it increasingly easy for those same people who do not make good decisions for themselves to vote in democratic elections, and hold the Progressive idea that democratic government carries out the will of the people. The masses who are not competent to make personal decisions for themselves should determine public policy that applies to everyone.
DBx: My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy recently and rightly ridiculed the inconsistencies and hypocrisy that infest politics. The inconsistency pointed out here by Randy is, in my mind, among the most blatant – although shockingly large numbers of people on the political left seem blind to it.
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