- Cafe Hayek - https://cafehayek.com -

Quotation of the Day…

Tweet [1]

… is from page 210 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2019 book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All [2] (footnote deleted):

The left explains the inability of workers themselves to grasp the hard-left dogma that all employment is exploitation by saying that the workers are in the grip of false consciousness. If the Bourgeois Deal is sound, though, the falsity of consciousness is attributable not to the sadly misled workers but rather to the leftish clerisy themselves. The politics is reversed. Workers of the world unite: demand commercially tested betterment under a régime of private property and profit making. Still better, become bourgeois, as large groups of workers in rich countries do believe they have become, approaching 100 percent in the United States, measured by self-identification as “middle class.”

It would then seem at least odd to call “false” a consciousness that has raised the income of poor workers in real terms by a factor of thirty. If workers have been fooled by accepting the [Bourgeois] Deal, then for such a way of being fooled let us give two and a half cheers – the deduction of half a cheer is because it’s not dignified to be “fooled” by anything. Let us have two and a half cheers for the new dominance since 1800 of a liberal and bourgeois ideology and the spreading acceptance of the Bourgeois Deal. Innovism rules.

Share [3] Tweet [4] Share [5] Email [6] Print [7]

Comments