Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on November 26, 2019
… is from page 155 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2019 excellent book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All:
The danger is that each new generation will not realize how good for the poor the Bourgeois Deal has been, and will forget how bad the earlier deals have been – the Bolshevik Deal, for example, in which the government takes over the railways and the electric companies and the newsagents and the newspapers and your employment, and everything else. Or the Bridle Deal, in which excessive regulations work against “unbridled” commercially tested betterment. I ask innocently, when has it been a good idea to “bridle” a person like a horse? [Thomas] Piketty’s idea is to bridle most people so that some people will not become rich. It is a mistake.
DBx: Yes. And, by the way, neither the reality nor the significance of the historical lessons to which Deirdre above refers can be made to disappear by uttering “Ok Boomer.”
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