… is from page 292 of Deirdre McCloskey’s marvelous 2019 book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All:
Nor is job retraining a good idea if it is to be directed not by the worker herself but by wise heads in Washington or Columbus. The wise heads don’t know the future, and they end up training machinists for jobs that won’t exist. Workers themselves know how best to retrain, within the limits of an inevitable uncertainty that no one can remove, and know when to move out, such as the hundreds of thousands who moved to North Dakota during the brief oil boom there. The workers, to put it mildly, have skin in the game. We need to make the labor force as flexible as the capital force. For that we need liberty, not government programs.