… is from page 56 of the May 9th, 2020, draft of the forthcoming monograph from Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Illiberal and Anti-Entrepreneurial State of Mariana Mazzucato:
None of the Great Enrichments – not Britain’s or Sweden’s or Japan’s or Hong Kong’s or Ireland’s or Chile’s or China’s or India’s – has occurred until economic liberalism took hold.
DBx: This reality, despite being undeniable to careful students of economic history, is regularly denied by those who simply cannot let go of their belief in miracles.
Miracle numero uno believed by these deniers-of-reality is that politicians and mandarins possess, or can acquire, more knowledge about the current state of the economy, as well as about future conditions of supply and demand, than is elicited, communicated, and used by participants in a market economy. Refusing to recognize that the amount of knowledge that must be gathered and used to ensure a regular supply even of something as (seemingly) mundane as ordinary pencils is unfathomably immense, these deniers-of-reality simply assume that state officials can perform the miracle of knowing what no human mind or bureaucracy of minds can know.
