… is from page 128 of the hot-of-the-press (2020) splendid work – co-published last month by the Adam Smith Institute and AIER – by Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State:
The statist economic engineers such as [Mariana] Mazzucato want to begin the world over again, by replacing society with government, replacing a voluntary order with comprehensive coercion.
DBx: What arrogance! What appalling arrogance of such people as Mazzucato – and of Marco Rubio, and of Oren Cass, and of Robert Reich, and of Elizabeth Warren, and of Julius Krein, and of Daniel McCarthy, and of … the parade of such arrogant, hubris-saturated people is depressingly, distressingly, and disturbingly long. Because the details of a dynamic, open-ended global economy consisting of billions of largely free individuals doesn’t perfectly satisfy the particular fancies of any one of these individuals, that individual believes that he or she is entitled to recommend that the state unleash its coercion on hundreds of millions of fellow citizens in order to better satisfy that individual’s fancies.
Each of these individuals has a God-complex: He or she mistakes his or her intellectual visions as being those of a deity. That he or she sincerely is unaware that he or she presents himself or herself to the world as a deity doesn’t change the fact that that’s just what he or she does.
This avalanche of arrogance is indescribable.
