Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on November 21, 2020
… is from page 158 of Robert Higgs’s August 28th, 2013, blog post, “Creative Destruction – The Best Game in Town” as this post is reprinted in Bob’s excellent 2015 volume, Taking a Stand:
For the losers [today, from economic competition], the perceived remedy of their plight has often been not to make the necessary personal adjustments as well as possible, but to use force, especially state force, to burden or prohibit the more successful competitors in the market. Thus, the market’s critics demand bailouts, subsidies, tax breaks, and corporate and personal welfare of various sorts to soften the blows of the Schumpeterian “perennial gale of creative destruction.” Notice, however, that all such attempts to soften the blows also serve to mute or falsify the messages the market system is sending about where resources can be employed most productively in the prevailing circumstances. Amelioration of the suffering softens the blows, to be sure, but it also slows the process by which wealth is being created and introduces wasteful measures that may, especially if they are state-mandated, become entrenched in the politico-economic system and thereby serve as channels for resource waste and as permanent fetters on real progress.
Comments
