Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
After exposing the economic fallacies that fuel the effort in California to mandate a 32-hour workweek, you ask “Why do progressives think any idea they come up with has to be imposed by political coercion?” (“California’s French Four-Day Workweek,” April 16.) And you answer, “Because they believe in their superior moral virtue, and they like to order other people around.” Nicely put, but H.L. Mencken was even more piercing: “The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.”*
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1949), page 622.
