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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 [2],” 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 [3] (New York: Knopf, 1949), page 622.