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And So It’s Long Been

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Andy Kessler eloquently exposes as nonsense the assertions by many of today’s intellectuals that reality is whatever our words say it is – that, for example, bees are fish, puddles are navigable waters, and violent rioting is “mostly peaceful” (“Bees Are Fish and Other Fake Narratives [2],” June 20). Such intellectual chicanery, alas, is not new. In 1776 Adam Smith observed that “[t]here is nothing so absurd, says Cicero, which has not sometimes been asserted by some philosophers.”*

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

* Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [3] (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981 [1776], page 876.

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