Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 71 of the excellent 2017 volume by Matthew Mitchell and Peter Boettke, Applied Mainline Economics: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Public Policy:

A consumer who selects peanut butter at the grocery store is also a voter who selects a president in the voting booth. This seems obvious. But a great deal of public policy is made with the implicit assumption that humans are stupid, nasty, or venal when they are in the supermarket or the boardroom but wise, angelic, and selfless when they walk into a voting booth or accept a civil service position.

DBx: Indeed. The transformation that humans are believed to undergo when moving from the private to the public sector is downright miraculous.