… is from pages 39-40 of my emeritus colleague Richard Wagner’s insightful 2016 book, Politics as a Peculiar Business:
Everyone, private citizens and political figures alike, acts on partial and incomplete information, for there is no other option in the presence of the scale and complexity of contemporary societies. A chief and a council of five elders might reasonably know everything of relevance for keeping a tribe of 200 performing as they think it should. For democratic systems of tens or hundreds of millions, however, any such presumption is some combination of arrogance and fatuousness.
DBx: Yes. Unfortunately, contemporary society is cursed with a superabundance of individuals with such arrogance and fatuousness. These individuals come in all stripes of ideology and politics save one: classical liberalism.


Everyone, private citizens and political figures alike, acts on partial and incomplete information, for there is no other option in the presence of the scale and complexity of contemporary societies. A chief and a council of five elders might reasonably know everything of relevance for keeping a tribe of 200 performing as they think it should. For democratic systems of tens or hundreds of millions, however, any such presumption is some combination of arrogance and fatuousness.
