… is from page 176 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague Jim Buchanan’s 1978 paper “Public Choice and Ideology,” as this paper is reprinted in James M. Buchanan, Politics as Public Choice (2000), which is volume 13 of the Collected Works of James M. Buchanan:
To the extent that these social “scientists” among us really think that the problems of living together in organized community lend themselves to scientific solution, I think they are seriously deluded.
DBx: Unfortunately, our world today, far more so than that of 1978, teems with people who are seriously deluded.
Two recent hysterias – that of climate change and that of covid – reinvigorated the old Progressive fallacy that society is an engineering project best ‘solved’ by ‘experts.’ In this dystopian vision, the masses – for their own good – are to obey silently, and thankfully, the commands of the ‘experts.’ And anyone who dissents from The Plan is to be labeled both a science denier and an enemy of the people.
