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… is from page 176 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague Jim Buchanan [2]’s 1978 paper “Public Choice and Ideology,” as this paper is reprinted in James M. Buchanan, Politics as Public Choice [3] (2000), which is volume 13 of the Collected Works of James M. Buchanan [4]:
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.