Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 110 of F.A. Hayek’s 1991 collection, The Trend of Economic Thinking, which is Vol. 3 in The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek; specifically, it’s from Hayek’s 1963 University of Freiburg public lecture “The Legal and Political Philosophy of David Hume”:

Hume’s further concern is chiefly to show that it is only the universal application of the same “general and inflexible rules of justice” which will secure the establishment of a general order, that this and not any particular aims or results must guide the application of the rules if an order is to be the result. Any concern with particular ends of either the individuals or the community, or a regard for the merits of particular individuals, would entirely spoil that aim. This contention is intimately bound up with Hume’s belief in the short-sightedness of men, their propensity to prefer immediate advantage to distant gain, and their incapacity to be guided by a proper appreciation of their true long-run interest unless they bind themselves by general and inflexible rules which in the particular case are applied without regard to consequences.

DBx: The approach to both life and government policy that is championed by Hume and Hayek is mature and wise. In contrast, politics in practice brings out the child in us.