… is from page 106 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Art Carden’s superb 2020 book, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World:
Liberals know that the future depends on unpredictable ideas from free humans.
DBx: By “liberals,” of course, McCloskey and Carden mean true liberals – people who embrace free minds and free markets – people not seduced by secular messiahs who promise to use coercion to ‘solve’ this and that problem – people who trust ordinary men and women to run their own lives and distrust anyone who proposes to run other people’s lives – people who understand that heaven is not the appropriate standard against which earthly reality ought to be compared – people who know that the details of the social and economic orders that emerge spontaneously from the countless interactions of free people are far too complex for even the geniuses amongst us to decipher.
