… is from pages 280-281 of the 1962 Gateway edition of University of Georgia economist David McCord Wright’s unfortunately forgotten 1951 book, Capitalism:
If there has really been a massive change in values on the part of the majority of the people, if men really are tired of change, growth, consumer sovereignty, and the responsibilities of democracy, then, of course, there is no real prospect for our civilization. Slowly the change in values will impose itself upon the politico-economic life and the way be paved for aristocratic stagnation.
DBx: Yes. And the pronouncements and policy proposals that today gush forth from the NatCons strongly suggest that at least they – the NatCons – are indeed tired of change, growth, consumer sovereignty, and the responsibilities of democracy. The NatCons want to suppress the market and replace it with the massive amount of discretionary state power necessary to stamp out innovation, genuine economic competition, and creative destruction. The final result of this effort will, of course, not be the steady-state dull paradise for which NatCons yearn; it will in fact be a society both increasingly impoverished and increasingly tyrannized.
NatCons will then protest that this result is certainly not what they sought. This protest will be sincere. NatCons will further insist that, because the outcome is quite different from what they envisioned, the implementation of their policies was hijacked or neutered or alloyed with impurities. This insistence will only further confirm the NatCons’ utter ignorance of economics and their complete naivety about the state.
