Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 361 of Robert Higgs’s Spring 2000 Independent Review article, “The So-Called Third Way,” as this article is reprinted in the superb 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan:

The post-World War II interventionist state ultimately provoked strong political challenge because it could not deliver the goods. By the 1970s, the economies of the interventionist states were floundering. Runaway regulation, high taxes, monetary inflation and, in some countries, inefficient government-owned industry were sapping economic dynamism. At the same time, the notion that centrally planned economies could outperform market-oriented economies – the “convergence hypothesis” widely accepted in the West during the 1950s and 1960s – no longer seemed compelling, despite the reluctance of many authorities, from Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson to the Central Intelligence Agency, to abandon it. No matter how much the intellectuals might abhor the capitalist goose, they finally had to admit that no other kind could lay golden eggs at the same high rate.