… is from page 233 of F. A. Hayek’s March 1945 essay, in Fortune, “Review of Sir William Beveridge’s Full Employment in a Free Society,” as this essay is reprinted as Chapter 12 of Hayek, Contra Keynes and Cambridge (Bruce Caldwell, ed., 1995), which is volume 9 of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:
It is the great merit of democracy that the demand for the cure of a widely felt evil can find expression in an organized movement. That popular pressure might become canalized in support of particular theories that sound plausible to the ordinary man is one of its dangers.
DBx: So true.
There is today a superabundance of policy ideas that sound plausible to ordinary men and women but that, upon inspection with sound economics, are revealed as crackpot. These ideas include minimum-wage legislation as a means of improving the lives of poor workers, protective tariffs as a means of enriching the people of the nation, and ever-increasing funding for government schools as a means of providing better education.
