Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 81 of Daniel Boorstin’s 1958 volume, The Americans: The Colonial Experience; here Boorstin writes of the early 18th-century English trustees of the colony of Georgia (original emphasis):

What could most profitably be grown in that remote part of the New World? How many acres did a man need for subsistence? The Trustees knew the answer to neither of these questions – nor, for that matter, to any of the other elementary problems of land-use or natural resources in their colony. Their sin was not so much that they were ignorant (although they might have done more to acquaint themselves with the facts), but that they acted as if they did know, and by their laws imposed their ignorance upon the settlers.

DBx: Such hubris and self-unawareness remain prevalent today – for example, among advocates of industrial policy. These people presume that they know far more than they do know – and that they, or any one else, can possibly know.

Pictured here is one such modern-day arrogant advocate of industrial policy.