Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 282 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and important 1937 book, The Good Society:

For it requires no great genius, or even much thinking, to deal with an evil by advising someone to order it cured. Any fool, it has been said, can govern under martial law and any tyro can enjoy the delusion of having advanced the interest of mankind by establishing an armed official with a mandate to advance the public welfare. But it is only a delusion to think that the infinite complexity of human affairs has been put in order by calling in an omnipotent official. All that the thinker has done is to relieve himself of his own perplexities by passing them on to the bureaucracy. He has solved no problem. He has merely appointed officials with a mandate to solve the problem for him.

DBx: Yes.

For example, when a pundit on the right or left advocates industrial policy as he or she applauds the desired results that the proposed policy will, only by assumption, achieve, that pundit commits the error that Lippmann identifies here. The ‘reasoning,’ such as it it, goes like this:

(1) I perceive a problem;

(2) I conceive a solution;

(3) I propose to empower government to impose my solution;

(4) If my proposal is accepted, the problem will be solved;

(5) End of story.