Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 29 of my friend, co-author, and former professor Randy Holcombe’s superb 2019 book, Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History:

Concepts like social welfare, or the general welfare, or the public interest, are discussed often as if some measure of the welfare of a group of people exists that goes beyond the welfare of the individual members of the group. In fact, the welfare of a group is nothing more than the aggregate of the welfare of each member of the group. It makes no sense to talk about the welfare of a group of people independently of the well-being of the group’s members. A group is better off when its members are better off; it is worse off when its members are worse off. This leave some ambiguous situations in which changes might improve the well-being of some group members while harming others, but in those cases, if one wants to say something about the group’s welfare, any conclusions must be based on a comparison of the value of the gains to some people against the losses to others.