… is from page 78 of the 2011 revised and enlarged edition of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 book Intellectuals and Society (footnote deleted):
Although businesses produce most of the things that make up the standard of living in a modern society, there is remarkably little interest among the intelligentsia in a causal analysis of the things that promote or inhibit the production of output on which everyone’s economic well-being ultimately depends. Instead, business issues are often approached as moral melodramas, starring the anointed intelligentsia on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. As Theodore Roosevelt put it, in accepting the Progressive Party’s nomination for President of the United States in 1912, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Business men were a special target: “Whenever in any business the prosperity of the business man is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen ad charging an excessive price to the consumers, we wish to interfere and stop such practices.
In other words, third party observers, usually without any business experience or (like TR) with no successful business experience, can somehow determine what prices are “excessive” and what wages are too low – and make their uninformed beliefs determine the law of the land.
DBx: Yep.
Randomly pick a protectionist or advocate of industrial policy. In doing so you’ll almost certainly have identified an individual who arrogantly supposes that, because economic reality doesn’t conform closely to what he or she imagines is ideal, reality is so out-of-kilter that force is justified as a means of engineering reality to conform with particular fancies of the arrogant individual.
The vast majority of such arrogant people are unfamiliar with the economic way of thinking and have no understanding of spontaneous order. They see only what is seen by third-graders, and mistake their mix of mental images and good intentions for a license to push the rest of us around, at the point of a gun if necessary. Their arrogance is as breath-taking as is the ignorance from which that arrogance springs.
