Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 158-159 of Robert Higgs’s excellent 2012 book Delusions of Power:

No perceived social or economic problem seemed out of bounds in this cacophonous new political environment [in which LBJ proposed his Great Society]. Faith in the government’s ability to solve social and economic problems reached a new high. Regardless of the nature of the problem – racial antipathy, unemployment, illiteracy, poor nutrition, inadequate housing, workplace accidents, insufficient cultivation of the arts, unsightly roadsides, environmental pollution, and a thousand other real and perceived problems spanning the full range of social and economic life – both intellectual elites and the mass public agreed in large part that the solution took the same general form: the federal government should “do something,” or if the government were already engaged in dealing with a problem, it should act more vigorously or on a larger scale. In particular, in one way or another it should spend more money.