… is from pages 200-201 of Johan Norberg’s excellent 2023 book, The Capitalist Manifesto:
Politicians who fund a certain technology steer resources away from the innovation and industry that would otherwise have happened. And why would they know better than millions of financiers, companies, researchers, and consumers what will work?
DBx: Yes. And note that the point here isn’t that private market actors don’t make mistakes. They do, often. But not only do private market actors have powerful incentives to acknowledge their mistakes as quickly as possible (private market actors are, after all, spending their own money), the competition among simultaneously occurring market experiments – that competitive process itself – is a far better source of knowledge than are the ruminations and theories of politicians and pundits about what combinations of resources do, and which do not, improve human well-being.
