Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 212 of Virginia Postrel’s marvelous and more-relevant-than-ever 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies:

Once the rulers of a society – in a democracy, the citizenry – become hostile to decentralized, trial-and-error processes, legal institutions will change accordingly. The sclerosis [Joel] Mokyr fears comes not because dynamism destroys itself but because people abandon it, either because they do not understand what is at stake or because they do not care.

DBx: Until not very long ago, only American “progressives” longed to turn the U.S. economy into a version of the sclerotic and nannying European economy. Today, alas, this longing is now shared by many American conservatives.