Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 13 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One [original emphasis]:

The feeling that government should “do something” has seldom been based on a comparison of what actually happens when government does and when it does not “do something.” Doing something almost always seems like such a good idea, to those who do not look beyond stage one, that they see no need to look back at history or to apply economics. The alternative to a “do something” approach is not to have the government always do absolutely nothing but, rather, to recognize that governments can only do something specific – and that these specifics must be assessed in terms of their specific effects, both immediate and long-term, as well as the general effects of extended experimentation.