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… is from pages 49-50 of the 1979 Liberty Fund edition of Hayek’s deep and profound and important 1952 book, The Counter-Revolution of Science:

But the concrete knowledge which guides the action of any group of people never exists as a consistent and coherent body.  It only exists in the dispersed, incomplete, and inconsistent form in which it appears in many individual minds, and the dispersion and imperfection of all knowledge are two of the basic facts from which the social sciences have to start.

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… is from George Will’s current column:

Leaving aside the seriousness of lawlessness, and the corruption of our civic culture by the professionally pious, this past week has been amusing.  There was the spectacle of advocates of an ever-larger regulatory government expressing shock about such government’s large capacity for misbehavior.

As Thomas Sowell reminds us, reality isn’t optional.  And humans are always human – even when they sport gaudy titles and win their jobs by persuading a majority of some group of voters to cast votes for them rather than for a different cast of hubris-lathered, self-important ruler-wannabes.

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Yesterday I delivered some brief introductory remarks at, and then participated in, a panel discussion entitled “Façade Capitalism and Its Threat to Human Rights” – which was expertly moderated by the Daily Beast‘s Michael Moynihan – at the Oslo Freedom Forum.  It was a great honor to do so.  Here are my remarks.

…………

An economy is capitalist in façade-only if much of the direction of resources in that economy is governed by something other than the free choices of consumers and the genuine competition of producers – competition both for customers and for resources to be used to produce what producers anticipate customers will demand.

Likewise, a society is free in façade-only if it is capitalist in façade-only.

The modern “liberal” – in America we increasingly say “Progressive” – ethos features two propositions relevant to the subject of this panel.  The first is that government intervention is a pernicious threat to liberty when exercised over “personal” or “civil” matters such as religious belief, speech, sexual practices, or participation in politics.

The second is that our liberty is somehow enhanced – or at least not threatened – by strong state or collective intervention into the economy.

I believe that the first of these propositions is absolutely valid.  I believe that the second – the one about the economy – is grossly mistaken.  And it’s mistaken in a way that is inconsistent with the very reasons for why the first proposition is valid.

Two facts support my belief.

Continue below the fold.

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Here’s a letter to Salon:

In your interview of Jaron Lanier you quote a passage from his book Who Owns the Future? – a book in which Mr. Lanier laments the modern economy’s facility at making available at very low costs many goods and services whose production in the past required a great deal of human labor: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion.  They even invented the first digital camera.  But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram.  When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.  Where did all those jobs disappear?  And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”  (“The Internet destroyed the middle class,” May 12).

Mr. Lanier sounds profound, I suppose, to people unfamiliar with history.  So let’s re-write Mr. Lanier’s prose just a bit in order to put his fears in historical context:

“At the height of its power, agriculture employed 90 percent of the population and produced output worth vastly more than half of U.S. GDP.  It even invented countless plant hybrids and animal breeds.  But today nearly all farms of the past have gone bankrupt (or, seeing the economic writing on the wall, were transformed to other uses).  Agriculture today employs only about one percent of the workforce.  Where did all those jobs disappear?  And what happened to the wealth that all those good agricultural jobs created?”

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

(For the pointer to the Salon piece on Lanier, I thank Steven McDuffie.)

By Mr. Lanier’s logic – and, to be fair, he’s hardly the only person who sees the world as he does – we’d all be made much wealthier if, suddenly, each gallon of water for human consumption had to be manufactured using many workers.

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… is from Book V, Chapter 2 – on page 876, Vol. 2, of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition – of Adam Smith’s 1776 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

There is nothing so absurd, says Cicero, which has not sometimes been asserted by some philosophers.

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NPR’s Planet Money asked a bunch of economists for their advice for new graduates. They used an excerpt of what I sent them. Here’s the whole thing:

Don’t take the job that pays the most money. Nothing wrong with money, but it’s the wrong criterion for choosing if you are fortunate to have a choice in this not-so-great job market. People often confuse economics with anything that is related to money as if the goal of economics is to make you rich. But the goal of economics is to help you get the most out of life. Money is part of that of course, but usually there are tradeoffs–the highest paying job has drawbacks. Don’t ignore those. So take the job that is the most rewarding in the fullest sense of the word. Sure, money matters. But so does how much you learn on the job, how much satisfaction it gives you and whether it lets you express your gifts. The ideal is to find a job you love that still lets you put food on the table and a roof over your head. You spend a lot of time at work. Don’t do something you hate or that deadens your soul just because it pays well.

Time is precious. One of the simplest but most important ideas of economics is the idea of opportunity cost–anything you do means not doing something else. Don’t spend all of your leisure on email and twitter and entertainment. Keep your brain growing. Listen to Planet Money. Read a novel. Take a cooking class or keep working at that musical instrument.

Finally remember the question Mary Oliver asks in her poem, The Summer Day:

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

You don’t have to answer that question today. Or even tomorrow. But time is precious. Find a way to use your gifts. If you don’t have any gifts, invest in finding some. If you have some, invest in improving them.

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EconTalk now is on Facebook. Please like us. And you can follow me, Russ, on Twitter, as EconTalker.

This week’s EconTalk is Austin Frakt talking about Medicaid and the Oregon Medicaid study. The Oregon Medicaid study is going to be a big issue going forward with the implementation of ObamaCare and the 2014 elections. I thought it was important to get educated. There will be a second podcast with Jim Manzi in a week or so with his take, which is quite different. Should be fun.

Scheduled for EconTalk in addition to Manzi will be Richard Epstein next week on the Constitution, Arnold Kling on the Three Languages of Politics (his Kindle single), Bruce Schneier on power and the internet, Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson on happiness studies, Dan Pallotta on the non-profit culture, Mike Munger on norms and law, and Morris Fiorina on the electorate. You can subscribe at iTunes or Stitcher as well as download individual episodes here.

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… is from page 261 of Robert Higgs’s indispensable 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan:

After the ideological transformation that took place during the Progressive Era, each genuine crisis has been the occasion for another ratchet toward Bigger Government.  The Progressive ideological imperative that government must “do something,” must take responsibility for resolving any perceived crisis, insures new actions.  The actions have unavoidable costs, which governments have an incentive to conceal by substituting coercive command-and-control devices for pecuniary fiscal-and-market means of carrying out their chosen policies.

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First Things‘s Matthew Schmitz says about yesterday’s Happy Mother’s Day tweet from the White House that “Something seems off here…”  Indeed something does, because something is.

Regardless of how you feel about birth control – whether you regard it to be sinful or, like me, find absolutely nothing remotely wrong with it – you should agree that for the White House to use the occasion of Mother’s Day to boast of its success at creating more free-feeders at the public trough and using taxpayer-funded birth control as its example reveals the perversion of values of the modern “Progressive.”  He or she is aghast if someone insists that people mature enough to be sexually active be held responsible for buying their own birth control – and equally aghast at those of us who wish to remain free to choose – pro-choice! – on how we spend our own money.

Once again: for the “Progressive,” to insist on spending your own money, and only your own money, is considered to be greedy and shallow; but to insist on spending other people’s money is considered to be selfless and enlightened.  Truly strange.