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An entry yesterday on Markets and Cooperation quoted Don Boudreaux, Chairman of George Mason University's econ department. Here is another Boudreaux saying that I quite like:
Perhaps the single greatest flaw of politics is that it encourages people to behave romantically rather than realistically — to confuse intentions with results. To dream is marvelous, wonderful, human; but to dream without constraint and regard to reality is to turn dreams into nightmares. This is worthy to stand with my all-time favorite quotation about the regulatory mind-set: Alan Furst's description of Soviet revolutionaries during the 1920s and the catastrophes of agricultural collectivization:
[F]or twelve years -- until 1929, when Stalin finally took over -- he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic intellectual[s] . . . actually ran things, quite literally, a country of the mind. Theories failed; peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer. (Dark Star, p.60) Whenever I read proposals to collectivize the production of IP, I think of this quotation -- especially the part about the "land itself dried up in despair."
posted by James DeLong @ 8:31 AM | General
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