Cafe HayekCafe Hayek - where orders emerge - Article Feed

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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 11 Aug 2020 02:15 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 256 of Joseph Epstein’s June 2015 essay “The
Conversationalist” as this essay is reprinted (and retitled as “Michael
Oakeshott”) in the 2018 collection of some of Epstein’s essays titled The
Ideal of Culture:

The problem, Oakeshott felt, was not only that “politics is an
uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others”
but that those it attracts are, too often, unimpressive human beings. At
one point he calls them “scoundrels.” What isn’t required, but is too often
evident, in politics is “manufacturing curable grievances.”

DBx: Or worse: manufacturing incurable grievances that people can be duped
into mistakenly thinking are curable by the highnmighty.




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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 10 Aug 2020 02:01 PM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 56 of the late Hans Rosling’s 2018 book, Factfulness:

The misconception that the world is getting worse is very difficult to
maintain when we put the present in historical context.

DBx: Regular readers of this blog know how deeply I agree with the point
made here by Rosling. But only time will tell how much damage will be done
to humanity by its insane self-immolation in response to covid. That
humankind was, as of mid-March 2020, much wealthier than it had ever been
and headed for still more and more-widely-shared prosperity can hardly be
doubted by anyone familiar with the historical record. (Those unfamiliar
with this record can improve their knowledge by reading the Rosling book
quoted here. Or Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. Or Johan Norberg’s
Progress. Or Edmund Phelps’s Mass Flourishing. Or Angus Deaton’s The Great
Escape. Or Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Or Deirdre McCloskey’s Why
Liberalism Works. Or, better yet, by reading all of these books. And spend
time at HumanProgress.org.)

But the collective insanity of the past few months the sheeplike
willingness of ordinary people to endure draconian restrictions on their
freedoms and the media’s uncritical embrace of such draconianism the
propensity to be frightened to the point of losing the human ability to
recognize the need to make trade-offs reveal to me just how very thin is
the layer of good sense and sound institutions that protect modernity.

I want to believe that any day now humanity will come to its senses and
return to normal a development that would feature sensible precautions to
protect those persons who remain in real danger because of covid. I long to
believe that, say, five years from now we’ll all look back on 2020 as an
exception to recent-history’s rule of progress. Yet I fear that we might
not at least not within my lifetime or that of my son witness a
restoration of enough of the liberal ideas and institutions that are
necessary to sustain progress and to protect ordinary people from the
tyrants who are always eager to prey on them.

I am not necessarily predicting this horrendous outcome, but now I would
not be surprised if it comes to pass.




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