(Don Boudreaux)
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… is from page 85 of George Will’s 2019 excellent book, The Conservative Sensibility:
Note a contradiction in progressivism that has become steadily more severe in the century since [Woodrow] Wilson wrote. Progressivism has no objection to steady enlargement of the “conceptions of state duty.” Quite the contrary, such enlargement is the progressive agenda – the expansion of the central government’s supervision of society’s complexities. But as solicitous government permeates society with its superintending, society responds in an inconvenient way. As government’s interests multiply, so do interest groups. As government seeks to supplement and even supplant market forces in the allocation of wealth and opportunity, there is a corresponding and commensurate multiplication of factions determined to influence the action of activist government.
DBx: Yes – and, of course, also an increasingly large number of conservatives are now guilty of this same contradiction.
Published on January 22, 2020 03:38
