Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 122 of F.A. Hayek’s March 9th 1976 Daily Telegraph essay, “Adam Smith (1723-1790): His Message in Today’s Language,” as this essay is reprinted in the 1991 collection, The Trend of Economic Thinking, which is Vol. 3 in The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

And if we persevere in the atavism and, following the inherited instincts of the tribe, insist upon imposing upon the great society principles which presuppose the knowledge of all the particular circumstances which in that society the chief could know, back to the tribal society we shall go.

DBx: No name of an ideology is more ironic than is “progressivism.” Progressives, always seeking ever-more conscious control over social and economic processes, do not understand that such control is possible only by reducing the range of consequences of human actions to that which can be observed and understood by the conscious human mind. But to so diminish the range of consequences of human action would be to dramatically shrink society, literally, to the size of a pre-historic tribe. Such is the logical end-point of so-called “progressivism.”