Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 220-221 of my late Nobel-laureate James Buchanan’s “Morals, Politics, and Institutional Reform: Diagnosis and Prescription,” which is chapter 5.1 in James M. Buchanan and Richard A. Musgrave, Public Finance and Public Choice: Two Contrasting Visions of the State (1999):

This terrible century has done much more than bear witness to the tragic failures of collectivist control over personal lives. In the process of those failed experiments, valuable social capital was allowed to depreciate, capital that was represented in personal attitudes of independence, obeying laws, self-reliance, hard work, self-confidence, a sense of permanence, trust, mutual respect, and tolerance. This capital has been eroded only to be replaced by attitudes that embody irresponsibility, dependency, differential exploitation, opportunistic advantage seeking, short-run hedonism, legal trimming, litigation, mistrust, and intolerance, especially for the “politically incorrect.”