And So It’s Long Been

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Andy Kessler eloquently exposes as nonsense the assertions by many of today’s intellectuals that reality is whatever our words say it is – that, for example, bees are fish, puddles are navigable waters, and violent rioting is “mostly peaceful” (“Bees Are Fish and Other Fake Narratives,” June 20). Such intellectual chicanery, alas, is not new. In 1776 Adam Smith observed that “[t]here is nothing so absurd, says Cicero, which has not sometimes been asserted by some philosophers.”*

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981 [1776], page 876.