Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 479 of the late, great Armen Alchian‘s penetrating 1975 essay “An Introduction to Confusion,” as reprinted in The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian (2006), Volume 1 (“Choice and Cost Under Uncertainty”; Daniel K. Benjamin, ed.); this essay is Alchian’s insightful response to the Final Report of the Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation:

We have needs, requirements, demands – depending on the price. Anyone who ignores these facts of life is irresponsibly playing  a dangerous and expensive game. He is increasing society‘s problems. The way he conceals these facts of life is to talk of a need or requirement as if it were a natural, unique, given quantity – independent of the cost or price of getting more.

DBx: Yes. And we have here yet further insight into why attempts to bring about greater prosperity by engineering an economy are doomed to fail.