Notable Quote - Matt Ridley - Granite Grok

Notable Quote – Matt Ridley

[T]oday few people appreciate just how similar the arguments made by Smith and Darwin are.  Generally, Adam Smith is championed by the political right, Charles Darwin more often by the left.  In, say, Texas, where Smith’s emergent, decentralised economics is all the rage, Darwin is frequently reviled for his contradiction of dirigiste creation.  In the average British university, by contrast, you will find fervent believers in the emergent, decentralised properties of genomes and ecosystems who yet demand dirigiste policy to bring order to the economy and society.  But if life needs no intelligent designer, then why should the market need a central planner?  Where Darwin defenestrated God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.  Society, he said, is a spontaneously ordered phenomenon.  And Smith faces the same baffled incredulity – How can society work for the good of all without direction? – that Darwin faces.

-Matt Ridley ( The Evolution of Everything)

And then Socialists of all spectrums, like Bernie and Hillary, come along and screw up that “spontaneously ordered” society.  After watching Venezuela, the richest country in South America in terms of natural resources, implode from Socialism like all other Socialist / Communist countries in the past, why do they persist in thinking “WE are the right people to put it right”?

Oh yeah, hubris to think they are smart smarter smartest.

We all know better – unlike them, we’ve studied history.  And now they’re no Einsteins.

(H/T: Cafe Hayek)

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