From the “Beneficent Paternalism” Department – you “children” aren’t up to being able to make intelligent decisions when faced with too many choices.
Related: No Prominent Republican Challenged the Ruling Class’s Continued Claim of Superior Insight
“Writing in The New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning columnist Paul Krugman offers a unified theory of everything wrong with America: We’re just too free to choose.”
…But the real kicker is [Nobel Economics Prize winner, Paul] Krugman’s contention that “an excess of choice is taking a psychological toll on many Americans, even when they don’t end up experiencing disaster.”
Nonsense. Krugman is pushing an only slightly more sophisticated version of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) complaints about the wide variety of deodorants available at any American supermarket. Or, if you prefer a more academic take, he’s peddling a warmed-over version of The Paradox of Choice, in which psychologist Barry Schwartz argued that a proliferation of choices “no longer liberates” but rather “debilitates” and “might even be said to tyrannize.”
That claim has been challenged in subsequent social experiments, including one that reviewed 50 experiments into “choice overload” and found no evidence to support the idea. In fact, a 2009 study found that increasing the number of choices actually leads to people making more reasonable—not riskier or more indulgent—choices, because it is more difficult to justify the outlandish option when so many sensible ones exist.
-Eric Boehm (Paul Krugman Thinks You’ll Be Happier With Fewer Choices. Nonsense.)
I had posted up about Bernie’s disdain about the number of choices that consumers had for deodorants back in 2015 in a post “But Socialists / Communists / Statists WANT you to not know history!“:
You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.
Now, he has the choice of three luxury homes from which to pick from at anyone time. Obama, a Socialist, said ““I Do Think At A Certain Point You’ve Made Enough Money”; now he’s worth 10s of millions of dollars. Socialists tend to be hypocrites when you get down to the bottom of their souls.
Like George Orwell’s 1984, they want you all to be historically ignorant so that the past can always be changed to meet the present and near future of their design. Doubt me? Start asking pointed questions to those under 30 years of age of what even happened over the last 20 years as well has last century.
Choice is the quantification of Freedom; being saying that for years. IMMEDIATELY when someone tells you “You don’t need that”, know that you are talking with a Progressive / Socialist that wishes to control your life. It’s a “tell” they just cannot hide with their overbearing sense of Moral Superiority as if they knew, just by looking at your, what you need and what you don’t.
Krugman, ensconced in his High Society dinners and speeches, exudes the same smugness about others.
Fine for me, cake for the rest of you.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
