Uncivilized people, children, violent criminals – these are people whose first instinct is to demand the seemingly simple solution of brute force to all problems, real and unreal. But there’s surprisingly little difference between the base, instinctive attraction to force of such people and the base, instinctive attraction to force of academics, “activists,” pundits, and politicians who, dissatisfied with some aspect of the world, immediately propose to use force to remedy the problem. Awareness of the great potential for society to progress undesigned, organically, bottom-up, spontaneously, piecemeal through a marvelously complex process of multitudinous tiny mutual adjustments – that is, awareness of the only process by which society has in fact progressed from subsistence and incivility to prosperity and civilization – is lost on the advocates of force, the most intellectually celebrated of whom call themselves (irony of irony) “Progressives.”
– Dr. Don Boudreaux, Professor of Economics and Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University
(and proprietor of Cafe Hayek, a daily read)
