[Treoblogging] Cafe Hayek quotes Thomas Sowell, restating a common free-market argument thus:
"[T]he thinking of the classical economist was not only a radical break from landmark intellectual figures like Plato and Machiavelli but also from mainstream thinking to this day." The notion of a self-equilibrating system -- the market economy -- meant a reduced role for intellectuals and politicians, he says. "And even today many still haven't accepted that their superior wisdom might be superfluous, if not damaging." [The bit outside quotation marks is the WSJ's paraphrase.]
But are the interventions of policymakers into the workings of the "self-equilibrating" economy really any more fraught with error than, say, the interventions of doctors into the workings of the "self-equilibrating" human body? Should we dispense with surgery merely because it "might be" damaging?
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