Quotes of the week

As soon as you crack your knuckles and open up a comments page, you just canceled your subscription to being a good person.--Louie C.K.

Manipulated by the media, voting their pocketbooks, supporting sectional interests or monofocal issues, voters in America and other Western democracies do not show very great signs of transcendent wisdom. Worse, we labor under the delusion (indeed, we foster the delusion) that somehow things will be all right provided lots of people vote. Our system of government is our new Tower of Babel: it is supposed to make us impregnable. The Soviet empire totters; other nations crumble into the dust, Balkanized, destroyed by civil war, tribal genocide, grinding poverty, endemic corruption, Marxist or some other ideology. Not us. We belong to a democracy, “rule by the people.”--Don Carson

Monetarism is not — nor did it appear to policy makers in the 1970s to be — a laissez-faire program.  Rather, it is a program for government control of economic volatility.--Michael Clune

Devote your life to something you love — not like, but love.--Gene Siskel

Justin Wolfers swings

and misses. I believe he is trying to get us all to believe that Larry Summers has had a bigger influence in the field of economics than F.A. Hayek (and, in my comment, he infers that Summers looms larger James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Jesus Christ in the history of the dismal science).

Surprising; I hope this is a rare occurrence.

UPDATE: Bill Easterly observes:

Hayek knew that the Right was hypocritical about individual rights as much as the Left. The latter dictates what you can’t do in the market, the former wants to dictate almost everything else.

Although Wolfers doesn’t do this, many readers of his blog will fall for that classic trick, the Reverse Ideological Rejection: because ideologues like Hayek, therefore I should (ideologically) reject Hayek. This is in the same class as “Hitler liked Wagner’s Ring, therefore I should hate Wagner’s Ring.”

It’s sad that Hayek has been the victim of so many violations of the intellectual freedom for which he was one of the most eloquent and courageous spokesmen ever.

UPDATE: Tyler throws a chiding tsk-tsk.

UPDATE: David Skarbek puts Wolfers down with a single jab. Will Wolfers be able to get back up?

UPDATE: Jacob Levy counts coup, too.