In the natural sciences, some checks exist on the prolonged acceptance of nutty ideas, which do not hold up well under experimental and observational tests and cannot readily be shown to give rise to useful working technologies. But in economics and the other social studies, nutty ideas may hang around for centuries. Today, leading presidential candidates and tens of millions of voters in the USA embrace ideas that might have been drawn from a 17th-century book on the theory and practice of mercantilism, and multitudes of politicians and ordinary people espouse notions that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others exploded more than two centuries ago. In these realms, nearly everyone simply believes whatever he feels good about believing.
anarcho-capitalism
anarchy
ancap
austrian-school-of-economics
coercion
collectivism
communism
crazy
delusion
dumb
dumbing-down
elections
evil
free-market
freedom
government
idiocracy
idiots
laissez-faire
libertarian
liberty
mental
non-aggression-principle
politics
population
retarded
socialism
statism
voluntaryism
vote
voting
About This Quote
About Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs was a contemporary American economic historian. Robert Higgs is an American economic historian and economist. He is known for research on the growth of the United States government, especially the ratchet effect, the idea that state power expands during wars and other crises and only partly recedes afterward, which he developed in Crisis and Leviathan (1987). Read more on Wikipedia →