Charlie Rose

REMant  01/12/2010 10:17 PM Report

Suppose that global warming causes seismic activity all by itself? Suppose that ppl are more likely to blame others for doing things to ppl, such as hitting them with a car, than they are to blame ppl for exposing themselves to danger, as in walking in the street drunk? Suppose the desire to help ppl, hurts them? The last's been the bias of microeconomists since at least Adam Smith. If you are an economics major and fail to come away with that idea, you deserve an F. It also forms the basis of the "public choice" school of economics, with which this year's Nobel prize-winner Elinor Ostrom is associated, an irony of sorts in itself. Sociologists Philip Rieff and Christopher Lasch (also Robert Merton and Erving Goffman, and Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault) spent a lot of time showing that interventions in schools, families, etc, are frequently the cause of the problems they attempt to cure, taken up notoriously by libertarian Charles Murray in Losing Ground. The same can likely be applied to most progressive issues, all of which are still with us, including the environment, and, of course, progressivism is what is behind political correctness. It is that kind of hypocrisy that Mandeville targeted long ago.

NB- When ppl say, as they commonly do, that Smith means to say that greed is good, they are wrong, and it is only that he is saying that true self-interest will result in the greatest happiness of all, if you will, as a defense of the idea of a self-organizing society, which he needed to oppose mercantilism. In his eyes, it was the mercantilists who were greedy. Likewise the interpretation that Mandeville meant to say the same, is wrong as well, and forgets that he says at the end of the Fable that he prefers being poor and honest. What he is saying is that it is hypocritical to criticize the current (mercantilist) society, when you are living off of it. Smith borrows his ideas from Mandeville, as much as, from the Physiocrat republicans in France.