All Posts Tagged With: "social engineering"

Eugenics: Progressivism’s Ultimate Social Engineering

According to the received account of the Progressive Era, an enlightened government swept in and regulated markets for goods, labor, and capital, thereby protecting the hapless masses from the vicissitudes of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. The Progressives had faith that experts would rise above self-interest and implement wise plans to create a great society. The resulting [...]

21Sep2011 | and and Art Carden | 21 comments | Continued

Taylorism, Progressivism, and Rule by Experts

The Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century—the doctrine from which the main current of modern liberalism developed—is sometimes erroneously viewed as an “anti-business” philosophy. It was anti-market to be sure, but by no means necessarily anti-business. Progressivism was, more than anything, managerialist. The American economy after the Civil War became increasingly dominated [...]

24Aug2011 | Kevin A. Carson | 13 comments | Continued

The Fiasco of Prohibition

The national prohibition of alcohol, initiated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and enforced via the Volstead Act, stands as an important illustration of the limits to social engineering. Prohibition failed to eliminate alcohol, and even exacerbated many of the social ills related to its consumption, because government is limited both by its knowledge [...]

22Dec2010 | Douglas Rogers | 19 comments | Continued

The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia

Throughout the 1930s the propaganda machines of the Nazi and Soviet regimes did all in their power to insist that they were ideological enemies, diametrically opposed to each other in every conceivable way. There were critics of totalitarianism who emphasized the similarities in the two systems, but theirs was a minority view among many intellectuals, [...]

9Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Diversity in America: Keeping the Government at a Safe Distance

According to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a blastula is “a structure, frequently a hollow sphere, formed by the cells of an embryo after cleavage of the ovum and before gastrulation.” Gastrulation, in turn, is “inward migration of the cells of the blastula.” I looked this up after reading the second paragraph of Peter [...]

7Jul2010 | Peter Wood | 0 comments | Continued

Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media . . .

In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith explained the three forces at work against the establishment and maintenance of economic freedom. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith warned of the arrogance and danger of what he called “the man of system,” or the social engineer, who presumes to redesign man and society [...]

6Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Stimulate the Catallaxy?

Last fall and winter’s brouhaha over the so-called economic stimulus package got me thinking about how far off target most people are when they talk about “the economy.” To hear the politicians and commentators tell it, the economy is a big machine located somewhere in Washington, D.C. That machine requires a skilled operator, and elections [...]

1Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

Benjamin Friedman is a professor of political economy and a former chairman of the economics department at Harvard University. He is also an unswerving advocate of the interventionist welfare state. His recent book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, is meant to demonstrate what is necessary to assure that the majority of the people will [...]

18May2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Corruption in Government? Shocking!

It’s funny how the people who push hardest for government intervention in more and more areas are the first to gripe that everything has become politicized. What were they expecting? Did they forget that government is a political institution? Paul Krugman and Chris Matthews, among other Progressives, are apoplectic because two senators of the minority [...]

20Apr2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | Continued

The Census: Vehicle for Social Engineering

In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott commented on the role played by census data in the rise of the modern State: “If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are imagining a state [...]

19Apr2010 | Wendy McElroy | 1 comment | Continued

Liberty versus Social Engineering

So David Brooks, the New York Times‘ resident conservative intellectual, must think he’s a pretty clever fellow. In trying to characterize “the choices we face on issue after issue,” he presumes to enlist the aid of philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and David Hume (1711-1776). Considering that Bentham believed human beings could consciously design society and [...]

9Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

TGIF: Liberty versus Social Engineering

So David Brooks, the New York Times‘ resident conservative intellectual, must think he’s a pretty clever fellow. In trying to characterize “the choices we face on issue after issue,” he presumes to enlist the aid of philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and David Hume (1711-1776). Considering that Bentham believed human beings could consciously design society and [...]

9Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Monsieur Bastiat, Call Your Office

Tomorrow I’ll lecture at the Liberty Weekend Dedicated to Frédéric Bastiat, sponsored by the Polish-American Foundation for Economic Research and Education (PAFERE) in Warsaw. Preparing for my visit, I reread  Bastiat’s great book The Law (online in PDF format here and for sale here). Oh do we need Bastiat today! The Law is the kind [...]

18Sep2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued
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Lost in Transcription

Following rules, such as the rules of language, of the market, or of just conduct, is more about “knowing how” than “knowing that.” This is a lesson taught by many important thinkers, among them, Gilbert Ryle (who used these terms in the title of chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind), F. A. Hayek, and [...]

1Dec2008 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Bailing Out Statism

The key to understanding the saga of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the newly nationalized twin government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that dominate home financing—is this: They were created—intentionally—to distort the housing and mortgage markets. That is, government planners were not content to let voluntary exchange and spontaneous market forces configure those industries unmolested. So—holding the taxpayers hostage—they [...]

1Dec2008 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

China’s One-Child Disaster

On February 28 a Reuters news story quoted Zhao Baige, the Chinese vice minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC), as indicating that the People’s Republic of China might change its “one-child policy.” That population-control policy limits the number of children Chinese couples are legally permitted to have. The default number is [...]

1Jun2008 | Wendy McElroy | 5 comments | Continued

A Department of Homeland Happiness Security? Only if We Want to Be Unhappy!

Richard Ebeling (rebeling@fee.org) is the president of FEE. It is more than 230 years since Adam Smith observed that each individual is a better judge of how best to apply his productive efforts than any statesman who would direct the economic activities of the citizenry. Furthermore, Smith said, any such power “would nowhere be so [...]

1Mar2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued
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