Look: I am eager to learn stuff I don't know--which requires actively courting and posting smart disagreement.

But as you will understand, I don't like to post things that mischaracterize and are aimed to mislead.

-- Brad Delong

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Monday, August 12, 2013

Quote of the Day

Peter Dorman at Econospeak has some fun playing "guess who?" with this quote"
Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another.  In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority.

I certainly didn't know, and I won't spoil it it by revealing the author, who you can easily identify via teh googly.

And, though I am in full agreement with this quote, considering the author, it does strike me as ranking rather high on the irony scale.


2 comments:

BadTux said...

The source didn't surprise me at all, because this is a classic Libertarian argument for why democracy has not created Libertopia. This is the root premise of their "tyranny of the majority" argument, which is that democracy is tyranny. Because, apparently, a minority forcing their will upon a majority is freedom, in Libertopia. Or somethin' like that.

- Badtux the Non-Libertopian Penguin

Jazzbumpa said...

Yeah -

And it explains the 2010 midterms.

When I look at this quote, I see conservatives in general, the religious right in particular, and in fact the libertarians, who believe in abstract concepts that are unrelated to the real world.

Hence the irony.

JzB