Tom Woods has a terrific article today in which he jousts with Jacob Weisberg of Slate. Weisberg is all hot and bothered that some Americans reject the notion that government officials (and even EXPERTS) should control most of the decision-making. Woods bashes him around like a pinata.
What we have here is, as Sowell puts it, a conflict of visions. People like Weisberg don’t believe in spontaneous order. They think that society requires a vast degree of conscious planning by people in authority; without it, everything falls apart. Woods and other libertarians understand that ordinary people do a very good job of making decisions and when we deliver power to politicians, we will get a lot of disastrous, society-wide mistakes.
Hey, Weisberg — could there have been a housing bubble if it weren’t for the foolish decisions of politicians?
