Beware the World Changers!

Jason Brennan at Bleeding Heart Libertarians HERE  posts on a debate he has with Ross Levatter HERE http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/libertarianism-thought-experiments

I extract this statement from Jason with which I agree:

“Libertarianism doesn’t follow from fundamental principles or axioms that are not open to question. Rather, to get to libertarianism, if you are at all sensitive to consequences, you need to make a series of empirical arguments about how institutions work. Now, in light of existing social science, it’s pretty clear that large-scale economies need to be run fundamentally on market principles. But it’s highly controversial to what extent government should supplement, enhance, regulate, or supplant markets in order to generate what consequence-sensitive libertarians would themselves agree are better outcomes.”

Comment

I prefer Adam Smith’s approach as a moral philosopher – “observe everything, do nothing” (History of Astronomy) as opposed to Marx’s later call: “The purpose is not to understand the world but to change the it”, because the world-changers always make things worse (no exceptions), particularly when they impose their utopian changes upon the rest of us.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions!