I read two great interviews recently - The Shah Always Falls, American Heritage's interview of military intellectual Ralph Peters, and The Experimental Economist, Reason's interview of economist Vernon Smith, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Their writings resonate very closely with my personal beliefs about government's role in society and the value of Western ideals, particularly the ideals of the United States as compared to other societies around the world. In fact, the following two quotes succintly state the fundamental premise(s) of my political philosophy:
I believe that perhaps our greatest advantage is a tradition that grew up over centuries, that we inherited from England. This is our tradition of openness to new information, of respect for empirical data, and of resistance to theoretical constructs other than those generated within the scientific community. Theoretical constructs did fantastic damage to Europe in the twentieth century, and much of the rest of the world lives in a fantasy land. They do not have our ingrained, hard-learned ability to separate fact from fiction. We have our myths, but we’re not paralyzed by them, and we question them. There are many ways you can divide the world, but I think one of the more useful ways is between factualizing societies and mythologizing societies. Listen to our enemies’ rhetoric. They’re in love with their myths of themselves, both old myths and relatively recent ones, and they’re myths of self-justification.For me, libertarianism is tied to a certain set of recognitions: that all organizations have the problem of decentralized information, that decentralized mechanisms are the best way to organize that information to produce good outcomes, and that the best results come when the individual is free to make his or her own tradeoffs while aggregating information. That’s true whether we’re talking about politics or economics or even social interaction. The best systems maximize the freedom of the individual, subject to the constraint of others in the system.
- Vernon Smith
As I looked at these two quotes side by side, I realized that despite their differences, both can be aptly summarized as "In theory, Communism works. In theory."
And so here we are.
Posted by Stephen Bronstein at February 7, 2003 08:10 PM