Supply Creating Its Own Demand
11 January 2009
Editor, The Washington Times
Dear Editor:
Joseph Carrigan is understandably disturbed that President-elect Obama predicts doom if a new "stimulus" plan isn't enacted (Letters, January 11). Alas, Mr. Obama is simply following his profession's code of conduct. What H.L. Mencken astutely observed back in 1918 is no less real in 2009: "Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."*
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
* H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (New York: Knopf, 1918), p. 53.
Editor, The Washington Times
Dear Editor:
Joseph Carrigan is understandably disturbed that President-elect Obama predicts doom if a new "stimulus" plan isn't enacted (Letters, January 11). Alas, Mr. Obama is simply following his profession's code of conduct. What H.L. Mencken astutely observed back in 1918 is no less real in 2009: "Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."*
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
* H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (New York: Knopf, 1918), p. 53.
Posted by Don Boudreaux on
Monday June 1, 2009 at 8:21am