Kahneman & Krueger: What the Left Has Planned For You Next

Roll over, Adam Smith. You said that we can trust the self-interested actions of individuals to benefit others. You said that an "invisible hand" guides markets, meaning that they did not require government control. But some of your economist descendants now claim that the self-interested actions of individuals do not even benefit themselves. Instead, government should intervene to make sure that individual choice serves to promote subjective well-being...., Don't Worry, Be Happy -- Or Else, Arnold Kling, TCSDaily.com, 4/19/2006

Those who believe statism, or dirigism, or whatever you want to call it -- we call it socialism here, never read or had an idea about intervention in personal choice that didn't tempt them to advocate it in Congress, a regulatory agency, or to a President willing to substitute executive orders for the risk of submitting a program to Congress. Arnold King at TCSDaily.com, James Glassman's mighty blog, has caught them at it again in his lengthy discussion of Alan Krueger and Daniel Kahneman's study of subjective well-being (we sometimes call this "happiness").

I am not altogether sympathetic to Krueger and Kahneman. In fact, you may think that the totalitarian examples I have come up with are an unfair distortion of their work. They merely claimed to be "interested in maximizing society's welfare." Hasn't that always been the goal of economists?...Indeed most economists, with the exception of the Austrian school, have seen the economist as an adviser to government...Don't Worry..., continued, Kling, TCSDaily.com

Merely claimed to be interested in maximizing society's welfare--isn't this where we came in? The movie gets old but, like a certain class of Hollywood producers, leftist economists always pitch the same story: we can do it better than you; you are too stupid to choose for yourself; we are wise men (and women too!) and you must accept our gifts or, if unwilling to do so, our generous offer to send you to the Netherlands to be put to sleep for good. And just to make sure we get support from the people, we are making our recommendations required reading (along with sexual training for kindergarteners) in public schools or in any school accredited in the United States. Just try to stop us, fiendish savage of the right! We have your name and number...etc.

There's a 747 leaving for Antarctica; put these idiots on it and have them study the behavior of penguins. Better yet, alter them genetically to become penguins. Then they can applaud each other and bark without the bother of having to conduct "scientific" studies.

Luther