Via Don Boudreaux at Café Hayek:
… It is probably no exaggeration to say that economics developed mainly as the outcome of the investigation and refutation of successive Utopian proposals – if by “Utopian” we mean proposals for the improvement of undesirable effects of the existing system, based upon a complete disregard of those forces which actually enabled it to work.
The cite is also quoted from Boudreaux’s post:
From page 19 of Hayek’s 1933 essay “The Trend of Economic Thinking,” reprinted in F.A. Hayek, The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 17-34.
Note that this quote is now nearly 80 years old. That’s how long ago people recognized that the sort of economic nonsense that politicians use to appeal to voters was a problem.
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