Tom Bernhardt on progressivism

The progressive movement has been a continual blight on mankind for way too long.  It's brought us Prohibition, eugenics, Federal Reserve, income taxation, WW I, and so many other horrors.  It stems from some theological-type notion of human plasticity and perfectibility to be molded by enlightened central planners.  It appeals to the hubris of the intellectual classes in academia, journalism, law, politics and now Big Tech.

~ Tom Bernhardt, Facebook post, February 18, 2021

Friedrich Hayek on the role of the economist: "gardener, not craftsman"

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in [economics], as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.  He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success," to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

~ Friedrich Hayek, Nobel Prize speech, December 11, 1974

Irving Fisher on the role of the elites and need for scientific management

The world consists of two classes - the educated and the ignorant - and it is essential for progress that the former should be allowed to dominate the latter.  But once we admit that it is proper for the instructed classes to give tuition to the uninstructed, we begin to see an almost boundless vista for possible human betterment.

~ Irving Fisher, "Why has the Doctrine of Laissez Faire been Abandoned?," Science, 1907, p. 20



(Cited in "The Great Depression: Mises vs. Fisher" by Mark Thornton, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, p. 239, November 25, 2008

Murray Rothbard on scientism

The key to scientism is its denial of the existence of individual consciousness and will.  This takes two main forms: applying mechanical analogies from the physical sciences to individual men, and applying organismic analogies to such fictional collective wholes as “society.”  The latter course attributes consciousness and will, not to individuals, but to some collective organic whole of which the individual is merely a determined cell.  Both methods are aspects of the rejection of individual consciousness.

~ Murray Rothbard, "What is the Proper Way to Study Man?," Mises.org, December 28, 2016

[Originally appeared as a chapter in Scientism and Values, Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1960). Excerpted from Economic Controversies.]

Murray Rothbard on applying the methodology of the physical sciences to economics

Scientism is the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action. Both fields of inquiry must, it is true, be studied by the use of reason—the mind’s identification of reality. But then it becomes crucially important, in reason, not to neglect the critical attribute of human action: that, alone in nature, human beings possess a rational consciousness. Stones, molecules, planets cannot choose their courses; their behavior is strictly and mechanically determined for them. Only human beings possess free will and consciousness: for they are conscious, and they can, and indeed must, choose their course of action. To ignore this primordial fact about the nature of man—to ignore his volition, his free will—is to misconstrue the facts of reality and therefore to be profoundly and radically unscientific.

~ Murray Rothbard, "What is the Proper Way to Study Man?," Mises.org, December 28, 2016

[Originally appeared as a chapter in Scientism and Values, Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1960).]

Nassim Taleb on confusing the social science of economics with the physical sciences

It was confidently believed that the scientific successes of the industrial revolution could be carried through into the social sciences, particularly with such movements as Marxism.  Pseudoscience came with a collection of idealistic nerds who tried to create a tailor-made society, the epitome of which is the central planner.  Economics was the most likely candidate for such use of science; you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations, and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment.

~ Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, 2nd Edition, p. 108