Chesterton quote-of-the-day (on economics and public policy)

Normally that normal person is urged by a natural force, which costs nothing and does not require a salary; the force of natural affection for his young, which exists even among the animals. If you cut off that natural force, and substitute a paid bureaucracy, you are like a fool who should pay men to turn the wheel of his mill, because he refused to use wind or water which he could get for nothing. You are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering-can, while holding up an umbrella to keep off the rain.

--The Thing (hat tip: Tim Bayly)

It reminds me of an Adam Smith quote:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or the strong prejudices which may oppose it: he seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on eerily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.


These quotes both points to some of the difficulties with government policy. First, philosophically, you're forcing people to do stuff. Second, practically, you're forcing people to do stuff they don't want to do.

It also reminds me of Charles Murray's discussion of "platoons" (borrowing from Burke)-- relatively small affiliations of people who voluntarily gather to take care of various social concerns and interests. Government policy often displaces these platoons-- sometimes intentionally; oftentimes not. The resulting society is often impoverished materially, spiritually, and so on.