{"id":35329,"date":"2018-03-30T01:00:24","date_gmt":"2018-03-30T05:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35329"},"modified":"2018-03-10T09:08:35","modified_gmt":"2018-03-10T14:08:35","slug":"qotd-progressive-eugenicists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/30\/qotd-progressive-eugenicists\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: “Progressive” eugenicists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although their ethics were appalling, \u201cProgressive\u201d eugenicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries at least got their economic analysis correct: they understood that forcibly raising employers\u2019 cost of employing certain kinds of labor would reduce the quantity of that labor that is employed. This correct economic understanding was at the foundation of these \u201cProgressives’\u201d support for minimum wages; these \u201cProgressives\u201d explicitly wanted<\/em> to keep people that they regarded as \u2018undesirable\u2019 from working.<\/p>\n

I say (and believe) that these \u201cProgressives’\u201d ethics were appalling. Yet I\u2019m quite sure that they<\/em> did not see themselves as monsters. They surely believed themselves to be enlightened, humane, and highly ethical. They believed that they worked for a larger cause \u2013 \u201csocial reform\u201d \u2013 and saw eugenics, minimum wages, and other uses of state force as progressive means of improving humankind through social engineering. One lesson here is that people convinced that they have a mission to improve society by helping forcibly to re-arrange that society so that it conforms to some pre-conceived image are dangerous brutes (if ones that wear suits<\/a>) whose brutality is hidden from them by their consciously held good intentions and masked from their contemporaries, ironically, by the grand scale (\u2018society\u2019) upon which they propose to implement their schemes. (If Bill pokes a gun at his neighbor Betty and threatens to shoot Betty if she pays any of her workers less than $7.25 per hour, Bill is rightly recognized as a brute who belongs in prison. Yet if Bill persuades a uniformed and well-armed gang to threaten to shoot, not just Betty, but everyone in the state who employs workers at wages lower than $7.25 per hour, Bill is celebrated as a humane social reformer who belongs in public office. It\u2019s damn bizarre.)<\/p>\n

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the day…”, Caf\u00e9 Hayek<\/em><\/a>, 2016-07-16.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although their ethics were appalling, \u201cProgressive\u201d eugenicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries at least got their economic analysis correct: they understood that forcibly raising employers\u2019 cost of employing certain kinds of labor would reduce the quantity of that labor that is employed. This correct economic understanding was at the foundation of these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,7,41],"tags":[783,96,1020],"class_list":["post-35329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","tag-eugenics","tag-minimumwage","tag-progressives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9bP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35330,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35329\/revisions\/35330"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}