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Bryan Caplan, in a photo taken last year. (Source).
History has more than enough inventors, businessmen, scientists, intellectuals, and philanthropists with zero blood on their hands to name every building, school, park, and theater in the world.
There's no need to name *anything* after politicians of any stripe - as if they don't already receive far more honor than they deserve while they're alive.
-- Bryan Caplan. (Source)
One of Professor Caplan's books is How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery.
My podcast interview with Dr. Caplan remains available.
3 comments:
"Superficially" I go along with Bryan Caplan's tweet (quoted in Tom's post). Less so with the first line in his book: "I think politicians are, by and large, evil people" (judging from the rest of that chapter, he seems mostly serious).
Too "all-or-nothing" for me. (Gratuitous plug: like the all-or-nothing thinking I wrote about in my latest RAW Semantics blog post, 'Cosmic Trigger 4 "is" You').
If we framed politicians as "representatives", might we see things differently, in a more differentiated way? Who do they represent? To quote RAW:
"The idea of representative government after we overthrew the monarchy was: we’ll have representatives who will represent us. In the first place, they don’t represent us! They represent the corporations who pay their campaign finance." (Interview with RAW, Lance Bauscher, 22 Feb 2001)
That expresses a different moral logic than Caplan's, even though they arrive at a similar conclusion (distrust of politicians). Caplan's thinking in fact reminds me of the US Libertarian Party's September 2022 tweet, that democracy "is mob rule that endangers individual rights". He generalises voters as "irrational" (for their "anti-market bias") - and sees "markets", not democracies, as the solution (but he protests that he isn't a "market fundamentalist").
To my reading, his main problem with politicians seems to be that they go along with conventional morality of the majority (as expressed in "democracy") instead of the "higher" rationality and morality of the "market" (and of those who understand and appreciate the market, such as professors of economics like himself!).
Historical trivia (no moral judgement implied): George W. Bush, one of the most bloody-handed politicians on recent record, took 14 of his government's 23 "deregulatory" policies from recommendations by Mercatus Center, the Koch-funded conservative "thinktank" that Bryan Caplan has worked for since 2003. (According to The Wall Street Journal, 16 July 2004).
As i write this, there have been proposals to put Donald Trump's face on Mount Rushmore, to put his face on $500 bills and to name an airport in Washington, D.C., after him. Perhaps this is "all or nothing," but I want none of these proposals to be adopted.
I guessed something like that sparked his tweet. My comment was directed more at his book that you linked to, and his "politicians are evil people" framing.
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