Wholly Selfish Reasons

Progressives are not all alike, of course, but this much they appear overwhelmingly to have in common: they believe that people like them should run the world; that in that event the great mass of humanity would be better off; and that whenever the progressives do not hold dominant political power, it is entirely because the people they dislike, especially the rich people they dislike, have corrupted the system for wholly selfish reasons, thwarting the will of the people and obstructing a great variety of measures by which the government might have been employed to make the world a better place.

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Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.