One of the grave errors of the modern mind – an error found in America in the presumptions, assertions, and actions of “Progressives” from Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama – is the belief that society must, or should, be engineered. This principal belief naturally entails the subsidiary beliefs that the engineering must be done by the state, and that in doing its engineering the state must ignore, or even destroy, any forces of social organization that hamper state-officials’ social-engineering efforts.
A great deal of legislation and, especially, law in a free society is inevitably inconsistent with the blueprints of social engineers. And so, in their unreflective and unscientific presumption that society has no self-organizing forces, the social engineers are blind to the logic of the law and to the importance of legal processes. The social engineers therefore do not see – because their blindness prevents them from seeing – the benefits that emerge over time through the operations of decentralized, spontaneous-ordering forces. The social engineers’ designs and intrusions destroy, or at least severely weaken, these forces. But being blind to these forces, the social engineers are blind to what they destroy.
- Don Boudreaux
