The Triumph of the Irrational

This dovetails with the point I made in Paradise Lost about the Nietzschean concept of emotion and irrationality governing Liberal thought:


In an era when our media and even our education system exalt emotions, while ignoring facts and logic, perhaps we should not be surprised that so many people explain economics by ‘greed.’ Today there are adults including educated adults who explain multimillion-dollar corporate executives’ salaries as being due to ‘greed.’ Think about it: I could become so greedy that I wanted a fortune twice the size of Bill Gates’s but this greed would not increase my income by one cent. If you want to explain why some people have astronomical incomes, it cannot be simply because of their own desires whether ‘greedy’ or not but because of what other people are willing to pay them. The real question, then, is: Why do other people choose to pay corporate executives so much?... Every time oil prices shoot up, there are cries of ‘greed’ and demands by politicians for an investigation of collusion by Big Oil. There have been more than a dozen investigations of oil companies over the years, and none of them has turned up the collusion that is supposed to be responsible for high gas prices. Now that oil prices have dropped big time, does that mean that oil companies have lost their ‘greed’? Or could it all be supply and demand a cause and effect explanation that seems to be harder for some people to understand than emotions like ‘greed’?

Thomas Sowell

Thanks to the Federalist Patriot