Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Ideas, not beliefs

In Kevin Smith's movie Dogma, Rufus (the forgotten apostle) has some wise words about religion:
"I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier"
Perhaps we can take apply this same idea to politics. The Economist Free Exchange certainly has:

"I have trouble with any ideological reading of the economics, because the two (ideology and economics) so rarely fit well together. I don't want to elect a free-market supporter or an interventionist. I want to elect someone who will carefully consider the issues and determine that here the government ought to assign pollution property rights, while here the government should reduce licensure, and so on. I want, in short, someone with enough intellectual heft to know the difference between good policy and good politics.

If the economists are unwilling to make these distinctions, I have little confidence that the candidates ever will."

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