I came across a source from 1887 while writing my legal history papers. The author is Albert Shaw, a Minneapolis-based journalist and academic. The context is the American myth of limited government.
Shaw wrote his essay almost 125 years ago, but it could serve as a reaction to modern American economic theory. Shaw writes that Americans benefited from and supported a strong regulatory regime while adhering to a wholly inconsistent laissez-faire ideology of limited government.
Here’s a snippet:
“The average American has an unequalled capacity for the entertainment of legal fictions and kindred delusions.
“He lives in one world of theory and in another world of practice, and he deludes himself into supposing that they correspond with one another in the main, whereas it is generally true that they do not. To this curious fact is largely due to his singular inaptitude for studying his own institutions in the concrete. He can never divest himself of his preconceived theory.
…
“Never for a moment relinquishing their theory, the people of the United States have assiduously pursued and cherished a practical policy utterly inconsistent with that theory, and have no perceived the discrepancy.
“My proposition is that the average American is just as blind with respect to the general economic bearings of his legislative practice as he is to the drift of his constitutional machinery.
“He humbugs himself by trying to adhere both to the schoolmasters and to the practical politicians. He studies his political economy in a textbook of abstractions, and not in the history of nations or the concrete conditions about him.
“Consequently he manages to keep his economics and his practical politics as separate as some men do their religion and their business, and he is just as naively unconscious about it.”
Albert Shaw, The American State and the American Man. Contemporary Review 5 1 (May 1887).
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