"It is bad policy to regulate everything... where things may better regulate themselves and can be better promoted by private exertions; but it is no less bad policy to let those things alone which can only be promoted by interfering social power"
About this Quote
List is taking a swing at the lazy libertarian reflex: the idea that noninterference is automatically virtuous. The line reads like a balancing act, but the intent is sharper. He is building a political economy for late-developing nations, and he wants to shame both extremes: the bureaucrat who regulates for regulation's sake, and the doctrinaire free-trader who treats the market as a self-healing deity.
The craft is in the paired phrasing. "Bad policy" appears twice, a rhetorical mirror that forces the reader to accept a symmetrical truth: overreach is stupid, neglect is also stupid. He then splits the world into two categories that sound almost diagnostic. Some domains "better regulate themselves" and thrive on "private exertions" - a nod to the dynamism of enterprise, competition, local knowledge. Others "can only be promoted by interfering social power" - an unapologetic claim that there are collective goods markets underprovide, and that waiting for spontaneous order is just choosing stagnation.
The subtext is national strategy. List wrote in an era when Britain could preach free trade from the top of the ladder while Germany and the United States were still building their industrial base. His target is not "the market" but the political use of market rhetoric to freeze the hierarchy of nations. "Interfering social power" is polite language for tariffs, infrastructure, education, and institution-building: the scaffolding that lets private exertion eventually matter.
What makes it work is its refusal to moralize. List frames state action not as righteousness but as technique - selective, conditional, and justified only where coordination is impossible without it. The quote is a warning against ideology masquerading as policy.
The craft is in the paired phrasing. "Bad policy" appears twice, a rhetorical mirror that forces the reader to accept a symmetrical truth: overreach is stupid, neglect is also stupid. He then splits the world into two categories that sound almost diagnostic. Some domains "better regulate themselves" and thrive on "private exertions" - a nod to the dynamism of enterprise, competition, local knowledge. Others "can only be promoted by interfering social power" - an unapologetic claim that there are collective goods markets underprovide, and that waiting for spontaneous order is just choosing stagnation.
The subtext is national strategy. List wrote in an era when Britain could preach free trade from the top of the ladder while Germany and the United States were still building their industrial base. His target is not "the market" but the political use of market rhetoric to freeze the hierarchy of nations. "Interfering social power" is polite language for tariffs, infrastructure, education, and institution-building: the scaffolding that lets private exertion eventually matter.
What makes it work is its refusal to moralize. List frames state action not as righteousness but as technique - selective, conditional, and justified only where coordination is impossible without it. The quote is a warning against ideology masquerading as policy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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