The grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood — and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same action.
But Sowell’s insight tells only half the story. Allow me to furnish the other half with a little posthumous help from Thomas Edison.
Conventional wisdom credits Edison with inventing the electric light bulb, but conventional wisdom is wrong. It was actually an English physicist, Sir Joseph William Swan, who invented the first working light bulb. But sadly for Sir Joseph, his “working light bulb” did not work very well, burning itself out after only 13.5 hours — far too short an operating life to be commercially viable. What Edison did was improve Sir Joseph’s invention, extending its operating life first to forty hours, then to a hundred, and eventually to fifteen hundred.
This did not happen overnight. It took three years and the testing of “at least three thousand different theories” to develop the first practical incandescent light bulb. When Edison famously described genius as “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” he knew what he was talking about. Three years passed, during which time the public did…what? They continued to use the existing technology — candles, kerosene lamps, and (for public lighting) arc lamps. And if Edison had failed, if developing a practical incandescent light bulb had proved impossible, surely people would have continued using the old technology until someone came up with something better.
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