David Harsanyi wrote today that a key takeaway from the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings is that the late Justice Antonin Scalia won the debate over constitutional originalism. Whether or not Brown believes in it, her answers supported the case for it.
In concluding, Harsanyi made a critical point that is highly relevant outside these hearings and which too many CEOs who support free markets ignore:
[B]attles of ideas can never be won by those who refuse to fight them in a public forum. The marketplace of ideas is unforgiving to those who won’t sell their own wares.
In a 1993 speech to an Auckland employer’s group entitled “On Doing What is Necessary”, my father, Roger Kerr, called out those who sit on the sidelines:
I have to say that I get a little tired of people who tell us privately how much they admire our efforts but keep their distance when the going gets tough. The fact is that the going is always tough when you are confronting vested interests who do not take kindly to the idea of having their privileges removed… But if you want to work, live and do business in a country with a real future; if you think there are past gains worth defending and future gains worth fighting for; and if you are not content to leave the field to vested interests and congenital pessimists, then I suggest you remember these lines by the poet Charles Mackay:
You have no enemies, you say?
Alas, my friend, the boast is poor.
He who has mingled in the fray…
Must have made foes. If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done…
You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.
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