PRAISE FATHER, SON, AND CROLY GHOST. The newest print edition of Reason arrived at Cold Spring Shops headquarters this evening. The first letter to the editor is from Company Mail source Don Boudreaux of George Mason University and Cafe Hayek. I'm quoting it in full.

Asked why he wrote only about the Republican war on science, Chris Mooney replied, "Democrats have no constituency that compels them to deny something as fundamental as evolution." ("Unscientific Methods," January.)

The evidence contradicts Mooney's claim. Democratic ranks, like GOP ranks, bulge with people proclaiming that legislated minimum wages benefit low-wage workers and that goods in short supply are made more affordable by price caps. These people, in short, deny something as fundamental as supply and demand. More generally, the faithful of all political creeds imagine that the lives of 300 million diverse individuals can be successfully run by a handful of strangers who pose and pontificate beneath soaring marble domes.

These are egregious superstitions, immune to evidence and reason.

One can use the theory of complex adaptive systems to make sense of life forms, and of commerce, where order emerges without conscious planning. There is room to debate the dissimilarities. A shark does not think about its carnivorous essence. A trader can think about the nature of the trades he gains from.