One of the deepest scars of my early youth was etched when my teacher told me, “You do not want that,” after I had told her that I did. I would not have been so upset if she had said that I could not have it, whatever it was, or that it was very wicked of me to want it. What rankled was the denial of my personality–a kind of rape of my integrity. I confess I still find a similar rising of my hackles when I hear people’s preferences dismissed as not genuine, because influenced by advertising, and somebody else telling them what they “really want.”

I quote this in my bio of Lerner in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. I called him “the Milton Friedman of the left.”