Socialism's seductive appeal

 

Roger Kimball has good history and philosophical lessons for us at American Greatness. He concludes:

For centuries, prudent political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of Communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but “reproductive freedom,” gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It looks, in Marx’s famous mot, like history repeating itself as farce. It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.

Such attitudes are all but ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Although of relatively recent vintage, they have spread rapidly. The triumph of this aspect of Enlightened thinking, as [philosopher David] Stove notes, marked the moment when “the softening of human life became the great, almost the only, moral desideratum.”

The modern welfare state is one result of the triumph of abstract benevolence. Its chief effects are to institutionalize dependence on the state while also assuring the steady growth of the bureaucracy charged with managing government largess. Both help to explain why the welfare state has proved so difficult to dismantle. The governments that support the welfare state, Stove points out,

are elected by universal adult franchise; but an electorally decisive proportion of the voters—in some countries, approaching a quarter—either is employed by government or is dependent to a significant extent on some welfare programme. In these circumstances it is merely childish to expect the welfare state to be reduced, at least while there is universal suffrage. A government that did away with free education, for example, or socialised medicine, simply could not be re-elected. Indeed it would be lucky to see out its term of office.

Is there an alternative? Stove quotes Thomas Malthus’ observation, from his famous “Essay on Population,” that “we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilised from the savage state,” to “the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition.”

“The apparently narrow principle of self-interest,” mind you.

Contrast that robust, realistic observation with Robert Owen’s blather about replacing the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system that, he promised, would bring forth a “new man.”

Stove observes that Malthus’ arguments for the genuinely beneficent effects of “the apparently narrow principle of self-interest” “cannot be too often repeated.” Indeed. Even so, a look around at the childish pretended enthusiasm for socialism makes me think that, for all his emphasis, Stove understated the case. Jim Carrey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (not to mention a college student near you) would profit by having a closer acquaintance with the clear-eyed thinking of Thomas Malthus.

It’s the same lessons that gave America its first Thanksgiving;  when collective socialism failed, the settlers learned that freedom, incentive, and private property harnessed self-interest to the greater good.

Read Mr. Kimball’s entire essay here.

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Falling Down and Falling Apart

 

On his blogsite, Robert Stacy McCain quoted part of Tucker Carlson’s Tuesday monologue yesterday.  Our household deleted Fox from our Favorites list some months ago, but Mr. Carlson made some good points.

The lessons of [the 1993 film] Falling Down were on my mind as I watched Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue for his Tuesday program:

There are a lot of unprecedented things happening, but not all of them are shocking. For example, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that, once they got their hands on real power, the same lunatics who don’t believe in human biology immediately made a serious mess of our economy. It took them less than six months to do it.

First, they acted like the U.S. dollar had no value. They spent money like they’d just printed it for the occasion, which, needless to say, they had. Predictably, we wound up with frightening levels of inflation, which for the record they still deny exists. But inflation does exist, as you well know if you live here.

Corn prices, to name just one example of a staple commodity that’s now out of control, have risen by 50 percent just since January. But that wasn’t bad enough. The lunatics decided to make it worse. They paid millions of Americans more than they make at work, to stay home and do nothing. To justify doing this, they used the word “COVID” quite a bit, but it had nothing to do with the pandemic. They just wanted to break the system. And so they did. And the rest of us immediately wound up with a bewildering combination of rising unemployment in the middle of a severe labor shortage.

So, at the very same time, we found ourselves with too many workers, and also too few workers. That doesn’t even make sense, but thanks to their policies, that’s now exactly what we have. And then, finally, in case 2021 didn’t remind you enough of a grimmer version of the 1970s, we now have serious gas shortages, in a country that just recently was energy independent. All along the east coast of the country today, people couldn’t fill up their cars. The footage looks like Venezuela.

And so forth. The real point — why it reminded me of Falling Down — is that ordinary citizens are powerless to fix this manmade disaster. The people in charge don’t give a damn about ordinary citizens, because if they did, they wouldn’t have done what they’ve done. We find ourselves in a broken system, where the incentives have gone haywire, and the world has stopped making sense. 

See – it’s not just you.  (Mr. McCain's full blog post is here.) 

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Thoughts for January 20

 

For conservative Americans, the past couple of months have been devastating. George Parry blogs at Knowledgeisgood, and his posting from January 1 struck a chord.  He begins:

Beware of the Thing That Is Coming

A number of you have kindly inquired as to why I have recently been absent from these pages. The reason is that, since early November, the only matter worth discussing has been the outright theft of the 2020 presidential election, and, as will be explained below, I have been emotionally and intellectually  unable to rationally address the topic.

President Trump won re-election by an historic landslide. He has been denied his rightful victory by means of corrupted voting machines and the massive use of unverified and unverifiable mail in ballots. I won’t go into the details since I would just be repeating all the depressing and alarming facts with which I am sure you are already familiar. But, watching events unfold, it has become apparent that there was nothing subtle about the theft. It has been the electoral equivalent of an in-your-face smash and grab robbery – as in, yeah, we stole the election and there’s nothing you can do about it.

On the emotional side, I have been too angry to write coherently about the theft and what it will mean for the future of this country. The consequences of the theft extend far beyond the fate of President Trump. Those who conspired to steal the election now have in place the tools to oppress the majority. Think of the massive demonstrations in Venezuela by the majority who oppose the Maduro dictatorship. The masses may demonstrate and protest, but so what?  Maduro and his thugs remain in control and will continue to “win” elections into perpetuity using the same voting machines and software now being used (in conjunction with fake mail in ballots) to deprive Trump of victory.

Will the majority in America suffer the same fate as its counterpart in Venezuela? If Trump, who won a huge landslide, can be cheated out of victory, what chance will lesser candidates have in the future?

Read the rest here.

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Venezuela tops the list: socialism on display

Monica Showalter at American Thinker reports:

It's no surprise to anyone that socialist Venezuela is an utterly miserable place - there's pictures showing that the capital of Caracas looks like a trash heap, there's the fact that hungry people eat from garbage trucks and drink sewer water, and there's the horrible reality that people are leaving  the country may see a full half of its population flee for any country that will take them.

But there are a lot of crappy places out there and maybe it's just bad press focusing on a few things, right?

Wrong. The sheer awfulness of socialism in Venezuela has been quantified, in hard numbers, by Johns Hopkins University Professor of Economics, Steve Hanke, whose global list, with hard data such as unemployment, inflation, interest rates, minus the percentage change in GDP per capita, quantifies the factors every year. 

Full article, with chart, is here. 

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