Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
While I was sitting in the smoke-filled saloon in the middle of nowhere, I did manage to whip out my phone and see what was on Phil’s page. Pretty interesting stuff actually. He’s got some relatives who are pulling out the ol’ moderation/extremism bit trying to prop up this albatross — You have to have some central planning, what about the interstates? — etc.
This is, as I pointed out, a lie. Progressivism, socialism, call it what you will; it’s a shark, it doesn’t stop. Moderation is conservatism. It’s far more accurate to say “of course you have to leave some things up to the people to decide…the ones who are most closely impacted by whatever it is.” To which, socialism is about, saying no to that. Nyet. Nein. Everything worth deciding has to be brought to the Kremlin. The only decisions to be left up to the people, are the decisions that headquarters has decided to leave up to the people. For the time being. Cosmetically. But the super-duper smart people at the epicenter decide everything worth deciding. No exceptions allowed, none.
Coincidentally, when I got back from the trip I found Glenn Reynolds discussing exactly that in great detail…and why it’ll never work.
Any economic planner who attempts to [centrally operate a diverse market] will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.
Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.
Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can’t possibly be smart enough to make them work.
I don’t know why the socialists argue about this stuff, I really don’t. They act like they have great big bundles of anecdotes they can bring to the table to prove, on an historical backdrop, that their way is right. And they don’t.
But this is the wrong question. The right question is one that deals with human psychology: Why is it that we are tempted, over and over again, to try out this failed experiment? If it’s a process of evolving the human condition and making ourselves better and better across the generations — doesn’t evolution involve rejecting the antiquated and unfit, as much as incubating and incorporating the new? Sometime, somewhere, something has to be dismissed. Socialism is as good a candidate for dismissal as any. As Phil points out, that does not equal the rejection of anything and everything that has been centrally planned. But you do have to reject anything & everything that has to do with local control, in order to show some hospitality or acceptance to the idea of progressivism/socialism.
Reagan’s quote really says it all, in my opinion: “If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I was out at Politico earlier today chasing down a link and I ran into some woman who took a tone that she was going to school all of us backwoods children who decry “progresives” … and it appeared that the thrust of her argument was that we were using the wrong word — “progessives” when we should have been using the word “progressivists” — so shut up, you cro-magnon idiots.
So after I took her to task over that, I expounderated on that theme you brought up. And my theme is basically that Progressivism is the Mother of Socialism. And Communism, and Naziism. Progressivism is always the road to statism, and those are all just different flavors of the same thing:
- philmon | 04/05/2010 @ 16:07[…] Read it. And the blog post it references. […]
- DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Progressivism and Socialism | 04/07/2010 @ 03:26