Maggie's Farm

--i was trying to remember a passage from Thomas Sowell's new book (alas i as usual only read some reviews for the thrust of the thing), and then found some of it in a Nyquist column from May of 2010: The Saviors of Mankind at

http://www.financialsensearchive.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2010/0521.html

(excerpt)

Leading bankers say that reforms are needed. But the head of the American Bankers association says that the present bill "has gone terribly wrong." Please note: If you knock down an industry, you are also knocking down its customers. "Our goal is not to punish the banks but to protect the larger economy and the American people," says President Barack Obama. How can he say this, when the bankers -- who should know their business better than anyone -- warn of disaster?

The anointed know better, of course. The banks aren't allowed to learn from the experiences of the past. They are not permitted to evolve and adapt independently. They must now be subjected to a new government bureaucracy, according to the metaphysic of the anointed. In this arrangement, the logic of the anointed is simple: Those with a vested interest cannot be trusted with economic decisions. The free market and those who "dominate" the market must be subordinated to those who will decide economic questions in favor of "the larger economy." Here is the Soviet ideal, in a nutshell. Economic actors motivated by profit cannot be trusted. Only government agents and commissars can be trusted. If you own a business, you are automatically a shady character who places your own economic interests ahead of others -- and this cannot be tolerated. The prospect of profit is corrupting, and the free market needs a pair of cuffs.

The anointed commissar holds a whip over the bankers and capitalists. If they seek profit, they will hear the crack of the whip. And who is this genius, this saint, this overseer, who holds the whip? Quite naturally, the markets have taken fright. The anointed have placed their fingers around the neck of the goose that laid the golden egg, and they are preparing to squeeze. Stock prices are falling around the world. The anointed say that the goose's neck must be wrung.

But aren't the anointed worried about the consequences? According to Sowell, the anointed feel no accountability because they are not creatures of the market. They are creatures who were nurtured in academia, insulated from truth and consequences (like Karl Marx, for example, who never worked a day in his life). If the anointed have faulty economic thinking, their business doesn't collapse. They don't live by producing anything tangible, after all. Their business has been to colonize the political class. As Sowell points out, "the steady encroachment of policies, practices, and laws based on the notions and ideologies prevalent among the intelligentsia has steadily narrowed the scope of the freedoms traditionally enjoyed by ordinary people to run their own lives, must less to shape government policy."

(close quote)

IOW, we are come to live in the house of lies, built for us over time by people doing it because we did not stop them. A nation's sunny smile disappeared because a smirk replaced it. The smirk is what two liars show when they are agreeing to lie to each other.

You've well-described the premise of Marxism --in the material dialectic everything is political and all politics is external.