Maggie's Farm

One of the grave errors of the modern mind – an error found in America in the presumptions, assertions, and actions of “Progressives” from Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama – is the belief that society must, or should, be engineered.  This principal belief naturally entails the subsidiary beliefs that the  engineering must be done by the state, and that in doing its engineering the state must ignore, or even destroy, any forces of social organization that hamper state-officials’ social-engineering efforts.

A great deal of legislation and, especially, law in a free society is inevitably inconsistent with the blueprints of social engineers.  And so, in their unreflective and unscientific presumption that society has no self-organizing forces, the social engineers are blind to the logic of the law and to the importance of legal processes.  The social engineers therefore do not see – because their blindness prevents them from seeing – the benefits that emerge over time through the operations of decentralized, spontaneous-ordering forces.  The social engineers’ designs and intrusions destroy, or at least severely weaken, these forces.  But being blind to these forces, the social engineers are blind to what they destroy.

- Don Boudreaux

Down the right column at Woodpile.  One example:

 "We have reached a point of diminishing returns in our public life. Hardly anything actually needs doing. We may in fact be past that point; not only does nothing much need doing, but we'd benefit if much of what has been done were to be undone."

John Derbyshire

"No believer in force truly respects his fellow-men.  He always slightly despises them, even while he serves them.  They tend to become for him mere material for carrying out his views.  His views may be honestly and sincerely held; they may be excellent in themselves; but when he uses force on their behalf he commits the capital mistake of exalting himself and his views into the first place, and of degrading his fellow-men, with an intelligence and conscience like and equal to his own, into the second place.  Thus it comes about that the user of force loses all hold on moral principles; he becomes a law, and a very defective law, to himself; and thus it comes about also that politics – which are simply the method of force – are in every country not only the battlefield of opposed fighters, but the hotbed of intrigue and corruption."

Auberon Herbert (1898), via Cafe Hayek

Isaiah Berlin, via Vanderleun:

If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.

But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my ‘liberal’ individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom—social or economic—is increased.

Harold Demsetz:

Beware the intellectual who seeks power over our decisions and over the persuasion to which we can respond, especially when he seeks this power to prevent us from doing what he thinks we should not desire to do.

Laurie Penny, via Driscoll at Insty:

“Fuck social mobility… Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class… Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, and every other small, ugly ambition.” These, she says, are things “we should have abandoned.”

You first, Laurie

From your lips to God's ears, Bird Dog. Calvinist tradition. Just pick your preferred combination of the list. A nap by the pool with a whiskey and a smoke must be ok sometimes, though:

"Life in America, where all citizens strive constantly for physical, moral, spiritual, intellectual, relational, artistic, and financial improvement and uplift! What else is there to do?"

 “High office teaches decision making, not substance,” Mr. Kissinger once wrote. “It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.”

Kissinger, via Ferguson's  The Real Obama Doctrine - Henry Kissinger long ago recognized the problem: a talented vote-getter, surrounded by lawyers, who is overly risk-averse.

“Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), as quoted in McCain's Feminism as Totalitarian Ideology