Saturday, September 11. 2010
A re-post. This is an important essay about individual freedom. From Peter Saunders
The problem for those of us who believe that capitalism offers the best chance we have for leading meaningful and worthwhile lives is that in this debate, the devil has always had the best tunes to play. Capitalism lacks romantic appeal. It does not set the pulse racing in the way that opposing ideologies like socialism, fascism, or environmentalism can. It does not stir the blood, for it identifies no dragons to slay. It offers no grand vision for the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of individuals pursuing their own preferences. Capitalism can justifiably boast that it is excellent at delivering the goods, but this fails to impress in countries like Australia that have come to take affluence for granted.
It is quite the opposite with socialism. Where capitalism delivers but cannot inspire, socialism inspires despite never having delivered. Socialism’s history is littered with repeated failures and with human misery on a massive scale, yet it still attracts smiles rather than curses from people who never had to live under it. Affluent young Australians who would never dream of patronising an Adolf Hitler bierkeller decked out in swastikas are nevertheless happy to hang out in the Lenin Bar at Sydney’s Circular Quay, sipping chilled vodka cocktails under hammer and sickle flags, indifferent to the twenty million victims of the Soviet regime. Chic westerners are still sporting Che Guevara t-shirts, forty years after the man’s death, and flocking to the cinema to see him on a motor bike, apparently oblivious to their handsome hero’s legacy of firing squads and labour camps.
Environmentalism, too, has the happy knack of inspiring the young and firing the imagination of idealists. This is because the radical green movement shares many features with old-style revolutionary socialism. Both are oppositional, defining themselves as alternatives to the existing capitalist system. Both are moralistic, seeking to purify humanity of its tawdry materialism and selfishness, and appealing to our ‘higher instincts.’ Both are apocalyptic, claiming to be able to read the future and warning, like Old Testament prophets, of looming catastrophe if we do not change our ways. And both are utopian, holding out the promise of redemption through a new social order based on a more enlightened humanity. All of this is irresistibly appealing to romantics.
Thursday, September 9. 2010
In The Economist, In America and Britain governments hope that a partnership with “social entrepreneurs” can solve some of society’s most intractable problems.
 Dream on, rainbow-pony dreamers:
POLICYMAKERS on both sides of the Atlantic are keen on a new approach to alleviating society’s troubles. On July 22nd Barack Obama’s administration listed the first 11 investments by its new Social Innovation Fund (SIF). About $50m of public money, more than matched by $74m from philanthropic foundations, will be given to some of America’s most successful non-profit organisations, in order to expand their work in health care, in creating jobs and in supporting young people.
Let's face it: this is all about jobs for people who work for non-profits. They vote too - for whoever gives them the bucks which they feed on. I don't know what Europe needs (besides a spine or two), but I know what America needs more than more non-profits: more lower-skill but decent-paying work from successful businesses, and better parental examples of adult responsibility.
Tuesday, August 31. 2010
At the Canada Free Press, The Media Loses Readers and Viewers to its Own Radicalism: The problem with the American media is that it doesn't speak to Americans. One quote (but read the whole thing):
 The left’s hijacking of American culture has turned institutions into rags and rubble, and it will only get worse. Because the left does not know when to stop. Does not understand that it should stop. That is why left wing revolutions that do succeed, eventually culminate in multiple levels of purges that exterminate many of the original revolutionaries, or send them off to fight and die somewhere else, turning them into convenient martyrs who look good on blood-red T-shirts.
Obama’s vision of the media was as purveyors of his talking points. To that end he kept it at arms length, even while using it non-stop to promote himself. By turning the media into his publicists, he helped accelerate a rapid slide that had already been under way, ending any real distinction between news and celebrity news, between opinion and reporting, and between the liberal media and the liberal government. And when Ezra Klein tried to occasionally draw a line between themselves and the politicians they cover, it was a line that was no longer there anymore, because the media had found its mission in the advocacy of liberal domestic and international policies, of convincing the public that their political way was best.
Wednesday, August 18. 2010
A quote from The Spirit of Independence: The Social Psychology of Freedom at The American:
In 1966, American psychologist Julian Rotter published a paper that introduced the concept known as locus of control. Human beings, according to Rotter, could be divided into two basic groups: those who believed their locus of control was within themselves, and those who see themselves as under the control of forces located outside themselves, such as luck, or fate, or other people whose will cannot be resisted. The first group, called internals, believe that they are the masters of their own destiny; they tend to be high-achievers, optimistic about their ability to improve their lot, and to discard bad habits. They believe in willpower and positive thinking. They are determined to control their own lives, for better or worse. Members of the second group are called externals. They look on themselves as victims of circumstances, the playthings of fate. If they go to bed drunk, light up a cigarette, and burn their house down, they explain the disaster as another instance of their bad luck, and not their poor judgment, much less their bad habits. On the other hand, if a drunk driver hits an internal, the internal will scold himself that he should have been more alert at the wheel, he should have seen the drunk coming and swerved in time to avoid him.
Yes, there is a spirit of freedom and a spirit of slavery and dependence. Another quote:
To natural libertarians, there can be no more existential conflict than the one they face today. Are they destined to perish from the earth along with their cherished cultural and religious traditions, pushed aside by those who claim to champion progress but who in fact promote learned helplessness in the general population, however benevolent their intentions? Will the natural libertarians’ roadblock to serfdom simply be brushed aside without a fight? Or will these roadblocks turn into barricades, to be manned by those who are willing to make the last sacrifice to preserve their spirit of independence?
Tuesday, August 17. 2010
Article at The American.
It often requires a Left-wing government to re-clarify the issues. A quote:
The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.
and
Tocqueville pointed to another danger as well, the danger of what he called “soft despotism,” in which a seemingly benevolent government would channel citizens into docile obedience like a herd of sheep. But that danger seemed distant, even to Tocqueville, in an America whose dominant and more populist party, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, opposed government spending on public works projects and feared the power of a central bank.
Sunday, August 15. 2010
 A series of essays on modern motherhood at Boston Review, subtitled Stay-at-home mothering is bad for mothers, their kids, and women’s equality.
I read no article there about Apple Pie, but I may have missed it. The academic lingo is tough at first, but you can get the hang of it. Something called "Care Theory," which I think, in plain English, means not wanting to be a mom.
One of the essays is Time for Public Childcare. Surely that must be so moms are free - I mean liberated - from their annoying and demanding brats so they can golf and play tennis and be CEOs and have lunchtime affairs with the tennis pro.
A re-post from a couple of years ago:
Across the pond, Mediocracy is often thinking about the sorts of things that we puzzle over. In this case, the tendency of people to expect governments to perfect the world. One quote from his piece on "Freedom To" vs. "Approval Of":
Another point of confusion for some libertarians, as for most others with enthusiastic views about the right way to run the world, is the false dichotomy between 'everything is fine' and 'collective action is required'. It is in fact possible to hold a third position, namely that:
(a) the world is imperfect
(b) a legal framework which upholds private agreements is a good thing, because it helps to exploit the benefits of exchange (this principle is usually abbreviated into 'free markets')
(c) specific market failures may require collective action (defence is definitely one; education and medicine definitely aren't; other putative market failures are a matter for debate)
(d) apart from providing a safety net, trying to address any other imperfection by means of government action is to be avoided, if for no other reason than that it invariably involves some form of coercion.
There is a tremendous psychological pressure in contemporary society to jump from 'something less than ideal is happening' to 'the state must intervene'. In fact, it is more than a pressure, it has become an unconscious automatic connection.
Well, not an automatic connection for me. Despite all of the accumulated evidence to the contrary, many insist on that "hope" the hope that government can and will fix "it." And politicians are more than happy to exploit that, because accumulating power tends to be their "unconscious automatic connection."
I heard it yesterday from somebody at lunch: "Bush doesn't care that we're in a recession." I noted (to myself) that this nice Liberal lady was assuming 1. that how much Bush emotes matters and 2. that a President could control international markets if he only chose to do do. I elected to move on to other subjects.
Saturday, August 7. 2010
This is a repost from 2006 (so you need to right-click on the links)
 What if the part of human nature which wants paternalism, or maternalism, in the State is sometimes, or often, stronger than the part that wants freedom, autonomy, self-reliance and self-determination?
What if we are wrong to imagine, as Bush claims, that an aspiration for freedom lives in the hearts of all mankind?
What if that aspiration is a simple error of a uniquely American culture, which combined northern European Calvinism which rejects any hierarchy in church or in life; a personal relationship with God; Lockeian liberalism; a distinctly northern European moral code in which honor, reliability, hard work, personal responsibility, generosity, and integrity are the measure of a person; a frontier attitude which expects life to be difficult but remains optimistic, and an innate distrust of government and politicians - is a very strange brew?
Maybe a strange brew which permits people to make the most of their lives and their "inner lives" - or the least of them, if they so chose - but requires more practical and psychological independence and liberty than most humans desire. Maybe?
We know that our revolutionary ancestors were in the minority, here in the colonies. The most vociferous, for sure. But most were Loyalists until the tide finally turned. Zogby polls would not have supported rebellion against the Crown. Neither King George, nor Lord North, were evil people, by any means. Well-intentioned, but confused by the new American spirit.
These are hardly original questions, but they come up because of a series of bits that stuck in my mind. One was a piece at Daily Pundit, about the Russian comfort with Putin's moves towards autocracy. A piece by Callick at TCS asks Is the world moving beyond liberal democracy? Another was a piece also posted on Maggie's about the blue-ification of my once-granite-ribbed New Hampshire, where I own the ancestral family farm, and where I live Thursday night-Monday morning. Also, Dr. Sanity's piece, which said it better than I could: Come for the Equality, Stay for the Bestiality and Tyranny.
As a shrink and a psychoanalyst, I am philosophically - and spiritually - biased towards the idea of an environment in which people can find their own way, and discover and use their strengths and individual gifts and talents in life. I am fond of telling my psychiatry students that "reality is always on your side."
But I also know that, in the big world, this view is often odd, blasphemous, antisocial, or rebellious. After all, few cultures even would embrace the notion of Erikson's idea of individuation - much less his notions of development. For us, the independent individual is King - but not so everywhere. Our Western near-sanctification of the individual is unusual, unique perhaps.
The revolutionary notion of the Individual As King is why we have guns, and private property, and educational chances for all, and a zillion places of worship, and clubs, and blogs, and a million volunteer organizations and charities and land trust and conservation organizations. And why we rely on our families before anything else, and why we distrust what the experts say. And it is why we have opportunity - not material equality - but opportunity for all, to make our own choices and decisions as grown-ups about how to plan a life. Economics is just one of many considerations in life, for most (not that we all would not welcome a bit more money).
Europe has embraced state parentalism - little different from its monarchical past: the fantasy that smart, powerful persons know best, or deserve power over us, is a piece of our childhood which we are reluctant to give up. A left-over from the time of nobility and serfdom. Our American culture may label that "childish," but probably most do not. Since psychosocial development is driven by the need to adjust to reality, the endurance of the parental fantasy must distort development for many people, similar to what happens commonly to the kids of the very wealthy.
Give me liberty or give me health care and more freebies: The American Left has similar aspirations, and a similar condescending attitude towards the human potential for autonomy and self-determination on the part of its policy-makers. "We'll take your money you earn, and fix it for you - because we care." AKA "It takes a village." (And, by the way, in my opinion it does "take a village" - but not a federal government.) The classic and revealing argument of the Left for idolizing the thug and murderer Castro is "But they have free health care." It's close to what they always said about Mussolini: "He made the trains run on time." (And that is saying a lot, in a place like Italy.)
State parentalism is one step from totalitarianism. And not just psychologically, but also in reality. First, you get the people used to the idea that they can depend on the government to take care of you and to solve your problems (rather than simply to defend you, and to keep life reasonably fair), and, having slowly softened them up, you build on that until you can't smoke a cigarette in your car without getting fined, or find a decent fried chicken take-out in NYC.
I always thought that Jack Kennedy's "Ask not..." (listen to it) was a fine call to maturity, and Reagan often echoed JFK in his speeches. The more powerful government becomes, the more the people will tend to regress psychologically, just as the more of their money you take from them, the less motivated they will feel to work hard, and to be inventive and creative with life. Necessity is the mother of invention, and a thoughfully planned life is necessary for most of us.
Happy human cattle is my nightmare. And yet every human is prone to the regressive, almost gravitational, pull, to childhood and relative helplessness. We must thank God for the adolescent rebel which lingers in all of us, however mature and effective in the world we may or may not be.
The bottom line is this: What if most humans do not feel that they have what it takes to handle life in freedom, and to deal with their own basket of challenges in life? What if most of them, both in the US and abroad, do not share my Yankee ideals? What if most people do not want to be kings of their own domains? Then what?
Image: Time Magazine named Joseph Stalin "Man of the Year" in 1939 and 1942.
Friday, August 6. 2010
You may not have read my piece this week, Preventive Medicine: Drive carefully, and make sure you have good genes. It's not the best post in the world, but it makes my point.
A propos of that topic, see Docs running to stand still in The American. A quote:
The general popularity of widespread preventive care rests on the shaky presumption that such medical services head off more serious medical conditions, save lives, and reduce healthcare costs. A lengthy literature actually challenges each of those premises; at least when recommended preventive care services are not limited to a shorter list of medical interventions and targeted to the most appropriate types of patients likely to benefit from them. But the broader political argument often is that “cost” should not be a disincentive to greater demand for such presumably necessary services, particularly when society as a whole is supposed to benefit in the long run from better population health.
Tuesday, August 3. 2010
From Dr. Bob's The Doctor Will See You Now – Or Else!
Mark my words, we are witnessing the disassembly of the American system of medicine — a system which, for its many flaws, has provided the best and most advanced health care the world has ever known. For some, its destruction will be a victory, flush with the naive utopian vision of universal, government-controlled health care.
For you, the patient, the outcome will prove far less sanguine.
Sunday, August 1. 2010
 Why? Because he says it all, here.
Photo from the post.
Thursday, July 29. 2010
Washington Rebel found a remarkable rant from Takuan Seiyo in Brussels Journal: Shotgun Marriage In Europe. One quote:
... to return a Western democracy to its rightful owners requires a majority of votes. Such a majority can no longer obtain for any political platform that would tackle even the top three major problems that bedevil the West: bankrupting socialism, nonwhite immigration, and implanted Islam. Not to mention the next dozen grave problems: irredeemable debt, the tyranny of the metastized State, the Looters’ coalition’s chokehold, sham global economy, fraudulent financial capitalism, minoritarian tyranny, shattered social capital, barbaric mass culture, nihilism, democracy turned idiocracy, breakdown of sexual norms and results (i.e. no babies), and falsehoods and self-hate careening through the land like a band of headless horsemen.
Tuesday, July 27. 2010
It's good to hear Tom Sowell say it: How Smart Are We? Elites may have more brilliance, but they can’t have as much experience as the people whose decisions they preempt.
One quote:
One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control, and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nit-picking.
"Things taking their own course" means, of course, people exercising free choice.
Some of us here have been accused of being elites ourselves. If I am in that category somehow, put me in the subgroup that has no interest in controlling anybody but myself. Just that is difficult enough, and often impossible.
Tuesday, July 20. 2010
From Applebaum's A government of the people's every wish? which we linked this morning:
Americans -- with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs -- demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don't simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.
Friday, July 16. 2010
VDH nails it, from our link last night to The Psychology of Recession. It is what I am hearing from everybody on Main St. around here. One quote to encourage reading of his post:
Obama, past and present, seems always to talk of how someone else’s money should be spent, dispersed, and redistributed, but never to worry about how it can be made in the first place.
So, fairly or not, when the president talks, business people do not gain confidence that he knows, or cares, much about them or what they do. If he thinks even surgeons are greedy profiteers, who then escapes presidential disdain?
Rainbow ponies do not create jobs or careers. Politicians can create temporary make-work - with our money and our kids' money - but that's all.
Tuesday, July 13. 2010
Re-posted from 2008. One quote:
Instead of inspiration the Democrat Party delivers shopworn socialist solution, numbing boredom, sheer despair, intellectual and spiritual poverty, sexism, and the worst sort of racism seen since it gave birth to the Klu Klux Klan. Classical racism loathes "the other." The new racism of the Democrat requires one loathe oneself first and last, and to accuse those that do not of racism. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, "The Democrats want to get you down in the hole that they're in."
Instead of telling us what sort of New Jerusalem it would have us build as our City on the Hill, the party requires that its members root about in the ghettos of the soul, to ponder the rightness or wrongness of the very babies of its opponents. Instead of waving the bright banners of America triumphant, the Party dons the rags and bones of defeatism and appeasement and moves about the country like a tarted-up Typhoid Mary, infecting all who kiss its chancred lips. As a party, it's a poxed whore for whom no condom is thick enough. It's a death trip.
Labash at Wkly Std: Living Like A Liberal - It’s hard work, politicizing your whole life. (It's only 2 1/2 pages).
It's about communities of true believers. In a way, I feel badly for these folks, seeking, as it seems to me, purpose, significance, a feeling of virtuousness - and maybe even transcendent meaning - in all the wrong places. In another way, I feel deeply annoyed with moonbats because I think these people aspire to control me and may view me as diabolical.
Monday, July 12. 2010
At Globe and Mail:
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb,” Benjamin Franklin reputedly said, “voting on what to have for lunch.”
The article is mostly about Italy, as an example.
Sunday, July 11. 2010
 Thanks to a reader for pointing out this remarkable piece by Woodrow Wilson, Socialism and Democracy. A brief sample:
In face of such circumstances, must not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control?
'Yes,' says the democrat, 'perhaps it must."
Wilson's short essay, in which he claims that democracy and socialism are inseparable, is certainly relevant to Kesler's Friday post, Demonization Does You In.
A discussion of Wilson's progressivism here.
Ed. comment: Interesting. It is an antique view of the world, indeed. I believe Wilson wrote that blog post essay in the 1880s. As we always ask here, 1. What about freedom? and, 2. Where's the money and wealth gonna come from? I am with CS Lewis, who preferred that people aspire to wealth than to power if they must aspire to worldly goals. Wealth is harmless, and often beneficial. Power is scarey.
Double addendum, Goldberg via Driscoll:
...it is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian–or ‘holistic,’ if you prefer–in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists.
If politicians had more common sense than my plumber or Tom Jefferson, it might almost be a debatable argument. One which Aristotle settled long ago, however.
Saturday, July 10. 2010
Prelutsky.
Same here, and I am not as old as he is. He is an old guy.
Thursday, July 8. 2010
It is happening. A good thing, indeed. Monopolies are bad policy, especially government monopolies. Monopolies do not respond to market demand.
However, I am an extremist. I do not believe in government education in any form. We did better before we had any of that. See John Adams and Abe Lincoln...
As I repeat ad nauseum, education cannot be "delivered." It can only be grabbed by those who wish to grab it. I also believe Harvard or Yale (your choice) diplomas should be an entitlement for all American kids on reaching age 21. Like the Wizard of Oz did.
Let's face it: How many Ivy grads know Fermat's last theorem, today? Or can translate Caesar or Plutarch? The education industry today is a giant rip-off and nothing more than a credential sales scam.
Monday, July 5. 2010
"Cooperation" has been the mantra of the Kindergarten-minded in our midst for years. "Competition" is supposedly male, leads to Capitalism and war and other not-nice things, and is thus evil and a human trait which must be eliminated.
Of course, I have never noticed women to be any less competitive than men. Everybody enjoys a bit of the spice of competition in life, even when you lose.
Competition vs Cooperation a phony duality which, I assume, comes from some wacky ideology. Case in point: The Dark side of Cooperation.
Sunday, July 4. 2010
I never held a firearm before the Marine Corps, and chose not to since Vietnam. I spoke with a Marine Sergeant yesterday, he on the way to Afghanistan, his third tour there and Iraq. He hadn't held one either before the Marine Corps loaned him a rifle, trained him to use it, and he has to protect his country and family back in Ohio. He doesn't know whether he will choose to own one after he returns, serves another 10-years, and retires from the Corps.
The point is that those of us who treasure the 2nd Amendment to our Bill of Rights are not rampant Rambos, but understand that any key right denied is a shot at all our others.
Last week's US Supreme Court defense of the 2nd Amendment wasn't just about our right to own firearms. As InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds puts it:
So in little more than 15 years, we've seen an amazing turnaround on an issue where the "establishment" side had broad support from politicians (in both parties, really) and almost universal support from the media. Gun control now is nearly dead as an issue, and the "establishment" view that the Second Amendment didn't protect any sort of individual right, but merely a right of states to have national guards, did not get the support of a single Supreme Court justice.
So what's the lesson for today? It's that activism matters.
Now the issue on which activists differ from the establishment is the size of government. Politicians (in both parties, really) are pretty happy with big government. In this, they have the near-universal support of the media (now using covert e-mail lists to agree on how to slant their stories).
But if people care about shrinking government as much as gun rights activists care about protecting the Second Amendment, then this situation, too, can see a turnaround.
For the sake of the country, it had better.
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