Over the cliff
Off the Tax Cliff He Goes
President Obama wants lower rates for GE and J.P. Morgan than for small business.
Long-committed leftist that he is, Obama's guided by the Marxist schema of social change through class warfare -- a recipe that has proven to be the one way to reliably cripple economic growth and make everyone equally poor. As for individual liberty, don't both to ask. In Obama's world, the enforcement of "fairness" through mandatory redistribution means that power necessarily must be primarily political, i.e., police power wielded by Government.
The best jobs will be Government jobs, or jobs in Government-sponsored enterprises. That's already more true today than it's ever been -- the D.C. area is prospering as no other. For firms, a guaranteed Government contract or concession is vastly preferable to taking your chances in the marketplace, so few tears will be shed for capitalism in those quarters. But the necessities of cause and effect mean that the inevitable result is an accelerating misallocation of capital, including entrepreneurial talent, gross inefficiency, falling innovation and productivity, competitive failure, and Southern European-style economic collapse.
Obama believes that such talk of causes and effects can be discounted as merely a way to provide pseudo-scientific cover for powerful vested interests -- the ideology of the 1%. He's convinced that he can make socialism work, apparently because he thinks nobody with his combination of deep intelligence, deep morality, and political persuasiveness has tried up until now. But he's wrong about all of that. We can lament the fact that the socialist blueprint -- which is immensely attractive on paper -- doesn't work in practice, but it doesn't work for good and sufficient reasons. No quantity of desires and good intentions can make up for that. Socialism will always sound plausible to the listener who is ignorant of the reasons why it always fails, and this makes him mis-read history and its clear lessons.
When Obama's attempts fail, which they will, he'll blame various and sundry internal "enemies" (Lenin's term was "wreckers") who interfered with his vision and his programs to carry it out. That line is already being peddled by Obama's lapdog media, but the problems of socialism are inherent problems. It doesn't work because it can't work, and it can't work because of the way it tries to accomplish what it wants to accomplish. There may be a planet somewhere populated by beings who are constituted in a way that would allow the socialist dream to be a reality. But this is not that planet, and we are not those beings.
There's nothing new in our current scenario, going back to Sophocles at least: The leader of a great nation thinks he knows enough to step outside the causal chain he's part of, that his personal goodness and brilliance can revise the necessities of cause and effect, and make history come out a different way than it must. He turns out, of course, to be wrong, and the nation suffers for his ignorance and arrogance. Film at eleven.
Byron
President Obama wants lower rates for GE and J.P. Morgan than for small business.
Long-committed leftist that he is, Obama's guided by the Marxist schema of social change through class warfare -- a recipe that has proven to be the one way to reliably cripple economic growth and make everyone equally poor. As for individual liberty, don't both to ask. In Obama's world, the enforcement of "fairness" through mandatory redistribution means that power necessarily must be primarily political, i.e., police power wielded by Government.
The best jobs will be Government jobs, or jobs in Government-sponsored enterprises. That's already more true today than it's ever been -- the D.C. area is prospering as no other. For firms, a guaranteed Government contract or concession is vastly preferable to taking your chances in the marketplace, so few tears will be shed for capitalism in those quarters. But the necessities of cause and effect mean that the inevitable result is an accelerating misallocation of capital, including entrepreneurial talent, gross inefficiency, falling innovation and productivity, competitive failure, and Southern European-style economic collapse.
Obama believes that such talk of causes and effects can be discounted as merely a way to provide pseudo-scientific cover for powerful vested interests -- the ideology of the 1%. He's convinced that he can make socialism work, apparently because he thinks nobody with his combination of deep intelligence, deep morality, and political persuasiveness has tried up until now. But he's wrong about all of that. We can lament the fact that the socialist blueprint -- which is immensely attractive on paper -- doesn't work in practice, but it doesn't work for good and sufficient reasons. No quantity of desires and good intentions can make up for that. Socialism will always sound plausible to the listener who is ignorant of the reasons why it always fails, and this makes him mis-read history and its clear lessons.
When Obama's attempts fail, which they will, he'll blame various and sundry internal "enemies" (Lenin's term was "wreckers") who interfered with his vision and his programs to carry it out. That line is already being peddled by Obama's lapdog media, but the problems of socialism are inherent problems. It doesn't work because it can't work, and it can't work because of the way it tries to accomplish what it wants to accomplish. There may be a planet somewhere populated by beings who are constituted in a way that would allow the socialist dream to be a reality. But this is not that planet, and we are not those beings.
There's nothing new in our current scenario, going back to Sophocles at least: The leader of a great nation thinks he knows enough to step outside the causal chain he's part of, that his personal goodness and brilliance can revise the necessities of cause and effect, and make history come out a different way than it must. He turns out, of course, to be wrong, and the nation suffers for his ignorance and arrogance. Film at eleven.
Byron
posted by Byron | Tuesday, July 10, 2012
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home