To blame the mere shortage of cash for the evils caused by incompetence and corruption is the favorite lie of socialists and crony capitalists everywhere. Socialists always say there is no problem of inequality or poverty that can’t be solved with cash. It is cash alone that separates the rich from the poor- not talent or skill or hard work or thrift. Similarly, in the socialist view it is only access to capital that separates “greedy” and “monopolistic” (read “successful”) firms from the thousand flowers that would bloom if only the government would create a “level playing field” and “enforce competition.”
After the socialists becpme the government and begin evolving into crony capitalists, their favored beneficiaries- Soviet state-owned factories, Japanese banks, Fannie and Freddie in the United States- are always described as faultlessly devoted, idealistic, and hardworking, or at least essential. If they underperform (and they always underperform), it is only because they are short of cash- which the government then always provides in some form or another.
From Panic by Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante
“I have been part of five institutions- the Catholic Church, The university of Redlands, the United States Navy, The University of Chicago, and Harvard University. If I were required to rank them to the extent to which free and uninhibited discussion was possible within them, I am very much afraid that the Harvard of 1972 would not rank near the top. In the last two or three years, the list of subjects that cannot be publicly discussed there in a free and open forum has grown steadily, and now includes the war in Vietnam, public policy towards urban ghettos, the relationship between intelligence and heredity, and the role of American corporations in certain overseas regimes.”
James Q. Wilson, political scientist
“A dynamic economy will always have booms and busts. But the story of the past twenty-five years is that Washington has created a financial system that cannot withstand the destructive part of creative destruction – necessary for free markets- without destroying the economy. We’ve grown so accustomed to government-subsidized failure in finance that we feel we have no choice. In accepting subsidized failure, we harm America’s trust in free markets, we harm the world’s trust in American markets, and we harm the financial innovation that advances the economy rather than smothers it.”
From After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street- and Washington by Nicloe Gelinas
“Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every ”ism” of the left. .. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew’s belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian’s belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas a believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.”
Dennis Prager as quoted in Why Are Jews Liberals? By Norman Podhoretz
HKO comments: Poderhoretz makes a grand attempt to explain why Jews are Liberal. Most of the book deals with their history that both made them sympathetic to the downtrodden and in direct conflict with the conservatism of the established orders. But that explanation still left Podhoretz wondering why they were so reluctant to acknowledge the development of increasing anti-Semitism on the left and greater sympathy and support for Israel on the right. Even when Jews acknowledge the drifts toward anti-Semitism on the left they remain resistant to acknowledge the changes in the right that have become more accepting of the Jews and more outright supportive of the State of Israel.
