“Hyphenated capitalism is no capitalism at all. The better name for it is socialism lite.” Nikki Haley
Read More“Recovery had proceeded far enough to end despair, but not far enough to restore satisfaction. People still felt that many things were wrong, but no longer felt, as they had in the terrible days of 1933, that their single duty was to trust Franklin Roosevelt and hold their peace. By transforming the national mood from apathy to action, the New Deal was invigorating its enemies as well as its friends.”
Read MoreBecause socialism always begins with a man in a workshirt and ends with a guy dressed up as Cap’n Crunch,
Read MoreThe voters, however, cannot escape some responsibility for this outcome. The more dependent we become on the government to solve our local and personal problems the more disappointed we will become with the results and the more likely we will be seduced by radical solutions.
Read MoreCapitalism becomes the basket where you place all your gripes about our economy. Capitalism is just a form of political freedom and like all rights and freedoms they’re not unrestricted and unregulated. There are good regulations and bad regulations. Good regulations support the proper functions of liberty and free markets; bad regulations undermine the institutions that support liberty and markets. If much of our problems come from bad regulation and bad government policy, then how is handing more power that source going to help? Progressivism grew to protect us from special interests, but what happens when the special interest we need to fear the most is the one that seeks to protect us?
Read MoreSocialism hinges on a belief in a general or unified will that is a myth. We are a diverse nation with diverse and competing interests and our Constitution is the most advanced political system ever devised for dealing with these competing interests. The belief in a unified interest becomes a justification for imposing one group’s interests on another. This is the essence of Hayek’s noted Road to Serfdom.
Read More“The destructive nature of socialism comes not from its tendency to trample on democracy (though socialism often does trample on democracy) but from its total disregard for rights — rights that are, in the context of the United States and other liberal-democratic systems, beyond the reach of mere majorities.”
Read More“The problems of socialism are problems of socialism — problems related to the absence of markets, innovation, and free enterprise and, principally, problems related to the epistemic impossibility of the socialist promise: rational central planning of economic activity. The problems of socialism are not the problems of authoritarianism and will not be cured by democracy.”
Read MoreWalter Williams properly noted that socialism works if you know everybody’s name; in small family and tribal units. It is poorly suited to the dispersed knowledge that is the glue of an integrated complex world. Capitalism is efficient but contrary to our biological nature. It is no surprise that the growth of tribalism in politics is accompanied by anti-capitalist rhetoric. Capitalism, like democracy, depends on values that may be contrary to human nature, while serving the betterment of mankind in our complex world.
Read MoreWe judge ourselves by our best intentions and the others by their worst examples. (George W Bush) Reform is seductive because the faults of the status quo are visible and real and the faults of reform are theoretical, obscure and often counter intuitive until the historians survey the wreckage years into the future.
Read MoreAdvocates of single payer and free benefits prove to be ignorant of the price system, profit, productivity and how they function. While they claim to allocate resources better than the ‘greed’ of the market (a claim easy to totally refute), they are clueless on how the wealth is generated in the first place.
Read More“Humans make hierarchies of status and privilege for themselves whenever the opportunity avails itself. This is why all socialist systems that do not work within the constraints of a liberal democratic framework of the rule of law inevitably descend into tyrannies. Give the state unbridled power, and the denizens of the state will use that power toward their own ends.”
Read More“When you hand power over to planners, technocrats, or commissars to substitute their judgement for the rule of law, you are behaving like an outlaw, because you are literally outside the law.”
Read MoreClarity in words and thoughts decay over time. When opposing views retain respect for the same words and principles, those ideas become ripe for interpretation, transposed to meet our current personal and political objectives as much as we may profess fidelity to its conception.
Read MoreBut repression on the Venezuelan model is not extraneous to socialism — it is baked into the socialist cake. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro (and Castro!), Chàvez, Maduro, Honecker, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, the Kim dynasty, Shining Path: No ideology is that unlucky. “
Read More“To curb the forces in business which would destroy equality of opportunity and yet to maintain the initiative and creative faculties of our people are the twin objects we must attain.”
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