We find that centralizing economic decisions does not solve the economic problems, it just creates a decider that is further removed from any accountability.  Political self interest can be more corrupt and damaging than economic self interest, and slower to correct excesses and mistakes.  Competence, more training, and empty gestures for accountability  will not save or correct bad laws and flawed institutions.  The ends do not justify the means.  The road to hell is paved by good intentions. Private virtues can become public vices. HKO

 Progressives equate progress to redistribution. They view the planet and every microcosmic society within it as a lifeboat with a finite amount of supplies to pass around for survival’s sake. Their idea of progress is achieved when the redistribution achieves their ideal of fairness and no further bouts of redistribution are needed. Since that day will never come, utopia becomes an economic police state.

There is no progress in progressivism. There is instead a deep fear of progress.Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress of social controls. Human genius is sold on the block in exchange for bureaucracy.

 From Sultan Knish, Daniel Greenfield

The classic economic dilemma of unlimited wants verses limited resources will not go away by transferring decisions from the market to the government any more than by transferring decisions from the elected officials to sequestered bureaucrats.- HKO

In a world drowning in data, even the brightest risk seeing patterns that appear logical but lead us to false conclusions.  Competency has become confused with credentialism.  Good intentions pursued by the credentialed, unmoored by either reality or accountability can yield disastrous results.  A political environment, as opposed to the accountability of a free market, only shields the credentialed with the illusion of competence.- HKO

But the illusion of competence as a solution to a flawed system remains.  Faith in the constitution, the republic, democracy and capitalism may often be tested but so is faith in the bureaucratic elite that believes that stability can be achieved without cost to freedom and growth.  The important question is not so much which system fails more but which system corrects quicker.- HKO

Regulators may avoid smaller failures only to lead us to larger failures.  By alleviating small failures we disable firewalls and become inured to risk and cause greater failures.  By reducing the pain of unemployment we risk increasing the pain and the cost of dependency and the inevitable harsh reception of any reform.- HKO

Inequality occupies the minds of the elite and the academics.  Most people at the low end of the scale just wants to improve their lot in life.  That is more important than how well others are doing.  Other than the new political elite who get massive checks from their crony relationships with the government, few people who depend on government subsistence will ever get enough of it to escape poverty.- HKO

 American has avoided much of the class warfare that affected other nations because we had mobility- people rose and fell among income categories.  It is more important to protect that mobility than to provide snapshots of equality that satisfy pundits but hinder opportunities for real citizens.- HKO

 

 

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