Roger Kimball on the return of central planning and the spurious claims about our economy:
The next time someone bemoans the evil of “laissez-faire capitalism” to you, utter the number 69,428. That’s the number of pages in the 2006 edition of the Federal Register, the official government compendium of rules and regulations, the handy-dandy list of things you must do, and not do, if you want to do . . . well, just about anything. “Laissez faire” is the bogey man unhappy leftists use to frighten the credulous. Capitalism was never completely unregulated, and it certainly isn’t unregulated now. In fact, we have much more to fear from the ethic of “défendre faire”–the nanny-state ethic whose ultimate goal is to turn us all into wards of the state.
The folks who control the language control the society. Of late – I’d say the past ten years or so – progressives have commanded an amazing amount of control of our language. Thus, we have the laughable claim that lassez-fair capitalism led to our economic woes, the idea that “proportional response” should be the main goal of any nation at war, that subjecting someone to a barking dog and the strains of Barney is “torture”, and “change” as anything but an empty platitude.
Kimball is right. Central control has always been, and always will be, a losing proposition to everyone except the people doing the controlling. As we saw in Soviet Russia (and can still see in China and Cuba), central planning means that the planners live in relative luxury while those who have to live with their flawed plans wait in line for hours for food or have to dig their dead children from the rubble of collapsed school buildings.
When folks like Arianna Huffington and Thomas Frank natter on about what a delight a socialist economy is, remember where they want to be in that power structure. Trust me, it’s down with the rest of us proles.
Tags: Culture Control, Economics, Progressives, Roger Kimball
