We could do so much more if someone could just be the dictator.
NYT columnist on politics,Thomas Friedman, advocated the same thing, more tyranny, some time ago, less debate, more diktat.
Let’s do it like China. No excuses, no asking permission–just do it.
+1 for the cogent argument
+2 for the Fraggle Rock reference
+12 for using Jim Henson, accurately quoted, against the Left
*standing!ovation*
I’ve never known anyone who hasn’t at some point thought “life would be better if only everyone would listen to me.” The appeal of being able to force a population to do and behave as you think best will always be an attractive prospect. It is only in concern for the way this power has invariably been abused that we develop a healthy distrust for the concept of totalitarianism. As always, the big question is “who gets to decide what’s best?” In all my readings I’ve never found a philosopher or statesman that I felt had everything 100% right.
Perhaps the best argument against statism I’ve ever heard came from an episode of the Jim Henson show Fraggle Rock. “I’ve learned it’s very hard to really know what’s best for someone, but it’s very easy to think you do.”
Statists are obsessed about control. Hayek advised that central planning and totalitarian administrative state strategies were the product of the “fatal conceit” and he is seconded by the wise and insightful Thomas Sowell in many essays and books such as the Vision of the Anointed.
Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada (and son of a former prime minister), when asked which country’s government he admired the most:
“There is a level of admiration I actually have for China,” he said. “Their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green … we need to start investing in solar.”
http://www.canada.com/news/Liberal+Leader+Justin+Trudeau+slammed+over+China+comments/9145144/story.html
Too many people see the debate as “Who should have control?” rather than “Should anyone have control?” They see no problem with one person, or a small panel of people making everyone’s decisions for them if that person really does know what’s best for us. Social progressives see the totalitarian future as Star Trek’s benevolent United Federation of Planets (an obvious UN allegory). All hunger and disease has been eliminated, money is no longer a concept, and scientific exploration is the most important mission of the military. Some people honestly believe that fictional Utopia is a real possibility. Anyone will to settle for less must lack compassion. As a consequence, they compare everything in real life to that fictional concept and all is found wanting. They can never be made happy by anything that falls short. As a result, no amount of compromise will ever satisfy their need to move inexorably toward their impossible goal.
Over the decades there have been numerous sci-fi movies showing that the future is totalitarian control of the whole world. So Progressives (who claim to love these movies when the totalitarians are depicted as evil corporations) continue to push policies that inexorably lead to the societies shown in the sci-fi films.
They assume (perhaps rightly) that they will be the elites who control the population.
And they sell all this by the falsehood that they “care” about the individual.
There is no such thing as stability for a living thing. Living things are either growing and advancing toward their life giving and sustaining goals or are in the process of collapsing and dying. This is not a mystery.
It is the ideas that are held as “common sense” that guide the path of human society. If those ideas are coherent with reality, the path is upward, life affirming, and life giving. When they are against, the path is downward, anti-life, and anti-man.
For the 18th and 19th century, common sense was mostly coherent with reality. As a consequence, we saw the greatest expansion of wealth and freedom ever experienced by man. Toward the end of the 19th century, common sense reversed and became no longer coherent with anything.
The technological advances of the 20th century were made based upon echos from the past. As with all echos, it was boom and bust. The necessity of freedom and reason all but vanishing as part of common sense. Faith and force took over with deadly consequence. There is no lasting middle ground. It is either Aristotle and his intellectual descendents or Plato and his descendents but not both.
Change the ideas that man holds as true and you can change the course of history. Without doing the work necessary to make that happen, entropy will win.
Lionell, you are correct, but I suspect what you describe is just a phase in a cycle. Somehow the situation where individuals can flourish does not last. Historically, it hasn’t. When they flourish, individuals tend to become complacent. They start taking good things for granted. They forget about the cost of living, which in their minds becomes an economic abstraction of secondary importance. A person who is convinced that his survival is guaranteed fails to maintain equilibrium, for he does not have the ability to recognise that he is drifting away from it.
At any rate, the most civilised countries in the world do not look stable at the moment. They look like they are about to start or are well underway on the downward stroke, and the free market we knew decades ago is no longer as free and is not much of a market anymore. Just recall the ruling against FCC yesterday. It certainly isn’t aimed towards equilibrium. And I thought FCC was the villain.
Liberals love their totalitarian states. Look at well Russia, China, Korea, and Cuba have done on pollution. You never hear about severe smog problems or dead lakes and streams or any of the oh-so common problems we have in the USA. They have no coal-fired plants pouring out smoke and particulate matter, nuclear plants without containment buildings, cars without smog control, or impurities in their food products, like is so common in the US.
But, then again, the good totalitarians regimes have never killed millions of their own people like the democracies have a history of.
Any clear look at history shows that all evil comes from free markets and that governments are always doing what is best for the people and that the more the people are controlled, the happier and safer they are.
Your use of the word “robust” is very different from mine. That poverty, death, and destruction has been the typical state of man since the get go, I do not deny. However, that state is anything but robust. It is simply the consequence of denying the nature of man and his relationship to reality by the attempt to substitute arbitrary whim and brute force for knowledge and rational action. Death is the end point. While death is long lasting, it is not robust. It is simply non existence of life.
To live and thrive, man must use knowledge. To acquire knowledge he must use reason. To be able to use reason, man must be free of coercion from others. The consequence is a robust civilization where individuals can flourish.
And yet dictators have evolutionary advantage over non-dictators and totalitarian regimes are more robust than free markets. Maintaining a free-market society is an uphill battle. As soon as its thrust weakens, humans revert to wild type.
“We could do so much more if someone could just be the dictator.”
Try that idea and command, at pain of death, any random person to make a a simple wooden pencil from scratch. I mean actually make one out of the starting materials and not buy it from the local drug store. Few would know where to start. No one can do it all from scratch. Yet the free market manages to make them by the billions and sell them for a few cents each. How? In a free market no one person needs to know everything. He only needs to know what is important to him and trade freely with other like minded people.
To be successful in doing anything other than causing poverty, death, and destruction, a dictator must know everything about everything and keep track of the instant by instant change in the state of everything. The information cannot be acquired or processed while it is still valid. By the time the central decisions are made, the circumstances will have changed enough to make the decisions irrelevant or even destructive. This is way all dictatorships ultimately fail even by its own standards of judgement. There is a total disconnect between a dictator and the reality he wishes to dictate. Reality doesn’t care one whit about the wishes of a dictator and simply IS what it is.
I remember the John Birch Society signs about getting out of the UN. Sounds like they may have been right.