Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Will the Lefty-Socialist Advance Cause a Flip Back Towards Freedom?



A friend responds to myEPJ  post, WOW Democratic Socialist Defeats GOP House Whip, detailing the Democratic sweeps last night:
I always agreed with your assessment of Trump, and continue to be amazed at the apparent support he has received.
Since I have little hope of logic winning the day, soon, maybe if socialists are swept into office the next election, the following election will permit reason to re-enter politics.
At this point, I just don't
see it. There is just very little deep appreciation for free markets in the United States.  The horrors that lefty interventions bring will just bring calls for more interventions.

It is Hayek's fatal conceit on steroids. 

That said, Austrian school economics teaches that the world is too complex in detail to forecast with certainty. So our sliver of hope is that there is an unseen domino that will fall that pushes things in the direction of liberty. But if there is such a domino, in the short-term, it is also well hidden.

  -RW

8 comments:

  1. Probably not, but libertarians still need to remain engaged. One thing we can count on is the inevitable failure of central planning. When that happens, some who previously advocated central planning will become disillusioned, and start looking for answers. We need to be there to provide those answers.

    I have no idea how long it would have taken me to eventually become a libertarian had it not been for guys like Dr Paul, Woods, and Schiff explaining how government caused the housing crash.

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  2. Surely allowing more pro-socialism immigrants to flood the US will lead to more freedom. How long does the magic dirt take to make third worlders into avid Von Mises followers?

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  3. Given at least on social media how much of current US politics is basically people wanting one form of government jackboot thuggery over another its hard to believe it will. However this doesn't mean we shouldn't stop promoting the message

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  4. Do humans chose freedom or comfort? Be it culture, creation, evolution or some combination it seems most prefer a patriarch. They want daddy to be benevolent but also to take on the big responsibilities and tell them how to handle it.

    As the report by Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation that was referenced in the post http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2017/11/50-of-millenials-would-rather-live-in.html indicates we are not headed in the direction of freedom.

    What are the solutions? Evan Smiley has an important one, remain engaged. Ultimately we need to demonstrate that freedom works. You would think this has already been done. It has to a large extent, but currently the human race values security over freedom. This causes the slide backward. Back to our created, evolved, cultured, learned desire to follow parents, tribal leaders, kings and presidents. Especially when things get dangerous or complicated. Even more so for young people. Studies have shown that the rational part of the human brain is not completely developed until the age 25.

    We know who college students are exposed to when there are tough questions about welfare, warfare, firearms, etc? With 66% of the US population attending college and similar percentages throughout Western Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Israel, the “first world” is awash in academia. As we know this is not a bastion of freedom and neither is the rest of our education system. This has got to change. This is the front line.

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    1. The front line is grade school. The state aims to get children earlier and earlier. This is where the groundwork of teaching people that being 'smart' is repeating what authority says. Where the spirit of self-learning is broken. Where natural curiosity and ideas of fairness fade away. This is what makes people accepting of the later messages in college.

      The social engineers, statists, and collectivists took the grade schools first for a reason. By the time adults are exposed to libertarian ideas it's too late. Outside of some of the homeschooled only those who somehow emerged from the schools with some natural desire to learn left intact or have stopped watching TV and such can be reached because their programming doesn't get refreshjed. A single digit percentage of people that grows smaller each generation.

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    2. This is spot on an not even the often less than ideal zealot home school offers the perfect alternative. The insidious nature of indoctrination in education is the 30,000 lb King Kong in the room.

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  5. I have always suspected that graceful graffiti, moonlight, state university architecture, and brief, well designed rhetoric were the way forward for an enlightened education, but I was educated by the government, so what do I know?

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  6. The madness of crowds has been a recurring theme in human history for centuries. Long before government schools or even statism. It is part of human nature and there is no cure, no solution. Except perhaps time. Just in the 20th century it took the Russians 70 years to accept their mistake. Germans, first with Nazism and than communism went through 50 years before bringing down the Berlin wall. And China suffered terribly for decades under communism. Even though these societies emerged into more individual freedom it has only been partial. I fear the U.S. has a long way to fall.

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