Tolstoy on the U.S. Govt

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means -- except by getting off his back."

Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?, Chapter 16

Ok, maybe he wasn't talking about the U.S. government, but it undeniably fits.

[Hat tip Jonah Goldberg for the quote.]

GM's Alfred Sloan Refused Slavery

From an article in The Freeman by Dr. Burton Folsom, author of New Deal or Raw Deal?:

Alfred Sloan, the [long-time] chairman of General Motors, framed the question this way: “Is American business in the future as in the past to be conducted as a competitive system?

He answered: “General Motors . . . will not participate voluntarily in what stands out crystal clear at the end of the road: a regimented economy.”

My, how things have changed.


[Note: the article topic is What Ended the Great Depression? Well worth a read.]

Keynes on the Power of Ideas

I've finally found something on which to agree with John Maynard Keynes.

“[T]he power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

Chesterton on the Health Care Non-Debate

Apropos the now-invisible health care debate (which, thanks to all the backroom dealing from which even most Democrats are excluded, has virtually dropped off the radar) and the woefully inadequate Republican response:

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
-G. K. Chesterton (April, 1924)

Quotes on Statism for a Wintery Day

As the Robespierres Gallic utopians in D.C. gather to wrangle over how best to rope and carve up American health care services, a few pithy quotes are in order. [Courtesy of Roger Kimball's worthwhile essay, Democratic Despotism Comes of Age, from the symposium "The New Statism."]

First up, while we're on the relation of do-goodism to statism: a stellar offering by C.S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Then, from Mr. Kimball himself:

The biggest challenge we face now is not to our stock portfolios or 401K accounts (renamed “201K accounts” by one wag) but rather the psychological conditions for political liberty, among which a spirit of individual initiative, i.e., taking responsibility for oneself and one’s family, figures prominently. [emphases mine]

Kimball goes on to offer a quote about greed from Trollop's novel Can You Forgive Her?

"There is no vulgar error so vulgar,—that is to say, common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. A desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray."

There are more psychological insights offered up, this one by Kimball, following Hayek's thinking in The Road to Serfdom:

Socialism is not only something that the state does to individuals. It is also something that individuals do to themselves when they decide that freedom is too expensive to fight for and that the consolations of dependency are worth the tax on individual liberty.

Then, just to show that even neo-conservatives can sometimes be right on important subjects, a quote from Irving Kristol's lecture to the American Enterprise Institute in 1973:

For two centuries the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society.

The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions.

The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

Of course, Hugo — great writer that he was — said it better:

"The pen is mightier than the sword." and "Not all the united armies can stand against an idea whose time has come."

So, on this wintery day, may your ideas be healthy and mighty, to stave off the day when the Robespierres decide to socialize your pen as they're about to do with your health care.

Quote of the Day - Eisenhower

I never shared President Eisenhower's concern over the "military industrial complex." Still, I'm not insensible to the tendency of some businessmen to take advantage of political pull to increase profits. What's especially interesting though, even tragic, about this quote is the final sentence.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist... There is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.

Adherence to that one insight would have eliminated 90% of the economic disasters of the past year that have, even now, not yet fully played out.

Melanie Phillips on Barack Obama

Quote of the Day

I haven't run across a column before by Melanie Phillips, a UK columnist for the Daily Mail. This one struck me as the most accurate, concise summary to date of Barack Obama and the current election out of the over 1 million words I've digested this past year.

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant [sic] radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshiped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

I'll be reading a lot more Melanie Phillips in the future. I hope I won't be reading much about Barack Obama in the future.

I have to add, though, that it isn't myself I want to pinch so much. I'm more inclined to want to pinch the heads of the millions of Americans who are lined up to vote for him.

Sure, Barack Obama is worse than radioactive virus-laden puke. But who has made him the leading contender for the office of President of the United States? About half the American electorate who are apparently either too lazy to read widely available material, or actually want socialism, or who are simply so disgusted (rightly so) with the Republican administration and Congress of the last 6-8 years that they have deluded themselves into believing that anything would be better.

Frankly, I'm half expecting civil war within the next 20 years if things continue as they have been.