"Old Fools, New Fools"
by Joel Bowman
“To argue with a person who has renounced reason
is like administering medicine to the dead.”
~ Thomas Paine, "The American Crisis" (1778)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Every age has its dimwits, its knuckleheads and its jobbernowls. What makes our time so special? Is it simply that, thanks to the population having doubled over the past half century, more fools rolled out of bed this morning than ever did before? Is it that, through the dubious miracles of reality TV and anti-social media, the mentally impaired are able to make their nonsense heard far and wide?
Or is it more the scale and severity of the ideas themselves that take one’s breath away? To be sure, the new stupid ideas sound suspiciously like the old stupid ideas... but now they are nuclear-armed and college-miseducated, too! Take the latest trend toward so-called “democratic socialism” in the United States of America...
This is the idea, as far as we can tell, that seeks to launder the astonishing conceit of collectivist wisdom through the echoing braincases of the unwashed mobjority... so not only are voters saddled with a system that has never worked in all of human history, but they get to thank their neighbors for having forcibly imposed it upon them, too!
Piffle and Prattle: The recently published Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) party platform, printed under the snappy headline “Workers Deserve More,” reads exactly as you’d expect: like a wishlist for entitled “studies” undergrads who mostly wish to work less and receive more. Here’s a whiff of the pile, from the DSA’s super edgy, raised-fist website:
“Imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism,” the dreamy fiction begins, like a marketing brochure for an eternal vacation to a marshmallow-padded utopia.
“You work as much as you are able and no more than needed, and you would control your own labor and see it going to good use. It’s not just a job to pay the bills...”
“Speaking of bills: you don’t really have them anymore.”
“You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.”
But wait! Why stop there? While we’re typing our thought bubbles in large-font crayon and doing away with life’s less desirable aspects, let’s get rid of long lines, bad breath, poor manners and rap music, too. As for free stuff, how about unlimited concert tickets, seaside vacations and Sunday brunches? Food and energy having finally been liberated from the constraints of the physical universe, why not make everything free all the time?
Never mind that existing debts still need to be settled (an uncomfortably grown-up responsibility)... or that blithely labeling goods and services a “human right” or a “common good” does not magically conjure them into existence... or that “publicly funded” cannot mean drawing from a limitless supply of capital which, apparently, nobody actually earns anyway... because profit = bad, duh!
Why let the pesky laws of, say, supply and demand, scarcity, comparative advantage, opportunity cost, time preference, diminishing returns, marginal utility, demand elasticity, subjective value, et al. derail our blissful daydream?
Eat the Rich, Redux: To the shock of none, the DSA movement has garnered the slack-jawed, empty-headed support from all the usual suspects in the popular press...
Nordic Mythology: Naturally, the DSA comrades support all the usual “eat the rich” slogans... higher taxes for the enviably wealthy and “greedy” capitalists alike, “free” rides on already dilapidated public transport, collectively owned grocery stores and more governmental intervention in the highly dysfunctional rental markets.
This is, of course, the exact same playbook that ended in poverty, immiseration and shallow graves throughout the 20th Century, from Soviet Union and China... to the Warsaw Pact nations across Eastern Europe... along with Southeast Asian states like Vietnam, Laos, North Korea... not to mention Cuba, and the allied nations across sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Blondes and brunettes... old and young... saints and sinners... blacks, whites and Asians too... the hammer and sickle came for them all.
“But, but, but...” comes the hoary rejoinder, “Mamdani and his fellow DemSoc travelers are not talking about Havana/Caracas/Soviet-style socialism... rather, they’re aiming more at Denmark-style socialism.” Which would be fine enough, were it not for the inconvenient fact that Denmark is not a socialist nation, as Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen was at great pains to note in a direct response to Bernie Sanders continued mischaracterization of his country and its people during the 2020 election.
“I would like to make one thing clear,” Prime Minister Rasmussen said in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. “[Denmark] is a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”
Old Fools, New Fools: Like its Nordic neighbors, Denmark is able to sustain generous welfare programs – universal healthcare, public education, etc. – because of its dynamic, competitive, highly functional capitalist economy. It is not the way it spends its money that makes it rich, in other words, but the way it generates it in the first place.
Denmark also happens to be a high trust society, something that cannot exactly be said of the mean streets of many a Democrat-run city in the US, where crime is rampant, baby formula lives behind plexiglass and stealing up to $950 of goods is considered by a growing demographic to be just a new and fashionable way of shopping, because private property is oppression (except for the person stealing it, obvs.)
Central planning, price controls, and collective ownership at home. Capital controls, currency manipulation and inglorious wars of pomp and vanity abroad. Many of the prescriptions of yesterday’s ruling class were pure, unadulterated nincompoopery from the outset. But they had yet to be dragged through the chambers of Congress... made to fail spectacularly in the real economy... and definitively routed on the field of battle. At least the old fools had an excuse, albeit a flimsy one. Many of their dumb ideas were, in part, new dumb ideas. What have the new fools to say for themselves?" Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
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