Posted on 11/06/2002 1:48:36 PM PST by vannrox
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin
John Powers, a Lefty columnist for a Lefty magazine on the Left coast discovered recently that "...over the last two decades, the joy has gone out of the left -- it now feels hedged in by shibboleths and defeatism -- while the right has been having a gas..."
Powers also "...discovered that while unread copies of The Nation invariably rose in guilt-inducing stacks, [he] always read The Weekly Standard right away.
Why? Because seen purely as a magazine, The Standard is incomparably more alluring..."
Powers himself is an awkward writer with a tin ear, his similes strained and clumsy, his attempts at levity risible, but he can recognize good writing. He pours copious praise on the Weekly Standard's "core of enjoyable writers, notably David Brooks, Christopher Caldwell (whose article on Islam in France is one of the best things I've read this year) and David Tell, probably the country's most compelling editorialist."
Contrariwise, he excoriates The Nation, which he dubs "the journalistic lodestar of the American left," as "gray and unappealing as homework." It "specializes in anti-corporate anhedonia." "Reading the average Nation editorial" writes Powers, " is like trying to gobble a box of dry muesli."
Anti-corporate anhedonia notwithstanding, clearly Mr. Powers is on to something important. But he can't break through. He attributes The Nation's (and the Left's) troubles to a lack of style.
Thus he asserts that the Right has the good funny people, such as "Lee Atwater [who has been dead for eleven years] "grooving the blues," Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter. And the funny writers, too"... the likes of P.J. O'Rourke (who reminds us that reactionaries make better humorists than liberals)." Reactionaries, you hear that? How quaint!
-----oo0oo-----
Ambling to Powers' side comes wordslinger Jack Shafer, another Lefty writer for another Lefty mag, Slate, to interpret the handwriting on Powers' wall. A case of right-wing envy is Schafer's diagnosis. It's spreading. Michael Kinsley, formerly editor of Slate, and Chris Hitchens, still a columnist for The Nation, are among many who have it.
It does occur to Shafer that Left content, not the manner of its expression may be the problem, but he brushes that possibility aside and speeds on to elucidate Powers' notion that the Left's "shibboleths and defeatism" are the culprits responsible. It's a good approach because that phrase is either meaningless or absurd, take your pick.
Shafer claims that Powers' essay "hints that the source of The Nation's illness is the Stalinist impulse to prescribe proper attitudes toward culture, art, and journalism." I find no such hints, but if they are there, they are matters of substance, content, not style.
It is indeed the nature of socialism, the Left's creed, not only of bad, bad Stalinism, to present one plan and proscribe all others. That's the idea. Can't have everyone pursuing his own plan. That would be chaos, anarchy. Freedom is out.
Twenty years ago, forty years ago, the Left's one-plan notion as the cornerstone of peace and prosperity was plausible-wrong, but plausible. In those days, it must indeed have been exhilarating, joyous for Lefties to see themselves as winners and mock their opponents over here on the Right.
But now the secret is out. Socialism is a hoax. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the record of repression and torture and murder in Europe and Asia, and in the Caribbean, too, the exposure of the misery and poverty the Left had long tried to conceal and excuse are incontrovertible proof that the core of socialism is rotten and about as scientific as alchemy.
The intellectual contest between the one-plan guys and the freedom guys is over. We won. They're intellectually bankrupt. The Left's remaining hangers-on are delusional hoaxters, worthy targets of our scornful wit. It takes no great rhetorical skill to mock them. All we have to do is quote them.
Stalinoids
In the long ago days when, as John Powers noted, the Left was joyous, Lefties were able to ascribe the lack of productivity even then an observable characteristic of socialism to its superior morality.
Socialism depends, they said, on people being willing to cooperate, to work for the good of others. By contrast, capitalism's motivator is human greed.
Of course, one man's greed is another man's self-interest--they've loaded the argument. And, as Paul Newman, one of The Nation's stockholders, can attest, you can run a business like Newman's Own-spaghetti sauce and other foods and you can devote the profits of that business to charity. Greed, even the despised profit motive doesn't enter into the picture, doesn't add a dime to the bottom line. It's irrelevant.
Nevertheless, the Left has had great success persuading themselves and others that socialism depends on cooperation, hence that it is loving and benign, good for what ails you.
Bit by bit, the word must have seeped out that socialism doesn't give a damn about cooperation. Coercion is inherent in all socialist plans, complete--when "ownership and control of the means of production" (Dr. Karl's prescription) has passed from the people to their socialist masters, or partial, that is, parasitic socialism which grudgingly allows a free sector to exist but only to stand and deliver. Whether complete (or nearly so) or partial, a socialist plan orders; it doesn't merely make suggestions. The plan calls for you to row, you better pull that oar.
It is part of Left mythology to expect socialism to usher in an age when competition, the Law of Jungle, they call it, is no more. But goods are scarce; they have a price, so material incentives don't disappear, nor does competition. All jobs are not equally desirable. Since there are no earnings statements to use to grade performance other methods must be used. The guys on top, how did they get there?
Nearly sixty years ago, in The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek observed that regardless of any initial benign romantic intentions of socialist revolutionaries, they were soon replaced by brutes who did not shrink from applying the force thought to be required. In time, word gets around. Even the folks at Nation must have caught on to the pattern, and no doubt it's discouraging.
But we can also observe an indifference to coercion and repression, even applause for it. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, quite orthodox Bloonsbury Fabian socialists went to Moscow in the 'thirties and liked what whey saw. (So, seven years before its collapse did that fraudulent flatulent economist, J.K. Galbraith.)
George Bernard Shaw, in his quest for Superman toured and praised both the Nazional Socialist Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
In many of the corridors of academe, the omelet-goal warranted any number of cracked eggs.
Still, I guess that most of the Left repeatedly passed off socialism's barbarous cruelty as a mere matter of personnel. The wrong people doing nasty things: gulags, torture, murder on a monumental scale. But nothing wrong with the system. System's fine.
How convenient to deny, for instance, that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn't socialist at all, to pretend to believe that its miseries were caused by Stalinoids (or androids or maybe adenoids).
As late as last week, Amblin' Jack Shafer wrote about the "Stalinist impulse to prescribe proper attitudes toward culture, art, and journalism."
Stalinist, you hear? The old shortstop has been dead forty-nine years, but his impulses linger on. Does that disappoint the faithful who went Left to escape conformity?
My seminarians and I have discussed the quaint Left notion that cooperation on the Don Corleone model-they offer you a deal you can't refuse-is the self-evidently efficient way to conduct public affairs. Why give the lumpen a chance to err when you are only looking out for their best interests? Why let them screw up your magnificent and magnanimous plan?
Bare Cupboards
Although the Left regarded socialism as the answer to the cries of the prisoners of starvation, Lefties were aware that there was something wrong with socialist productivity. Goods were scarce, sacrifices had to be made to assure a better, more abundant future. That, anyway, was how it was explained.
But facts are stubborn things, as you know, and they kept seeping out. They had started seeping out soon after Lenin took charge after the Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 against the constitutional Kerensky government. (The czar had been removed back in February of that year.) Lenin was a professional revolutionary with no knowledge or experience outside that exotic profession.
He knew nothing about manufacturing, mining, farming, finance and commerce, all of which he viewed as a matter of clerks making entries in ledgers while Party managers issued orders.
Lenin soon found out that things didn't quite work that way. Not to worry, the clerks were skillful and made entries as if their lives depended on them, as indeed they did. Five-year plan followed Five-year plan, but they weren't plans at all--they were declarations of mythical production goals-and of course they were never met.
Clerks kept making false entries, creating fake statistics for the entertainment of the gullible and of frauds like John Kenneth Galbraith, But the years rolled on and the scarcities never went away.
There continued to be lines for the most common consumer goods, men's and women's work clothes and shoes, soap, sugar, bicycles, cars, refrigerators, butter, bread, underwear. Stores ran out of merchandise and closed early. Apartments were scarce. It was common for three generations of a family to inhabit a single room.
For many Lefties this was a minor flaw.
The guys in charge in Moscow maintained it was caused by "obstructionists, wreckers, capitalist spies" inspired by greed. Lefties abroad, when they thought about it at all, were confident that socialist economic theory was correct notwithstanding the ever-present problem of scarce consumer goods.
------oo0oo------
I am not sure when it dawned on the leaders of the Soviet Union that socialism as economic theory was bunk. The top guys in the Soviet Union, said Richard Pipes, historian, knew early on that socialism could not deliver the goods, that it didn't work as advertised. I doubt if they ever knew why. But they certainly knew they were on top.
The system produced enough for them to live like sultans. They were greater than the czars, said Lev Navrasov, an astute observer who left the Soviet Union in 1971. They owned the entire country. All the people in it were their serfs. Why stir up trouble by telling everyone the truth about the Tooth Fairy? So they continued to prattle on about their devotion to socialism.
Lefties had noticed early on that Russia was the wrong country. Marx had specified an industrial country as the best candidate for scientific socialism's advent, and Russia was agricultural. So their hopes must have turned upward when the industrialized countries of western and central Europe joined the throng after World War II. They were joyous then, as Lefty illuminatus John Powers observed. Socialism was on the march everywhere.
It took another twenty or thirty years for the thin veneer of socialist faith to crack and flake off. The Chinese ceased waving their little red books of Mao's pithy banalities as they looked hungrily toward Japan and Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Those despised capitalists of the West, what had they wrought?
The faithful, grown inured to the economic failures of socialism were able to offer a last-gasp defense. They blithely denied that prosperity was any part of the socialist program. Their lexicon dutifully defined "consumerism" as a social disease, and Alex Cockburn, the Lefty counter-puncher who, through constant self-abuse had turned his brain into warm, lumpy kasha, declared the sin of capitalism was overproduction.
It was too late and too feeble. As the Soviet empire crumbled and its satellites scurried for home, the bare cupboards of socialism were visible to all who wished to see. And the joy was gone.
------oo0oo------
Lefties never understand that the same coercion that attracts them for its appearance of orderliness and simplicity makes impossible any of their goals of fairness, equality, and prosperity.
Command and Consent
When Henry Ford declared that his customers could have any color car they wanted "as long as it's black,"--Model T's were available only in black from 1914 to 1927--surely he was behaving like a commissar. When Ford, an abstemious and thrifty man, banned smoking in Ford factories, that was another commissar/coercive act. Old Henry was behaving like a commissar or a thug--Don Corleone comes to mind--wasn't he?
Not quite.
A black Model T was a deal which potential customers could refuse. If smoking on the assembly line was more important to you than the wages Ford paid, you weren't compelled to work there. Anyway, smoking wasn't forbidden under pain of criminal punishment. It was only a condition of employment.
Ford Motor Company was huge. It controlled enormous resources and could buy, if its managers chose to, rubber plantations in Brazil or Africa, and the services of engineers and architects, tool and die makers, welders, painters, vast quantities of wheel assemblies, starter motors, spark plugs, paint, glass, and sheet metal. In order to acquire these services and goods, Ford was obliged to make deals, to exchange, to seek consent. Not imputed consent, not majority consent, but actual, real consent.
Of course, need drove consent.
Employees worked for Ford to get money to supply their needs. Suppliers sought the custom of Ford to meet their needs. Buyers of those 15,000,000 black Model T's needed cheap, reliable transportation. Ford needed employees, contractors, suppliers, and customers.
To meet these needs from the top down, by command, is a quite impossible task.
Oh, it can be done for any limited particular task, say, producing a space shuttle or an airplane, a parade, a swim team. But the unstated premise is that costs don't matter, that resources, material and human, will be applied without stint and without considering other needs. Even with small, limited goals, the coordination problem is enormous, beyond the reach of anything that passes for planning.
A command system--we command, you perform--confers apparent order only. There is no way to coordinate the commands. Resources are scarce, limited. That's the nature of life on planet earth. They must be rationed according to some scheme because all demands for resources cannot be met.
Resources spent on project A cannot be spent on project B.
Things wear out.
Capital goods--machinery, buildings, goods that are used to produce goods, must be repaired and replaced.
Resources must be allocated to those tasks.
Decisions must be made whether to repair old capital goods or junk them and produce new ones.
Those decisions can be made rationally only if the costs can be estimated with reasonable certainty and compared--but this will be true only if lower costs are preferable to higher costs. Nothing requires a command project to choose lower cost.
Indeed, command systems, partial or complete, are designed to carry on by spending their budget. The activity itself does not generate the resources necessary for its continuance. Those resources are allocated by another set of commands, another budget.
Human capital-human intelligence, energy, and skills-is a scarce resource without which all other resources add up to nothing. So human capital must be cultivated, rewarded, and allowed to flourish. If it is squandered on enforcing command systems where innovation, inherently involving risk, is a breach of the Plan, it is not available to produce where it is needed.
-----oo0oo-----
The joy that Leftists felt when their command systems were installed after World War II around the world has departed. That's the point we started from in the first Mene Mene. Contrary to their promise of fairness and abundance, they have brought brutality and scarcity.
Post-mortem
I don't apologize for flogging a dead horse, for bothering to analyze the obvious failure of two centuries of Leftist endeavor at such great length. The Left is intellectually moribund--dead, that is. So, it's imperative that we understand why, that we use that understanding to prevent them from rising out of the grave and us from slipping into it.
For instance, our post mortem examination of the corpse of Leftism enables us to see why using that unfathomable mystery, the Federal Reserve, to compel lower interest rates won't work to restore prosperity to this country.
We can see how the Fed's single plan unfairly penalizes thrift and misdirects resources, impoverishes us. Not Mr. Greenspan's intent, of course, but that's the truth of it.
The autopsy also shows us the vital difference between the pseudo-planning of the pseudo-science embraced by the Left and the profound planning inherent in our Bill of Rights.
Contrast the multitude of commands of the Left model with the simple elegance of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press... A brilliant, deep, and subtle plan it is, using the fundamental national law to keep Congress out and allowing people the chance to carry out their own plans. The chance, yes; no more is needed or possible.
A free press is free when it is independent of the commands (or whims) of the armed powers that be: police, soldiers, and operatives of one or another Ministry of Fear, the omnipresent feature of the Left model.
(Doesn't it strike you as odd that the Left intelligentsia, nearly all of them scribblers, would shrug off as trivial the leashing and muzzling of the press, the imprisonment and the murder of poets?)
Our analysis demonstrates that freedom of the press is anchored on a base of private property immune from seizure or control by those same powers.
Similarly, we observe that using the power of the state to allocate goods, to set wages, prices, to compel who and how many may be hired and advanced, contrary to the results of peaceful consent and exchange, inevitably impoverishes the entire community for the benefit of the anointed few. And of course, it's neither equal nor fair.
Freedom and secure title are essential.
Freedom is a good in itself irrespective of the material benefits that follow in its wake. The material benefits will always depend on the human capital of the community.
We conclude there isn't a shred of intellectual content in the Left. It's just cultish mumbo-jumbo, obeisance to stale dogma.
What's left of the Left?
Nothing coherent. The dream of "progressivism," a new world of peace and plenty, has vanished, drowned in the blood of 100,000,000 casualties in the twentieth century--a failure everywhere it's been tried, and now stripped of any intellectual pretensions it commanded in former days.
This doesn't mean that the Left has dissolved or is without power. It means that the Left is in disarray.
The Left position on the Middle East since September 11, 2001 is illustrative.
A portion of the Left, typified by the Socialist Party USA, called for summoning Osana bin Ladin to the International Court of Justice in the Hague and trying him there.
No specifications of how this was to be accomplished were given.
The Socialist declaration is foolish, delusional, and anti-American: This retribution is not and cannot be just.
Instead this military aggression will only lead to more violence; endless cycles of retribution and war will again be in all our lives; innocent people will die; and we will be no better than the September 11 hijackers.
Never in history has peace been obtained through war.
Presumably, bin Ladin and his armed followers and the heads of states which supported him would submit themselves for prosecution and punishment.
We know that the death penalty, condemned by the entire Left as barbaric, would be out of the question, so we may presume that sensitivity training, grief counseling, and community service were what they had in mind.
A portion of the Left viewed the attacks of September 11 as deserved payback for imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and other miscellaneous crimes committed by the United States--no, make that Europeans, the West, the white race--going back, said our forty--second President, to the Crusade of 1095.
Another portion of the Left, in disarray, as I've said, atavistically shouted "quagmire," "exit strategy" and "Vietnam," then retreated into sulky silence when the campaign in Afghanistan went off brilliantly. Old habits of mind die hard, but Leftists in public office were wary of appearing to oppose what they believed and their polls told them was the temper of the electorate.
These Leftists seem to be crawling out of the woodwork now that the prospect of an Iraq campaign emerged, three of them showing up in Baghdad just last week, but it's a good bet they will scuttle away when the light of victory is turned on.
In the wake of September 11, a fragment of the Left broke ranks, blamed the perps and not America, and saw the necessity for the use of military force. They have thus earned the obloquy of the Left's true believers, the faithful who actually read The Nation, that lodestar of the Left.
The Left no longer has a program to improve the lot of the working class. just condescension, a dash of freebies whose existence depends on plundering a prosperous productive sector (the part that operates on consent and exchange) and a full dose of resentment.
From the detritus of socialism the Left has dug up and clutched to its bosom a mound of moldering resentment. It is resentment which energizes and occupies its attention, resentment engendered by the prosperity and freedom of the West, the United States in particular.
This resentment is so overwhelming it beclouds their judgment. Lefties end up preferring a dangerous tyrant to their own democratically chosen governments, repressive societies to liberal ones, any religion to Christianity or Judaism, an agglomeration of mostly pip-squeak dictator-run nations (whose Human Rights Commission will soon be chaired by Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya) to their own republican democracy. What's left of the Left? A legacy of lies and delusions and a fondness for thuggery.
"Atzlan" will become a (de facto?) reality.
California is lost; very soon other southwestern states will follow.
The Republican win is temporary; the Socialists are playing the long game.
--Boris
Allah Mode: France's Islam problem
or at Weekly Standard Souce:
Allah Mode, Part 1
Allah Mode, Part 2
"Before the comet comes, many nations, the good excepted, will be scourged by want and famine. The great nation in the ocean that is inhabited by people of different tribes and descent will be devastated by earthquake, storm, and tidal wave. It will be divided and, in great part, submerged. That nation will also have many misfortunes at sea and lose its colonies." John of Vitiguerro - Thirteenth Century. Source
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