Just because your girlfriend must in order to get up for her opening shift, you’ll wake up at midnight. She’ll be up in about an hour or so, to get ready, so she can catch the bus. I’m still awake, and so there will be blogging…oh yes, there will be blogging:

ONWARD!

I was thinking about socialism earlier. Why is it that some folks seem to think an equality of results is achievable, not to mention preferable? I’ve long said, in a half-serious manner, that it’s some sort of mental disorder. Of course, the obvious answer is laziness. Laziness and mental disease, however, are not adequate to explain such a pervasive and organized world-view.

My conclusion is this: Socialism springs from a fundamental sense of entitlement and a belief that people’s choices (or merit) have nothing to do with their value. This insidious combination of perspectives leads to the belief that people deserve compensation simply for being alive and that the successful should therefore be forced to support those who fail. This misunderstands motivation to a large degree, and at this date completely ignores the last 100 years of human history. It also assumes that people have no control over their own destiny; the successful ended up on top by no effort of their own, through some sort of third party mechanism, and that the same is true of those who fail. That’s quite amusing, given that it reeks of Calvinism and that most socialists are atheists or other non-Christians. In some sense, socialism is the newest form of Calvinism: Our fate is decided, no matter what we do, but we should still be good for whatever reason. It seems that condescending paternalism will never go away, it will just make The Capitalist its new boogie man instead of God.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2003 at 03:41 by Timothy and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.