Here We Go Again

Wisdom isn't created by concentrating stupid.

The linked American Greatness article by Victor Davis Hanson carries the subhead:

"The Left projects itself onto Trump, and understandably finds itself all too terrifying."

VDH is inside my head again.

I've been thinking about how hypocritical it is to accuse someone of doing the thing you are doing. It is projection, of course, but there are more than just those two aspects.

It could be that self-righteousness, a lack of self-awareness, self-importance and arrogance involved - and those things are certainly part of the smorgasbord of awful the Democrats are serving up.

But more than all of that, it is the smug superiority that gets me.

"Sure, we are acting like dictators," they tacitly admit, "but it is different when we do it. We are doing it for the RIGHT reasons."

In his 1850 treatise "The Law", Frederic Bastiat wrote:

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

The answer to Bastiat's rhetorical question is "Of course they do".

C.S. Lewis, the famous Christian apologist, had something to say about such things:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may 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.”

But then autocrats have always believed, and at times sincerely so, that only they have the key to perfecting a mankind that has proven eternally messy.

As predictable as the sun rising in the east, Democrats are at it again, engaging in a bit of teeth gnashing and hair rending. The mindless partisans on the left are on again about Trump the Dictator, how the GOP is about to starve old folks and children, poison the air and the water, how Trump wants to put people in the camps and will ignore climate change until the entire planet is a bare, lifeless, smoldering clump of rock orbiting the sun.

Out of this pot-banging comes yet another elevation of something called “democratic socialism.”

F.A. Hayek documented in real time the catastrophic errors of the “democratic” socialists in the UK and Europe before, during, and after WWII in his 1944 “The Road to Serfdom”:

“…democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable but that to strive for it produces something utterly different – the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

There will be a stronger and stronger demand that some board or some single individual should be given power to act on their own responsibility. The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning. Thus, the legislative body will be reduced to choosing the persons who are to have practically absolute power. The whole system will tend toward that kind of dictatorship in which the head of the government is position by popular vote, but where he has all the powers at his command to make certain that the vote will go in the direction he desires. Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.”

Somehow, there are people out there who “just know” things. These people are called “Democrats”. These are the people Reagan referred to when he said, “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”

What these individuals “just know” is that individuals are flawed and cannot make proper decisions for themselves – but a group made up of those same flawed individuals can - once blessed with the magical wisdom and power of simply joining something called “government”, but the fact is if people are generally dumb, concentrating the dumb only makes for more dumbassery. Incompetent individuals don’t somehow magically become competent through aggregation.

The Democrat Party is living proof that wisdom isn’t created by concentrating stupid.