I'm sure David Brooks' editors at the local New York liberal paper* view him as the tame house conservative -- think Pomeranian or tabby cat. To keep his job, he seldom expresses an opinion with which a movement conservative could agree strongly.
But just as any house pet occasionally acts up, Brooks sometimes does a Scottie (West Highland Terrier) snapping at the heels of the liberal masthead's staff mastiff. I suspect this draws not-too-disapproving glances from his editors, in effect, a cooed "Oh, isn't he cute!" The readership -- at least those who take the time to comment on his columns -- are far more critical, of course.
This week, he struck at the core of progressivism in a way that should make the most thoughtful LNYLP reader's head spin. With soft words, in the language and logic of progressivism itself, he says that there is no hope of the United States and European governments exhibiting the wisdom to guide the mass of the ignorant, because, driven by polls and pandering politicians, those governments have changed from republics to near democracies. The people are supreme in either system, but in a democracy, the populace acts to satisfy their whims immediately, so that the government is no smarter than the populace. There is no notion more damaging to progressivism.
In the words of Benjamin Franklin, our founders gave us, "A republic, if you can keep it," to insulate the government from the whims of the vox populi.
Somebody go tell Uncle Ben we failed.
The calculation problem of central planning -- first identified by the Austrian school of economics -- that neither 5, nor 545, nor 54,545 wise men in rooms in Washington or Brussels are smart enough to manage an economy of hundreds of millions of people, is amplified by this new structural weakness of our government.
The progressivists' centrally planned economy, with social programs for all, at first roars as the less entrepreneurial spend their savings expecting to be cared for, then settles down to a creeping debilitation as even the savings of the entrepreneurial are inflated or taxed away, and finally whimpers to its eventual collapse as none will loan to it.
Fortunately, only two things are necessary to restore general prosperity. First, individuals must be permitted to make their own decisions for their own benefit and to take responsibility for those decisions. Second, individual rights in private property and in private contracts must be enforced for the prosperity of all.
Everyone must be allowed to pursue happiness and keep what they catch!
That is laissez faire capitalism, the system of Western civilization under which more people have risen from abject dollar-a-day and even pennies-a-day poverty to tens and hundreds of dollars a day comfort and even luxury. It has no superior among economic systems for generating total production and the personal economic satisfaction of earned success.
Unfortunately, a democracy can't do those two things. Only a republic can.
________
* Used to be every city had two local papers: one more conservative and one more liberal. The New York local liberal paper, aka the N__ Y___ T___s, has had overweaning aspirations of being the national paper of record and the source of all truth for many years. That's what makes them a local paper. We can refer to it as the LLNYP, or the LNYLP, or the NYLLP as the mood strikes. If you know someone who reads it frequently, you should distrust their political opinions!
