Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
David Warren uses Friedrich Hayek to explain how environmentalists have become stalking horses for the people who wish to command others.
It was my hero, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), economist of the “Austrian School,” and historian of ideas, who wrote the book titled Road to Serfdom. It appeared in the spring of 1944, in England, not the most convenient moment given the paper shortages of wartime, and the continuing distractions from the life of the mind offered by Herr Hitler. Nor could it have been calculated to please Keynesians and other supporters of the prevailing economic wisdom — which was that the success of centralized war production, and Roosevelt’s New Deal in America, had permanently validated “central planning” in every national economy.
More than that, the ideologues of the Left, having had to withdraw their pacifist approach to Hitler after the disintegration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, were now arguing that the Nazi Party of Germany was “capitalism’s answer to the socialism of Mother Russia,” and laying down the rhetorical notion that “capitalism equals fascism,” as a way to tarnish the people who had actually risked their lives in fighting the Nazis tooth, nail and soul.
While the idea that Hitler’s program of “National Socialism” worked on free market principles was utterly absurd, not only on its face but on every possible level of analysis, we must remember that then as now the batty ideas of the Left enjoyed a tremendous cachet in fashionable society, among people who do not so much think as preen themselves. Moreover, those were the days of “Uncle Joe” Stalin, when the western world was too busy fighting a war in which he had become an ally to remember that the socialist system in Russia was an obscene and murderous tyranny. …
A most amazing thing was overshadowed last week by Spitzer and Jeremiah Wright. David Mamet, Pickerhead’s favorite playwright and screenwriter, wrote an article for The Village Voice titled Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain Dead Liberal.’ First spotting was a Mark Steyn Corner post. Since so much else was going on, we left it for this week. That has the virtue of allowing many of our favorite blogs to comment.
Mark Hemingway Corner post offers to suspend some of the rules of the dark side Mr. Mamet has joined.
Russ Roberts in Cafe Hayek with what amounts to a Hayek tribute.
David Mamet has written an extraordinary confessional for the Village Voice (I’ve edited this link, ht: Drudge) where he describes his philosophical change of heart from being an anti-American, anti-market believer in man’s perfectibility to something different. An excerpt:
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?
I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. …
The libertarians at Samizdata post twice.
Jonathan Adler in Volokh Conspiracy.
… David Mamet, long one of my favorite living playwrights, thinks Thomas Sowell is “out greatest contemporary philosopher. Go figure.
Here is Mr. Mamet.
… I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f–k up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.” …
… I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
Rather brilliant. …
… I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism. …
Since Mr. Mamet is a fan, we have Thomas Sowell‘s comments on the pastor disaster.
… The bad news is that Barack Obama has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer.
While talking about bringing us together and deploring “divisive” actions, Senator Obama has for 20 years been a member of a church whose minister, Jeremiah Wright, has said that “God Bless America” should be replaced by “God damn America” — among many other wild and even obscene denunciations of American society, including blanket racist attacks on whites.
Nor was this an isolated example. Fox News Channel has played tapes of various sermons of Jeremiah Wright, and says that it has tapes with hours of more of the same.
Wright’s actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.
Sean Hannity began reporting on Jeremiah Wright back in April of 2007. But the mainstream media saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.
Now that the facts have come out in a number of places, and can no longer be suppressed, many in the media are trying to spin these facts out of existence. ….
American Thinker thinks Obama might be the new Jimmy Carter.
… Barack Obama seems cut of identical cloth. Carefully scripted, Obama quickly corrects statements which show how he truly feels. He rejects anti-Semitic, anti-American supporters only when nudged to do so. His wife “misstates” when she says that she has never been proud of America until now, but Michelle corrects the error only belatedly and without apparent concern for misinterpretation.
It certainly seems as if Obama feels that the problems of America have been her moral shortcomings, which is very much what Jimmy Carter thought. It seems as if Obama feels himself morally superior to those in politics today, much like Carter did thirty years ago. Obama, like Carter, invites Americans to trust him with the most beguiling claims of spiritual elevation. Obama, like Carter was an utter and complete Democrat partisan, although he promised to be just the opposite.
Jimmy Carter never tried to “govern from the center” or “seek bipartisanship.” He could easily have passed tax cuts or defense spending increases. He did not want to. Barack Obama has never sought bipartisanship. He embraces Leftism completely. They are the same: Barack Obama is our next Jimmy Carter.
Robert Samuelson reports how this financial crisis is different.
… Previous financial crises so weakened the banks and savings and loans that they lost their primacy. As recently as 1980, they supplied almost half of all lending — to companies, consumers and home buyers. Now their share is less than 30 percent. The gap has been filled by “securitization”: the bundling of mortgages, credit card debt and other loans into bond-like instruments that are sold to all manner of investors (banks themselves, pension funds, hedge funds, insurance companies).
As a result, the nature of financial crises changed. With a traditional “bank run,” the object was to reassure the public. The central bank — the Federal Reserve in the United States — lent cash to solvent banks so that they could repay worried depositors and preempt a panic that would spread to more and more banks and would ultimately deprive the economy of credit. But now the fear and uncertainty center on the value of highly complex, opaque securities and the myriad financial institutions that hold them. …
John Stossel with more on the unintended consequences of sex-offender laws.
… Too often, American criminal law is a blunt instrument designed to make it look as if politicians are protecting us. I think the politicians usually protect themselves, at our expense.