LINK

The referenced article is the most powerful and passionate piece I have read on the website to date. It is a long article but it is worth the read. I may write a response post that highlights my favorites points. But here is a taste…

Soon, however, those who come to power, even with good intentions, discover that for all men to be made equal, some men must be made poor, and most men will not agree to be made poor in the absence of force. So force must be applied, assets must be seized, censorship must be imposed, dissidents must be jailed, enemies must be destroyed. Men must be made equal by any means necessary, and soon enough those means include intimidation, imprisonment, and execution.

Again and again, the handsome smile of the reformer is twisted into the callous sneer of the tyrant. Those who present themselves as saviors are always the most dangerous, for unlike the one true savior, who rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, they must work their will on the things of this world, and one cannot remake the world without the application of force.

At the heart of the ideal of fairness, in the peculiar ideological sense in which the term has come to be used, is the fundamental mistake that all workers — not just all workers, but all human beings, including those who simply choose not to work — should be equally rewarded, regardless of effort and ability. It is a problem that was noted as early as the mid-18th century, even before the French Revolution transformed that unfortunate nation into a bloody shrine to godless egalitarianism. As Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot wrote: “To permit a large number of men to live free of charge is to encourage laziness and all the disorders that follow; it is to render the condition of the idler preferable to that of the man who works….” (qtd. by G. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity 179).

Under socialism, those who are lazy and unproductive, or not productive at all, or even blatantly destructive, get a free ride; those who are skillful and enterprising are punished. When ambitious workers attempt to get ahead on the basis of their abilities, as inevitably they do, they are harassed, beaten, imprisoned, and executed. The longer that ambition is repressed, the less productive the overall economy becomes. At that point, the wrath of the state is unleashed on all workers, not just on the more able.

Seth

Four smart people write on whats next for the conservative movement at Slate.

Jim Manzi
Douglas Kmiec
Ross Douthat
Christine Tood Whitman

Scott