Liberalism Is A Cargo Cult

Piecing together a couple of rants from elsewhere and some other things that have been stewing. Warning: long ranty rant ahead.

One very offensive thing about Elizabeth Warren’s and Obama’s statement that ‘no businessperson is successful alone, other people made them that way,’ is the complete discounting of risk (and hard work). Risk is nearly the whole game. The whole thing, this entire American enterprise, rests on people who are willing to take a risk.

Where, in either of their diatribes, do they acknowledge the (often terribly high) risk required by individual enterprise?

Worse, they fail to mention the people that risk it all, who LOSE. They pretend those people don’t exist. The false assumption behind both these clowns’ statements, is that the successful were guaranteed to be so, by a helpful public sector. But we know that’s not actually how things go. Most ventures fail.

That bears repeating! Most ventures fail. And not for a lack of roads and bureaucrats.

There's no end to the stupid things you can get people to believe about business, when you omit that very important fact from your considerations.

The government wants to say you didn’t really earn what you earned? They want you to hand it over because they believe the public owns part of it? Ok then; who shares the downside with you, when you lose your ass? Does the public own part of your failure, too?

Yes, they let you own some percentage of the success, and all the failure. They want to win both ways. They want to say you’ve rolled the dice, and you’ve lost fair and square, and you’re on your own, when you lose. But then they also want to say, you won and that's not fair, so pay us, when you win.

There’s a social safety net, but it’s only a social safety net for people operating close to the ground, who risk little. No net for the high-wire acts.

Because at that moment, when someone who took a high risk and failed asks for others to share the loss, liberals have a sudden moment of piercing clarity about whose decision to go into risky business it was, and who actually fully owns the failure. Funny, that.

Well, you can't have it both ways. You can't disown the downside on one hand, and then also swoop in when the upside happens, and expect people to still bother with entrepreneurship, which is risk. You have to either own both outcomes, or neither.

And since we know what happens to business risk backed by the US government, I'd hazard that 'neither' sounds like the better deal to most taxpayers and job seekers. First of all, bureaucrats interject politics in business decisions, and buy into things that no sane investor would.

Not to mention that from ANY relationship between enterprise and politicians- even a regulatory relationship- arise many natural conspiracies against the public interest. They can't help themselves. These two characters are irresistibly attracted to each other.

Graft, vote-buying, and cronyism is always their malformed progeny. Over and over again, we see the same outcome, everywhere in the world. The more we can keep these two lovers apart, the better.

Oh, lefty politicians think they know business. But they only know it the way they know a thing that has fun holes in it. When they try to actually talk about the primary role of business, you get the hot vomit that Warren and Obama each produced. No doubt one inspired the other.

Obama's little speech the other day where he essentially discounts the risk of the entrepreneur, is just another way for liberals to prop up the lie at the core of leftism; that the state is a provider.

It's a colossal and laughably transparent lie. The state provides nothing, because it possesses nothing on its own. The state is the perpetually dependent child of the taxpayer, and not the other way around.

We are told by these geniuses that we are supposed to be building busways and roads and bridges and HIGH! SPEED! RAIL! and that will get us out of the mess we are in.

But all of the roads the government builds- with our money- will not magically create successful commerce all around themselves. Merely building infrastructure and calling it 'stimulus' is a childish mimicry of the trappings of a healthy economy. It is foolish to expect the commerce that actually provides these good things to 'just happen,' and downright dangerous to try to force this pipedream by spending out our sustenance before we've earned it.

Liberalism/socialism/leftism is a cargo cult, magical thinking, donut seeds.

We have to remove the levers of power from the hands of these mad children. We just have to.

posted by Laura. at 11:56 AM

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