Dec
16
2024

Does This Shoe Fit? Be Honest.

I'm really not a fan of explaining the beliefs of my political opponents via their psychological quirks. And yet… there's gotta be some explanation for it, right?

Anyway, that's from Daniel J. Mitchell's latest entry in his ongoing series: The Case for Capitalism, Part VII. He links to and quotes Domenic Pino's July 2023 column for Law & Liberty, Why Markets Work. Which is excellent, I'll excerpt a slice that overlaps his:

[Ludwig von Mises in his 1956 book The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality] essentially concluded that opposition to capitalism is a psychological problem, one that especially affects intellectuals and artists, who are often frustrated by career failure. Mises’s explanation is unsatisfying, and his book was described as “profoundly and dreadfully false” by Whittaker Chambers in a letter to William F. Buckley, Jr. after National Review ran a review that Chambers thought was too positive.

The better explanation for the seemingly irrational rejection of capitalism comes from Friedrich Hayek, in what he calls the “atavism of social justice.” Hayek said that he spent ten years trying to figure out what “social justice” means and concluded it is “nothing more than an empty formula, conventionally used to assert that a particular claim is justified without giving any reason.”

He traces the instinct towards social justice and against the market system to earlier stages of civilizational development, when humans lived in small bands of a few dozen people. In that context, “a unitary purpose, or a common hierarchy of ends, and a deliberate sharing of means according to a common view of individual merits” are beneficial characteristics to survival. In a modern commercial town of thousands of people, to say nothing of a globalized market economy, those characteristics are largely impossible to obtain, given the diversity of human wants and needs and the specialization of production. Commercial society has improved our standard of living far beyond what our ancestors could have ever imagined, but that instinct from primitive societies is still hardwired in us, Hayek argues.

Whittaker Chambers was also, famously, not an Ayn Rand fan.

Anyway, I encourage you to read Dan's post, and also its predecessors, parts I-VI.

Also of note:

  • Maybe God will grant him mercy, but… Kevin D. Williamson says History Will Not Have Mercy on Joe Biden.

    President Joe Biden—forgotten but not gone as Jim Geraghty so nicely put it over at National Review—is a much-reduced figure, and one naturally wants to be charitable toward him as his failure as a politician and his failure as a father are fused together in the waning days of his presidency, a period dominated by his dishonest and impolitic pardon of his son Hunter, who was duly convicted of tax and gun offenses in a case brought not by some overreaching political enemy but by Biden’s own Justice Department.

    Charity is a virtue. But, as journalists refresh their pre-writes of the president’s obituary (and I do not mean the political one) and the historians begin their first drafts in earnest, honesty is a superseding virtue. There is simply no way to tell the truth about Joe Biden’s life and career without kicking him while he is down—it is not like he is about to get back up and make of himself a more sportsmanlike target.

    The defining qualities of Joe Biden the political man were arrogance and dishonesty, compounded by stupidity. That Biden lasted as long in politics as he did—he first was elected to the Senate the year your gray-bearded correspondent was born—and that he rose as high as he did is an indictment of the state of Delaware, the Democratic Party, and the American electorate, which was wise to choose Biden over Donald Trump in 2020 but foolish to put itself in such a dilemma to begin with.

    KDW actually makes the same point as in this item's headline.

    But wait! Biden's being urged to make one last assault on the Constitution, as reported by Annie Karni of the New York Times: Gillibrand Presses Biden to Amend the Constitution to Enshrine Sex Equality.

    "But wait," you are no doubt thinking. "The President has no role in amending the Constitution."

    Well, the argument NY Senator Gillibrand is making is: the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified, ignoring the time limits set by Congress and the ratification rescissions by six states.

    So all Biden needs to do is order the US Archivist to "publish" the ERA as a working amendment. Constitution amended by presidential decree!

    House Democrats are also advocating this Constitutional end-run including, shamefully, both current New Hampshire CongressCritters, Chris Pappas and Annie Kuster.

    And scary part is that I wouldn't be surprised a bit if Biden undertook this gambit to fully cement his legacy as a wannabe tyrant.

  • Those New Jersey drones are powered by beef tallow, I tells ya! A wild-eyed Andy Kessler asks: It’s All a Conspiracy, Right?

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has brought conspiracy theories back into the mainstream. In the past, he has claimed vaccines cause autism (since debunked), that we should drink raw milk (last month it was found possibly to contain bird flu), and that 5G broadband is used to “control our behavior” (well, it does tell my Uber driver where to go).

    Mr. Kennedy recently tweeted: “Seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods.” He’ll even sell you a $35 “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” hat. Ending corn and other farm subsidies would solve their overuse—but tallow? Cardiologists suggest that saturated fat in beef tallow increases heart disease. Can we agree that policy should never be based on lawyers’ theories?

    Humans are gullible. We like to be told tall tales. We eat them up. The Central Intelligence Agency killed John F. Kennedy. It must be true, I saw it in an Oliver Stone movie! Go to the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, and you’ll find a 1980 Texas Historic Landmark sign that reads: “When Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed President John F. Kennedy.” Allegedly? Well, those dissecting frames 313 to 316 of the Zapruder film think so.

    And, no, Paul McCartney is not dead.

  • Feel-good story of the day. An analysis by Jeffrey Blehar: Trump ABC Defamation Suit: George Stephanopoulos’s Partisan Irresponsibility Costs Network.

    Stephanopoulos claimed, in an aired interview with Nancy Mace, that a jury found Trump "liable for rape".

    He made that claim twice.

    But (in actual fact) the jury in question explicitly declined to do that.

    So I'm in complete agreement with Jeffrey's take:

    Yes, I’m reacting to news of the ABC payout to Trump to settle his defamation suit with the same line that old Grandpa Blehar — a hardworking western New York railroad man — used whenever the Yankees won: “Ain’t the beer cold, boys?” I love to see this. Nobody will ever mistake me for a Trump partisan, but by the same token I yield to no man in my contempt for the corruption, bias, and sloth of the mainstream media, which has shucked its skin of respectability and devolved into a niche market for the few aging progressives who still get their news from television.

    I enjoy seeing ABC get what’s coming to it for its arrogance and carelessness, and it couldn’t have involved a more deserving agent of disaster than the odious Stephanopoulos, who will otherwise pay no price professionally for the incident. I saw one former mainstream media journalist dismiss the $15 million settlement as analogous to “Disney avoiding legal costs” and had to laugh. Big media corporations do not drop that much money, plus attorneys’ fees and a televised apology, merely to avoid costs. They do so because they fear that worse things might become public. Neither side would have enjoyed the discovery process in this case, but ABC had far, far more to lose than Donald Trump.

    That $15 million is a lot of Disney+ subscriptions.