George Rebane
You can fool some people most of the time; you can fool most people some of the time; and today you can also fool most of the people most of the time.
As ensconced in communist Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the new Democratic Party has thoroughly embraced its dictum ‘Accuse others of what you are guilty.’ Nowhere has this been more profoundly demonstrated than over the last decade as the Democrats have started their short march to socialism. The notion of socialism was anathema in post-war American politics as demonstrated by almost daily reports of ruinous suppression of all human rights and freedoms that our Cold War enemies were imposing on their citizens. Now, going on three generations of the Left’s dominance in public classrooms, the nature of socialism has been obfuscated in the American mind so that at least half of our citizens view it as another viable form of governance that we should perhaps try.
All this has been built on a complex façade of lies designed to install a political monopoly based on constantly customized collective ideologies du jour from the Democrat Party that cascade through the various channels of the now propagandized lamestream media. A partial list of these very large, significant, and nationally consequential lies includes –
- Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election;
- Democrats are not taking America into socialism cum Marxism;
- C19 from a Wuhan virology lab has been a baseless rightwing conspiracy;
- HCQ and IVT are not useful for fighting C19;
- Today China is not America’s mortal enemy;
- Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon;
- Our Mexican border is closed and secure;
- There is no human crisis at our southern border;
- Raising taxes and regulations does not impact economic behavior;
- The 6jan21 Capitol invasion was a planned insurrection to topple government;
- BLM is a protest movement and not a Marxist political organization;
- America continues plagued by systemic racism; no progress made since 1964;
- America’s Left and its corporatist allies have not rolled back 1A rights and practiced cancel culture;
- The systematic destruction of black families and perpetuation of urban ghettos is the Republicans’ fault;
- Rolling back 2A rights from law abiding citizens will eliminate ‘gun violence’ such as ghetto murders and mass shootings;
- Police have been purposefully murdering blacks;
- America’s colleges don’t have racist admissions policies and welcome free speech;
- The biggest existential threat to America is climate change;
- There is a scientific consensus that preventable manmade global warming is occurring;
- The great American experiment was founded on the racist principle, promotion, and practice of slavery; today Critical Race Theory correctly teaches that America is still a racist country, and its teaching is not anti-American propaganda.
And finally, perhaps the biggest, most damaging, and enduring lie is that the solution to the all of humanity’s problems requires our embrace of collectivist governance at its most comprehensive scale possible. There, the admitted goal is achieving a Marxist-Leninist society populated by the “communist Man”, at which time government will naturally dissolve as the then altruistic humanity marches joyously into a future of eternal peace and plenty. (A similar list is always invited from our left-leaning readers.)
However, as history has shown, collectivism (e.g. socialism, communism) wherever and whenever it has been practiced has begat nothing but human suffering, and the more complete the practiced collectivism, the greater the resulting human tragedy. The reasons for this have been expounded for almost two centuries by historians and economists. In these pages I have sought to expand on these illustrations from a systems standpoint.
The first and foremost reason for failure is that, sooner or later, all collectives require establishment of a centrally controlling elite, be it a father/parent, chieftain, or politburo. The larger the collective in terms of members, the more complex are their economic, social, cultural, and ‘legal’ interactions. Beyond a large family or village, the comprehension of such a dynamic (model) becomes at first difficult, then faulty, and ultimately catastrophically unworkable. The inevitable solution to fix things is always to appoint a hopefully compassionate and wise tyrant with powers unlimited and expanding.
Since the input/output relations (‘do this, and that results’) of a human community are poorly known or at best unreliable, social orders, with distributed planning and control over smaller local affairs (e.g. democratic republics, capitalist open markets), are able to implement corrective feedback in a timely manner when things inevitably start going off track. But the centrally controlling tyrant (and his elite lackeys) can do no better at increasing the common weal for the simple reason that in a large collective (be it a country or a government bureau) human nature prevents the implementation and operation of corrective feedback loops. Why? Because the correction required to maximize a local (e.g. departmental, satrap’s) utility (i.e. measure of ‘good’) is always at odds with even the best formulated global utility for the entire collective. And since communications are always imperfect (and risky in an autocratic collective), when a problem arises on some lower level, the applied ‘fix’ is always such that the local vs the global utility is maximized. And the result is that people continue to suffer as the elite are forever puzzled why things aren’t working out – ‘maybe in the next 5-year plan things will be better’.
All this, as we have preached over and over, is avoided by what Adam Smith identified as the working of ‘the hidden hand’ in an economy populated by minimally controlled agents each attempting to maximize his own profit in an open market environment. In such social orders no sub-unit, be it the individual or a leaf on a tree, need understand the workings (model) of the entire system. He just needs to know approximately how his immediate neighborhood operates, and then have the freedom and security to make corrections when he has made or is about to make a mistake. The required minimum for such a social order is the Bastiat Triangle of Rights (q.v.) It was ever thus, and will be unto the end of time. Amen.
[4jun21 update] ‘What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth?’ This explosive article was linked by a reader in the comment stream below. It also needs to be pointed out in the body of this post about the evils of the Democrat Party. Everything reprehensible that is happening in medicine now has its roots firmly planted in today’s radical leftwing ideology embraced thoroughly by Democrats. Today “whole areas of research are off-limits. Top physicians treat patients based on their race. An ideological 'purge' is underway in American medicine."
A commenter under the posted article sums up what is happening in America’s healthcare industry under the destructive push cowardly wokesters in high places. “This is extremely serious: the turning away from excellence in admissions to health programs, the almost panicky drive to admit often underqualified members of protected groups to residency programs to avoid charges of "racism", the primacy of identity over clinical excellence, etc all these are creating a new ‘Dark Age’ in medicine, where the grossest incompetence and quackery are celebrated. Patients are beginning to rightly fear interacting with a medical system that is actively abandoning any pretense of treating ALL patients with compassion and skill.”
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