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The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of morality as a sort of technology. That is in perfect congruence of the Greek understanding of techne as knowledge about how to do something. Morality is the technology by which we can live happily as individuals and in groups. As technology, if it doesn’t work, then it isn’t true.

In my view, the hedonistic mindset, which rejects the necessity of pain, has done more to FACILIATE pain than the most severe Puritanisms did. One could, as a de facto ascetic, at least take pride in being self possessed, and in adhering to a coherent moral code.

The person who lives for themselves–picture here a stereotypical Californian in a Hawaiian shirt–is someone who doesn’t stand for anything. They are not willing to take a position that involves difficulty. The only value they hold is that no one should ever expect anything from them. They will go to protests to protect that right. No one should ever make them go to war. No one should demand that everyone pay their own way, if possible. No one should demand life-long fidelity, unless it met the whims of both people. No one should demand hard thought on complex issues.

And since it feels good feeling generous, no one should interfere with the process of taking money from people who have it, and giving to people who have less.

Seemingly benign, this mindset leads quickly to a loss of self respect, and constant frustration. You always seem to be on the verge of self discovery. You “fall in love”, and it feels forever, but then one or both of you flake out. You take your nice drives along the coast, and wonder what it’s all about, but it eludes you. You attend meditation conferences, and do yoga, and become a vegetarian, and it all seems like it should work. Everyone smiles and talks about how happy they are, but late at night something still doesn’t feel right.

You go to a therapist, and say you are depressed. Maybe you get meds, maybe she says it isn’t your fault, that your parents or ex-wife or ex-husband or someone did something that you haven’t processed yet.

Everywhere, there is this idea that happiness is simply an absence of pain. If you just do what you like, you will be fulfilled.

That simply isn’t how life works. It is unwise.

Meaning is a function of doing DIFFICULT things, of persevering across harrowing fields of battle, because it is the RIGHT THING TO DO.

It is a little reported fact, but the men and women who served in our military in Vietnam are actually much better adjusted and successful, on average, than those who didn’t go. This makes perfect sense.

Techne, then, consists in correct understandings of how life does and does not work. Buddha had his eightfold path http://buddhism.about.com/od/theeightfoldpath/a/eightfoldpath.htm

Christians have service. Muslims have their 5 Pillars. Hindus have dharma. All of these make a happy life possible. None of them, pursued correctly, are wrong in their practical effects.

The task I have set myself is to figure out what is common to them all. What I have come up with is that the absolute minimal requirements to live happily are to reject self pity, persevere through trouble, and treat each day as a new miracle. The last one I frame very broadly as perception, of which the key element is to not get stuck. Obviously, every religious order tends to foster dogmatism. Dogmatism is the death of the spontaneous order of genuine goodness.

In my own view, modern psychology does what traditional moral orders did, but far less well, and quite frequently–by fostering self pity–it actually makes people weaker and less able to persevere happily through lifes challenges.

The only exception to this is that modern anti-psychotic drugs are useful.

I have mixed feelings about anti-depressants. I do agree some types of depression reach the level of an organic disease. Yet, I feel most of the time that point is reached as a result of poorly structured cognition, and would thus be preventable if we were wiser as a culture. The rates of monopolar depression in pre-industrial civilizations is measurably something very close to zero, and when it happens, it is typically in response to a tragedy, which makes it closer to mourning than a disease.

I was looking at the mess in my kitchen this morning, and thinking “well, it will be gone in 20 minutes”. The battle for order is a daily one.

Then it popped in my head that we interact with our objects with pride and anger, and I got thinking about it. Do we not all have things we own we are proud of? I really like my gun. I don’t obsess about it, but it is a well engineered tool, and I’m glad I own it.

And when you look at, say, your car, you might be proud of it, or mad at it for being so old, or small, or whatever.

This, in turn, got me to thinking about what a PROPER relationship might be. I don’t think pride is necessarily a useful emotion, except to the extent it keeps you on the straight and narrow, and I think that would be better defined as self respect. Nor is anger, in general, a useful emotion, especially at objects which you control, and which have done nothing to you. They are just there. Any emotive content is a projection from you.

It seems to me a proper relationship is pleasure in presence. If you live a dirt-floored hut, you can still sweep the floor and keep it neat, and you can be happy in that. You can interact with all you own with contentment and enjoyment. You can enjoy cleaning.

This led to the thought that that is not a bad way to think of interacting with people. Pleasure in presence. Finding what is worthwhile and enjoyable in them, and directing your attention to that. Most everyone has something worthwhile.

The Hindus use as their greeting Namaste, which literally means “I bow to you”. You are not bowing to the person, per se, but rather to the spirit of God which is in every person. This is, I think, a worthy idea.

Musings for the AM.

William James has a nice quote in his introductory lecture on Pragmatism, again from Chesterton, in this case his work “Heretics”: “There are some people–and I am one of them–who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.”

One has to ask: how did the horrors of the 20th century happen, and why are there hordes of seemingly intelligent people who have still not learned the lesson that Statism is tyranny, and that “social justice” in almost all forms is the precise opposite: INjustice by any rational criteria.

We had so many smart people at the end of the 19th century, and beginning of the 20th, especially in England and America, such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Sumner, William James, G.K. Chesterton.

How do such basic philosophical errors as holding to Statist ideologies, and rejecting all the evidence that favors an anti-materialist bias persist in our academic world?

I was watching a waterboarding video last night. The guy thought he could go 15 seconds, but he only lasted 5-6. What this technique does is induce panic that cannot be calmed with reason. It is absolutely primal. It has nothing to do with how you think.

In my view, if one follows the ideational train of modern Communists, what you see is something like this: God does not exist; death is final; morality is an artifact of evolutionary necessity; free will is an illusion; personal autonomy is an illusion; and everything we do and build and think will in the end perish without a trace. This is, in my view, a depressing worldview. Many people, I think, react with the same primal fear and anxiety that our waterboarding victim did.

I myself found it exceedingly depressing, and remember getting dizzy thinking about a world without meaning, where death was final. Darwin started it, by removing God as a necessary “hypothesis”, and of course much of “modern”–by which I would intend to connote Regressive–philosophy is oriented around the creation of meaning in a world denuded of permanent immanent order. That was the work, among others, of Nietzche, Sartre, Foucault, Camus, Heidegger (approximately), and their countless descendents and fellow travellers.

None of these “philosophers” (if you define Truth as what is useful, in the spirit of philosophical Pragmatism, none of these people offered it–with the partial exception in my view of Camus, who did seem to me in the end to be a decent human being–so they were not truly “lovers of wisdom”) really succeeded in creating actionable systems.

Ayn Rand did, and is for that reason still widely read.

Yet, I have issues with all thinkers who begin with the proposition that the world is composed of matter which is necessarily separated from us; really, of which we are composed. It is not necessary to link what I term Physical Materialism with Moral Materialism, but it is a tendency of the system.

What I mean by this is that if you understand the universe as basically a complicated machine, and human beings as small complicated machines, it tends to create a focus on those factors in human life which are material–which are visible. For those who accept the doctrine of Physical Materialism, science is the only means of making any useful truth claims. If everything is composed of matter that invariably obeys knowable laws, and which is separate from our consciousness, then only that is real that can be measured, and measuring is what scientists and scientists alone do. Morality, then, belongs to scientists.

And you see this history over the last several centuries of psychologists trying to decide just who they are, and what they should be doing. Are they scientists? How can you empirically measure the contents of a person’s consciousness? And if you can’t measure it, how can you claim you are a scientists? B.F Skinner, of course, tried to solve this problem by ignoring consciousness altogether, and focusing ONLY on what could be directly measured. This was a logical extrapolation from the basic problem.

Yet, manifestly, each and every one of us thinks. We feel. We make decisions using some combination of thought and gut instinct.

William James, in his excellent book “Principles of Psychology”, delineates three basic approaches to psychology: introspection, empirical measurement, and a combination of the two. In the first case, the psychologist can simply write about the contents of his own consciousness. He can compare his impressions with those of others, to see to what extent there is congruence, which is moving to a blended psychology.

As far as pure empiricism, you can test people’s perception, for example their ability to detect slight changes in weight, or light, or sound. You can measure how they process different stimuli. You can give people drugs, and measure the physiological results. Yet, the subjective results remain instrospective, and only approach empiricism across wide samples, which is an approximation of science, but not yet “hard” in the way measurements of accelleration are in physics.

Getting back to my main point, though, it seems to me that Moral Materialism leads to the rejection of softer notions such as beauty, love, kindness, refinement, and the like. You can’t measure them, so they are not suitable to be relied on in any kind of moral system. What you CAN measure is difference; and you can likewise formulate a “scientific” plan for the eradication of that difference.

The question, really, is “given presuppositions of meaninglessness, what can you hang your hat on”? For people who go through what I term (possibly following someone, I don’t know) “ontological shock” and react by becoming political Leftists, the answer is that you can rely on a visible system that creates visible results, that you define to yourself as beneficial.

The problem, though, is they now NEED this system. They NEED these beliefs. They can’t not have them. They can’t interact with them reflectively and with nuance. They can’t elevate them to some sort of qualitatively higher level, since they have already rejected notions of human perfectibility. We are all animals, after all, living for no purpose, and destined to die and be forgotten.

Yet, the question of how our universe is put together remains an empirical question. It is far from settled, and to the extent we can tell, our best guess is that the universe cannot be understood as existing apart from consciousness. It is NOT out there. It is connected with us.

This is not mumbo-jumbo New Age mysticism, but the reasoned conclusion of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, John von Neumann, who literally wrote the book on quantum physics, and played a significant role in the development of usable computers.

We know, experimentally, that faster than light communication is possible across, in theory, infinite differences. Since this violates a principle theorem of General Relativity, it falsifies that theory. No one wants to admit this, since Relativity is such a great theory otherwise, that has worked empirically every time is has been put to the test. Yet, the fact remains that we only have two proven models of the universe: General Relativity, and quantum physics. Both work in their domains–big, and small, respectively. But General Relativity is not right about light being a univeral constant, and there are no experimental objections to quantum theory, which to my mind means of the two it should be regarded as the more correct one, pending some third theory that outdoes both (which will NOT be String theory, which to me appears to be a sort temper tantrum in reaction to Bell’s Theorem, which was the mathematical proof of non-locality).

Likewise, I think that Darwinian notions of Natural Selection will in the end need to be supplemented by appeal to some sort of biological field theory, where we posit some sort of information-containing aspect of the universe, which enables functional adaptations to be retained at much higher than random rates.

With respect to the survival of death there always has been and continues to be substantial evidence. We have apparent recording from people who have passed on. We have countless stories of apparitions. We have cases where mediums obtained information that they could not have known any other way.

One good example of this is an English medium who was imprisoned for divulging State secrets in WW2 for revealing the sinking of a British Navy ship before the Admiralty itself knew about it. All the details she provided turned out to be correct. This is one example of many 100’s of recorded examples of people possessing information no cold reader or skillful fraud could have possessed.

I always hear this seemingly logical comment “the plural of anecdote is not data”, but of course it is. When X number of scientist claim to have achieved a certain result, when X claim is made Y number of times in “respectable” journals, then that claim is considered a fact, even if none of the believers in this fact have done the experiment themselves.

Then the objection is raised about repeatability. Scientific results can be repeated. The people who make this claim do not typically follow the logical path of trying to repeat the results themselves, for example by consulting a medium, or experimenting in EVP (trying to capture voices on tape), or “ghost hunting”. Rather, they simply make the claim that it is not proven–meaing, to THEM–and dismissing the whole thing.

Yet, there are a number of cases of deeply commited skeptics doing the honest thing and investigating the evidence themselves, and becoming in the process converted.

I won’t dilate on this further. My core point, here, is that stupid ideas get people killed, and make them unhappy, and that if we are going to use science as the entirety of our truth system, let us at least do that honestly.

The chain of logic that led to so much horror in the 20th century was based, in my view, on erroneous postulates. The sooner that fact is acknowleged, the better off we will all be.

It is not too late to create a good world, one where we can live happily, and in peace.

John Stuart Mill, one of the greatest Liberal [which is to say generous but not insane] minds ever:

“I confess I am not charmed with an ideal of life held out by those who think the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each others heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or anything but one of the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. . .[But] that the energies of mankind should be kept in employment by the struggle for riches as they were formerly by the struggle for war, until the better minds succeed in educating the others into better things, is undoubtedly better than that they should rust and stagnate. While minds are coarse, they require coarse stimuli, and let them have them.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Mill would today be a frustrated Republican, a frustrated Libertarian, or an ex-Democrat.

Allitt: “One of the most intriguing contributions to the debate as to whether Britain should become a democracy [note: as was the case in America, the British system explicitly excluded many citizens from participation it the political process, perhaps most obviously by denying them the vote] and what the relationship is between democracy and tradition was made by the journalist and controversialist G.K. Chesterton. I’d like to read you a passage from his book Orthodoxy, written in 1908, in which he makes the claim that you might think democracy is one option, and tradition another, but actually that’s not true. They really go together beautifully. Chesterton knew how to manipulate paradox in a beautiful way, and he never did it better than here. Here’s what he says:

“Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democracies object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I at any rate cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition.”

I like that. What tradition provides is a keel in the churning tides of change. It keeps us on track, even if we have the option of altering course. Cultural habits that are retained have, in general value, or at least did have value. What is new is untried, and science is unequal to the task of testing ideas for 100 years prior to granting them to us. What they do is think they have found something, then use us as lab rats. 100 years of Freud is too much. 2,000 years of Christianity was not too much.

When I first learned the details of Chamberlain’s Munich agreement, and started talking about appeasement, I somewhat stupidly thought I was advancing a novel argument. The reality is that the idea “let us not appease, or it will be just like 1938 again” has been in circulation since somewhere just after WW2, when the memory was fresh, and children were still taught history.

In particular, the Neocons used it often. Now, this is a word that gets used constantly. I just finished a course on the history of Conservatism, and the term used properly refers to a group of mostly Jewish former leftists–in the 30’s many of them were Trotskyists, and Communists of other stripes–who retained some affinity for social welfare sorts of programs, but were rabid anti-Communists, and consistently hawkish on almost every issue of foreign policy. Irving Krystal (sp?), David Novak, and Norman Podhoretz are the names I remember. They had a magazine back in the 50’s, whose name I’ve forgotten. Currently, the main magazine is Commentary, if I’m not losing my marbles.

In any event, the lecturer, Patrick Allitt, labelled Buchanon a “paleoconservative”, as someone who continues the long standing tradition in Conservatism of isolationism. Now, Buchanon has been in the game a long time–at least 40 years by my reckoning, and likely longer–and he has heard this theme of “the Germans are coming” many times.

As a matter of historical fact, it was FDR and the Democrats who did the most to get us in WW2. FDR started the rearmament process, the Lend-Lease program, and arguably exceeded his Constitutional authority by, if memory serves, offering up Navy escorts to transports crossing the Atlantic. Since they became thereby subject to U-boat attack, this was tantamount to getting us in the war, without Congressional authorization.

In any event, it is hard to argue that we did not have a vital national interest in helping defeat the Axis powers, particularly Germany. Thus, what Buchanon is doing in his book “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War” the same thing leftist Nicholas Baker does in Human Smoke: deny that Hitler needed to be fought at all.

This is not just an argument about WW2, but serves as a proxy argument for all American interventions overseas period, including most recently of course our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I assume Buchanan opposed.

Now, I could know one hell of a lot more about this than I do. I have read reviews of both books, but have not read the books. I could be wrong, but this feels right to me, based on the not inconsiderable number of facts I do possess.

A great many people are attracted to “socialism”, very loosely defined, since they see in it simple responsibility to our fellow human beings; they want to be nice, and socialists are nice.

This is not a fully incorrect view. One could certainly argue that some sort of basic “safety net” is not unreasonable, particularly in a wealthy nation.

The problem is that such people don’t understand the full logic of socialism, which is the logic of the eradication of difference. In homogeneous nations like Sweden, there is really no need for violence, since everyone basically belongs to the same group. In a strongly heterogeneous nation like the US, though, this is a problem, in that it necessarily leads to conflict between those who want to do the leveling, and those who are being confined to a smaller box, not of their choosing.

A paradigmatic example of this is the abortion issue. We have at least two strongly delineated lines of thought on this, but only one was victorious, and it achieved victory not through legislative action, but through the manifest abuse of the court system. The long term goal of all Socialists is the eradication of religion. In their own terms, the only reasonable system of knowledge is science, and anything not demonstrable is not scientific, and therefore doesn’t exist. This is the consequence of the abuse of the basic Vienna Circle protocol, which I won’t get into here.

Thus, the overarching goals are secularism, the eradication of historical cultural difference, and the leveling of incomes and social hierarchies. Now, even if these goals seem reasonable, the means are that of a hegemonic government, that can impose uniformity where difference is strenuously defended. This means that a system is necessarily put in place which can be abused, and abused thoroughly, as in the National Socialist regime.

In my own view, our Federalist system can tolerate the strains of localized tribalisms, but not the imposition of centralized cultural uniformity, which–the romantic dreams of silly people notwithstanding–is manifestly the aim of Socialism. If you understand Political Correctness, you have a passkey to an open cultural world anywhere in America, and damn near anywhere in the world, because they all think the same.

Our system, though, is broken into pieces. There was intended a very strong bias in favor of the States for EVERYTHING to do with day to day life. The Federal Government was for negotiating treaties with other nations, brokering disputes between States, and for providing for the national defense. Many considered even highway building to be beyond its proper reach, and if memory serves Andrew Jackson vetoed a plan to provide Federal funds for a road in Kentucky, to Maysville, if I am not mistaken.

Thus the proper place for the expression of what we might term Scandinavian sentiments is at the State level. I do not think that represents an overarching abuse of the system, even though I personally would not want to live in one of those States. Who knows, though, maybe it could work? Every State could adopt something similar.

But what we have today, with Social Security, Medicare, and the federal component of Medicaid (which, by the way, increased considerably, since much of the “Stimulus” money went to bail out bankrupt programs, such as that in California, and the Stimulus runs through 2014) are programs that we can’t opt out of, that provide money to the goverment that is promptly spent on many other things, and for which money is being borrowed on our behalf. It would be far, far better just to put the money in a bank than to trust the clowns in Washington with it.

Thus, if you want to be nice, and want to vote for nice people, make it at the State level, and let us get the Federal government out of the “nice” business, which it was never intended to take part in anyway.

If we posit that some sort of what I am terming moral technology is necessary for happiness, what are the essential elements? Is compassion? Is non-violence? Or is it sufficient that you accept your lot, no matter what it is, and move forward directly with pleasure in your work, and what companionship you have?

Famously, the Bhagavad Gita is presented to a soldier in the heat of a battle in which he is killing kinsmen. He is told that doing his duty is what is necessary, not feeling sympathy for those he is killing, who, after all, can’t be killed.

Let us further posit that the Hindus were wrong in their belief in the after-life (I would disagree with this position, but let’s extend this idea to its logical end): would the argument change? Would the reasons offered lose their validity? What is being offered is a means of living congruently IN THIS LIFE. Would it lose its actual value, that of fostering goal directed activity, and “meaning context”? I don’t think it would.

Comment:

Let me think out loud a bit. None of us are as happy as we can imagine. What keeps us from happiness? Is it pain? Is pain an absence of happiness, and happiness an absence of pain? I don’t think so.

We often remember with the most fondness times when objectively we are challenged–for example, sports competitions–or pleasant days following difficulty. You can’t say a pleasant day exists on its own. It is in a context, where normally it is embedded in hard work. You work hard, you enjoy your vacation. The thrill of victory only follows great strain.

The starting point for happiness, it seems to me, is a life that is neither too hard nor too easy. That is the material requirement.

The moral requirement is relative tranquility. This means freedom from abusive emotions like chronic anger and jealousy, which themselves begin with casting ourselves as a victim of something.

Ultimately, you are happy as an individual. You can’t be happy as a “society”, unless the members of that society are happy. This means that happiness is an internal state, local to each individual.

Given this, the starting place for happiness is in the individual too. An individual can work to make his life physically easier. He can also toughen himself, such that he needs less, and the same amount of difficulty creates less strain on him.

On the one path, of physical ease, there is no logical end point until he is doing nothing all day. This is the dream of some people, until they achieve it, and realize doing nothing is overrated. And the prospect of achieving it is an uncertain one. You may fail, since you are trying to control things external to you. And until you achieve it, you are not satisfied, since you have not met your own requirement of happiness, that of ease.

Obviously, there is always potentially a stopping point, where you say “this is good enough”. This is the point of contentment. Yet, since this is an internal state–one with no external requirement–why not shorten the period, and alter your opinion earlier? This is the logic of the the wandering beggar, in the other extreme, who tries to live happily with nothing.

Socialism, in the event, is not a system for building ease and wealth, but rather for pulling people down who have been successful. It is not intended so much to raise the low, but to lower the high. The only places something like Socialism works is when you have very high degrees of cultural homogeneity, and where people tend to be like one another anyway.

In our own country, it is always expressed in terms of resentment and anger and hatred. No one is dying of hunger or thirst. The pain they feel is the outcome of agitation, which is the intentional cultivation of a sense of grievance on the part of professional activists, who use their clients as a means to their own power.

One could look at agitators like Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama as professional extortionists, who can be employed to get money and concessions out of monied elites, where the “interest” or fee they charge is power. You put them in power, they give you stuff. All they want is the land underneath you. You keep the house.

Now, I am not opposed to charity. If people are weak and hungry, or sick, and suffering in other ways, it is the decent thing to do to help them. This is not Socialism. This is not what I am opposing. Nor am I fully opposed to using even the Federal Government in this service, although I think it much better Constitutionally to limit those projects to the sundry States.

What I am opposed to is the belief that wealth, per se, is a crime. When the Russian Communists murdered the kulaks, or when Mao held his show trials by “The People” where so many “bourgeois capitalists” were killed, this was the crime that was alleged, and we see it in muted form every time somebody says “soak the rich”. The top 10% of income earners pay some 71% of the taxes in this country, and the bottom 47% pay nothing. Economically, asking them to pay 100% is stupid. History is clear: when you punish achievement, you get much less achievement, and correspondingly less money.

The “soak the rich” people are just jealous. They want to punish the successful for being successful, and to steal everything they own. This was done literally in all Communist nations, and is the idea behind most of the policies we see today on the Left.

It is interesting that we are all most sensitive to the flaws in others we can readily recognize in ourselves. A person incapable of sin, would be incapable of grasping on a human level how most people think. All of us are in constant flux, and what order we contain relates to the decisions we make, which themselves are invariably based on principles. If you act on impulse, the principle is that that is acceptable. If you act based on greed, it is based on the idea that having things is far better than not having things, and that the pleasures to be had from having things outweigh the pains of avariciousness, such as the objectification of experiences and people.

As I have often argued, morality is simply a technology for optimal fulfillment in life, when it is understood properly. There is no need to reject in advance and in principle ANY human emotion: greed, hate, anger all have their places. To not feel them is to so curtail your possibility of emotional movement that you likewise curtail your innate capacity for fulfillment and joy. The grim sobriety of the stereotypical Puritan (who may in fact not have been so grim, but that’s another discussion) is not Goodness at all, in my view.

Where negative emotions become malignant is when they become permanent parts of your personality. If you are always angry, or always jealous, that is a manifest sign of a character flaw, something in you which holds on to things, and which in so doing lessens your ability to generate emotional satisfaction. This is the grasping–tanha, if I’m not mistaken–of the Buddhists.

In my own view, evil begins with self pity, and self pity cannot be understood except in a social context. Animals do not feel self pity. They feel pain, which something completely different.

It is for this reason that I view the moral basis of Socialism as evil. It is a doctrine of envy. It is a doctrine of resentment.

There was a time when large numbers of people were going hungry, and lived in cold, leaky homes, where they often died before their time of preventable illnesses. The claim made by Marx was that this would get worse and worse, until such time as they rebelled. The claim made by the followers of Adam Smith was that increasing quantities of wealth would be generated, such that over time all such suffering would be alleviated.

Self evidently, the Capitalist school of thought was right. Our poor live better than most kings did 200 years ago. They have heated homes, shelter from the elements, more than enough food, access to medical care (Medicaid goes back to the 60’s), and quite frequently cell phones, TV’s, and even cars.

Thus, the Socialists are not critiquing a system which is causing unnecessary suffering. They are invoking ENVY–the idea that we should be angry that results are not spread evenly–to criticize the system. Socialism is a solution, then, to an emotional dysfunction. It is rotten in its core claim to relevance.

It is not an economic doctrine. Marxism was an economic doctrine, and it was wrong. Marx failed to account for the unlimited human capacity for creativity. Every year, we do more with less. Garbage, nuclear waste, pollution: these are technical problems, not philosophical problems.

As I have said a number of times now, it was the MERCANTILISTS who invented the idea that wealth was limited, and that one man’s gain was NECESSARILY another man’s loss. This idea was WRONG. I don’t know how else to put it. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

Adam Smith, a radical liberal in his day, offered up the only theory proven to make EVERYONE richer. The only alternative is theft, and that is the solution of empire, and Socialism, which do diminish others in the process of enriching the few.