The Lords of Order

One of the many things that I have always had a hard time figuring out is why do people put so much faith in the government running things and have so little faith in people, business, and religion. For instance, I got into an argument with an aquantace of mine about the healthcare bill recently. I pointed out that the government has not succeeded in running anything succesfully. He responded as many on the left have by pointing out the successes of Medicade, Medicare and Social Security. My response was in effect, what planet are you from, these programs are going broke. His response was " well at least they are helping people."

Never mind the fact that these programs are going broke for the moment, this was the beginning of something of an enlighting moment for me. It did not matter whether they were financially successful, what mattered was that "they took care of someone." Since he never met a tax on the rich that couldn't solve all problems, all was right in the world. He did not care that it was unsustainable, he just cared that it would make him feel a certain sense of safety for him and all of his friends.

What ties this all together I think is a concept from the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Here is an extended quote from Peter Drucker that sums it up:

"In 1942, when everyone was scared of a worldwide deflationary depression, Schumpeter published his best-known book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, still, and deservedly, read widely. In this book he argued that capitalism would be destroyed by its own success. This would breed what we would now call the new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries of capitalism's economic fruits and, in fact, parasitical on them, and yet all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving, and of allocating resources to economic productivity. The forty years since this book appeared have surely proved Schumpeter to be major prophet.


And then he proceeded to argue that capitalism would be destroyed by the very democracy it had helped to create and made possible. For in a democracy, to be popular, government would increasingly shift income from producer to no producer, would increasingly move income from where it would be saved and become capital for tomorrow to where it would be consumed. Government in a democracy would thus be under increasing inflationary pressure. Eventually, he prophesied, inflation would destroy both democracy and capitalism.

When he wrote this in 1942, almost everybody laughed. Nothing seemed less likely than an inflation based on economic success. Now, forty years later, this has emerged as the central problem of democracy and of a free-market economy alike, just as Schumpeter had prophesied."

Schumpeter believed that it was a matter of greed that would lead the bureaucrats and all the rest to destory Capitalism. I think that it is more than that. Greed to an extent is part of it but it takes so much more to keep arguing in this matter. So what is it that causes people to react so fearfully of what we would call freedom and they would call greed? Instead of just greed, I believe that it is just plain old fear.

The Wall Street Columnist Thomas Frank wrote a book callled What's The Matter With Kansas? Though I have not read the book, the premise is one that I have heard of before from people who are liberal. The premise is that the people of Kansas are voting against their own economic well being by voting for economic policies that promote the freemarket and not for the government polices that most would regared as socialism. Though I don't know that he actually uses the word socialism.

At this moment it occurs what all of these people are getting at. Most could not make in the world that most of have to, and those that are not a part of the government are resentful that they have to. We live in a world of what I would term "creative chaos." By this I mean that we have to create the solutions  to our own unforseen  problems and that we have to take care of our own selves. We don't demand that others have to pay our way for us if things go wrong, we believe in self-reliance.

This scares the holy you-know-what out of people who are leftists. What they want more than anything is order, and anything that provides order is good and anything that doesn't is evil. Not bad, but evil.  This is why so many are attracted to working for the government or giving up their freedoms to the government. Because the government can provide or enforce a sense of order.

This is why the Democrats went for broke with the healthcare bill. The capitalistic system was so evil because of it's disorder that they had to defeat it no matter what. It did not matter that the American people opposed it, the Thomas Franks of the world think that you are hurting yourself and so for your own good, you have to be over ruled.

The problem is that when you go down this road, it is not long before you move from a republic to a dictatorship, and you justifiy it with "it's for their own good."