Why are people still drawn to Marxism? Did you know it's still hot among the professoriate? I know, I know. Thoroughly discredited. But they eat that stuff up in the ivory tower. Brad Thompson's thesis is essentially that Marx was a great sloganeer. And he was. (I'd also argue that people have inherent dispositions to socialism.) My friend Michael Strong argues quite powerfully that -- due to academia's continuing fixation with Marx -- higher ed may be the "world's leading social problem."
Around the world, pockets of communists still cling to power. They're either smaller regimes run by a cadre of strongmen, or they have evolved into what has come to be known as "state capitalism." In this latter form, cronyism is considered a feature not a bug. The question for me is: will these pockets of communism linger? Or will they linger for a while, but eventually evolve into another form? And is state capitalism becoming the dominant form for the globe?
Vaclav Klaus -- the great Czech president and free-market reformer -- will keynote at the 2012 Heartland Climate Change Conference in Chicago. If you share Klaus's views about the threat of environmentalism as a veiled form of central planning, you should attend this conference. It's a fascinating event with great speakers and lots of food for thought. The Heartland conference is also the culmination of powerful scholarship and a decade's worth of sane thinking that has served to counter a conserted power grab by the radical environmental left.
Interestingly, the conference takes place just after one of the world's leading climate alarmists, James Lovelock, admits to being an "alarmist"...
John Dewey is famous for devising -- more or less -- the Soviet factory model of public education we have in the U.S. today. This system has essentially stagnated (and in the inner cities, it's gotten worse). Student performance on the systems' own testing remains flat despite a doubling of taxpayer resources per student going to education since 1970. It's become a fairly well known fact that the system has failed and is failing multiple generations. That's sad. Hence my deliberately provocative title. But really: what do we do about it? How do we kill John Dewey?
Vaclav Klaus (above) reflects on how Milton Friedman's ideas not only got him through the darkest days of communism, but helped him open the Czech Republic.
You will see more of this kind of fare here at Ideas Matter. We will likely be heavy on the Milton this year. What better time to spread the ideas of a man who embodied a movement?
It's 2012. It's going to be one of the most critical years in recent history -- a year in which, around the world, we can choose to let things continue to slide towards statism, or we can liberate the spirit of entrepreneurship for good.
It's also the 100th year of Milton Friedman. But we're not celebrating the last one hundred years since his birth. We're celebrating the next 100. This, you see, is Milton Friedman's Century.
Isn't this interesting? The beginning of the boom in living standards also marked the beginning of modern literary egalitarianism (Dickens) and theoretical egalitarianism (Marx). I believe when humanity started seeing a profound rise in the standard of living -- not to mention a large intellectual class -- we started seeing the re-emergence of an innate hoarding taboo that would become wrapped in either narrative or theory.
Sam Harris has upset a lot of classical liberals with this post on wealth redistribution. I won't critique it here, because other people have done such a good job. Why would Harris wade into this debate? Perhaps fame has helped Harris feel qualified to talk about everything under the sun. He's become one of the big evangelists for atheism, you know. And while I'm not particularly religious myself, I generally find his critiques of religion to be a couple of centuries behind the times.
Interventionism versus free markets. It's a battle that never seems to end. It appeared in 1989 as if we could all celebrate the death of communism and go home. But interventionism -- which invariably leads to corporatism -- is in many ways more insidious. After all, it's less obvious than communism, so infects the system much more easily.
Recall U.S. President George W. Bush, during the financial crisis of 2008, saying something like: We have to abandon capitalism in order to save it. To my ear, that had such a dissonant ring. First, it assumed we'd long been in a state of laissez faire -- which conceded way too much to the progressive talking points. Second, it assumed that mopping of the mistakes of interventionism with more intervention was somehow a good thing.
It shows you how readily people are willing to accept the doctrine. It's not ideological really. It's apparently pragmatic. It's a means of "fixing" something in the economic system that, to central engineers and economic tweakers, gets broken. People accept it as a means of "getting the economy back on track." Unfortunately, it leads to crony capitalism -- that blurring of big business and big government in which the world is truly controlled by elites.
I am not sanguine about the next twenty years. I'm not one for catastrophism. But I certainly worry that interventionism has won the day. If the U.S. is in any way the locus of power in turning the tide away from the grip of Keynesianism, I see no evidence that there is leadership capable of changing a system that is now designed for business and government to collude. I see the state blowing up more bubbles. I see leaders making politically expedient choices, not tough choices. The longer run looks like one in which Hayek described in his more pessimistic moments.
"Utopia...has always produced the most brutal and criminal regimes," says Mario Vargas Llosa. Funny that classical liberals and libertarians are often accused of being utopians. I would argue just the opposite: freedom creates pluralism -- a million local utopias and a right of exit from each.
Lately I've noticed a cliche meming about in the chatterscape: one side accuses the other of not engaging in "grown up" conversation. It's used so much lately that - if you read - you'll already be tired of it by now.
But Kevin Williamson says something a little subtler in this video. He's not using this tired old trope about people who disagree with him being puerile. He's actually saying that people disposed to socialism have certain psychological characteristics one normally associates with adolescence. It's probably still insulting to a socialist, but the point has a little more substance than the "grown up conversation" meme.
