Monk

"there are no conflicts of interest among rational men."

-- Ayn Rand

David Sloan Wilson, in the linked article, draws a nice concise case for how Ayn Rand's philsophy is another brand of religious fundamentalism, and that what makes these fundamentalisms attractive to many followers is that they offer a world in which there are no trade-offs, at least not among rightly guided people, so that life is never a zero-sum game, that is, everyone wins, provided that everyone plays along and sticks to the ideological line. In Ayn Rand's case, that means everyone zealously pursuing his own naked self-interest, rather than, say, adhering to some narrow conception of Biblical teaching. Her philosophy may be atheistic, and thus seemingly the opposite of religious fundamentalism, but it really offers up the same psychological-philosophical attraction. He illustrates how this is so in his article, as I am just getting down the main point here.

This may be more obvious to some, as we often think of Randian thought as being cultic, but I thought that Mr. Wilson lays this out in a clear, apperceptive way, and I find the focus on trade-offs to be partiuclarly illuminating. As most of us know, one of the things that makes life so fascinating as well as aggravating is that life is full of trade-offs, and a lot of very nasty ones at that.

We should tune in to the Romney and Ryan show

The myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished

-- Janet Daley at The Telegraph

Right-wingers in Europe are getting excited by what the Republicans are doing, in being on the verge of unraveling all the New Deal and progressive legislation of the twentieth century in favor of Ayn Randian fantasies.


_ _ _

Whatever the outcome of the American presidential election, one thing is certain: the fighting of it will be the most significant political event of the decade. Last week’s Republican national convention sharpened what had been until then only a vague, inchoate theme: this campaign is going to consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be engaging in, but which only the United States has the nerve to undertake. The question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic crisis from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly threatening to the governing consensus of Britain and Europe as to be virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the robustness of the US political class to make the running.

What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.

Or else democratically elected governments can be replaced by puppet austerity regimes which are free to ignore the protests of the populace when they are deprived of their promised entitlements. You can, in other words, decide to debauch the currency which underwrites the market economy, or you can dispense with democracy. Both of these possible solutions are currently being tried in the European Union, whose leaders are reduced to talking sinister gibberish in order to evade the obvious conclusion: the myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished. This is the defining political problem of the early 21st century.

-- Janet Daley at The Telegraph

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

-- David Brooks for The New York Times

Brooks has an interesting column today, especially for a conservative, that looks optimistically on the rise of collectivism, along with the strength of Asian culture and outlook.

( Brooks )

♠
According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

-- Paul Krugman for The New York Times

Leave it to Krugman to kick us with the 'French do it better!' argument, as with health care so goes the Internet. You need good regulation to realize the best of free markets and competition. If government is a necessary evil, sometimes you need it to keep in check the evil of private power, so that we have a better chance of realizing the greatest good for the greatest number.

Sometimes compassionate conservatism isn't enough.

( Krugman )

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