Seriously, though, do not despair. A few years ago the media swooned over OWS. What happened – nothing. OWS’s ideals and solutions were totally utopian and impractical. The utopians promoted Obama, a many of no useful experience who promised to stop the seas from rising. What has he accomplished – nothing. The next president will be a more sober individual. A couple of decades ago the media and the intellectuals swooned over global warming. They saw it as their ticket to world domination since only total control of the economy could stop this menace. Now it is fizzling out and nothing will be heard of it in a few years. Sooner or later these utopians have to produce results.

Lagniappe? grin like a possum.

Hard times bring the rich-haters out of the woodwork. (Full disclosure: I’m not rich; I’m an Art Bum.) And the demagogues take full advantage of this.

Just a couple responses to your two posts above. Yes, there is always an upper echelon which seeks to control the govt to influence the govt to do the bidding of the top 1%. It happened that way in Europe with the landed aristocracy and it happens in the U.S. with the moneyed gentry (corporations and the super wealthy) using their influence to restrict or eliminate their competition. In truth, they don’t want the lower classes entering their play space. My father used to call the middle class “crowders” because they stood to crowd out the potential of the children of the 1% many of whom were gentlemen ‘C’ level intellects and producers.

Secondly, w/ regard to Marx. One of the things that Marx did not foresee was that the lower classes, his proletariat, would also advance through capitalism along with the elite. That’s why the proletariat revolutions never occurred naturally, as Marx said the eventually would, but had to be agitated for by the likes of a Lenin or a Mao. That’s also why today’s left has to manufacture the concept of “income inequality.” their fundamental and false premise is that there is something wrong with it just because it exists. They further want to imply that wealth is attained through greed as if the simple act of being greedy will alone cause/force people to give you their money, as Thomas Sowell so clearly points out.

They must do this to manufacture a (false) moral imperative to an otherwise immoral goal — their control of everyone who is not them.

The great genius never comprehended that the Capitalist Revolution consisted of machines replacing human labor.

While his manifesto was first published (and remained pretty obscure) in 1848, it had absolutely nothing to do with the mass civil disorders of that time.

Marx drafted his missive largely on the basis of the 1830s, and the textile glut created by the newly installed mills which upset craft labor everywhere they spooled up.

De facto, the new looms dis-employed housewives from coast to coast. Now largely forgotten, in Colonial times, every housewife was a ‘Betsy Ross’ textile factory in every spare waking moment. Cotton and wool really were spun in the home.

&&&

3-D printing and robotics are going to take this dis-employment trend into a higher gear.

For obvious market scale reasons, the labor that’s going to be dis-employed is centered on the 90 IQ crowd.

So the man with the vision would appear to be H G Wells.

He did get one thing backwards.

The beautiful people end up harvesting the proles.

The truly hyper-wealthy — as a rule — are riding Big Government’s coattails — one way or another.

The way to gut their wealth is to gut their Big Government connection.

Budget cuts would do that.

%%%

The hyper wealthy cash in a capital gains rates.

Gates
Buffett

They also hold, de facto, monopoly positions in the business world.

Cronyism allows them to carry on their good works.

$$$

Marx’s plaint against capitalists omits mortality.

God resets the table.

Even corporations, eternal, can’t stay at the top of the greasy pole. I offer United States Steel as proof.

###

Economic philosophy from a Frenchman — that’s rich.

The Enarques run that place!

I can see how someone can be antipathetic to capitalism and the free market (even though it’s the only system that’s ever moved large numbers of people from poverty to prosperity) but that’s a political disagreement. It’s got nothing to do with Area 51 or who killed Princess Diana.

20 Responses to “All those objective moderates who love Piketty’s book…”

Eric Says:
April 23rd, 2014 at 5:27 pm

Once again, proof of the effectiveness of the activist method in normalizing and stigmatizing social value sets in the general will and collective consciousness.

What was normal “20 years ago — or even 10″ was a manufactured social product then.

What will be normal 10 or 20 years hence will be social products manufactured by activists.

It’s the only social-political game there is.”

Although we have had disagreements on certain levels, I am in fundamental agreement with the thrust of what you are saying.

And as a result I am left stupefied that we (as the class of non-progressives) keep repeating the same themes and announcing and re-announcing the same “discoveries” and symptomologies.

It is as if the conservative person is congenitally hardwired, constitutionally incapable, of really hearing what the liberal says he believes about reality, or bearing it in mind as applying even to the liberal, much less to anyone else.

Thus, like dogs chasing our tails we argue and speculate about what “rights” must mean mean to people who have plainly stated that they do not believe that “rights” have any objective existence. We puff in outraged disbelief that some would violate the sacred laws of human nature and liberty, when the fact is that those who do so violate these “laws”, assert that no fact of “human nature”, insofar as they grant the term has any meaning at all, implies anything in the moral realm in any event.

They tell us to our faces that they are fundamentally nihilists, and that the will to power and self- “creation” (not deduction and inference and alignment with a natural order) against a backdrop of moral chaos constitutes the core of their worldview and anthropology.

And then, after we have been told this a million times over we still stare incomprehendingly at one another and ask: “How can they do and say such things?”

Are conservatives fucking stupid? I don’t know. But it seems that they would rather die than give up the illusion that the leftist as he has deliberately made himself, is still a moral fellow. Or, a human in any traditionally meaningful sense. The conservative would apparently rather die a victim of a self-deconstructed bag of appetites than give up the wan hope that somewhere down there in the progressive, among the jumble of urges loosely floating around like fragments of DNA in a wrecked cell … there is still someone recognizable in there.

I suppose that the alternative is just too terrifying for them to live with. They tremble at the prospect of saying to the self-proclaimed soulless thing: “I see you are a soulless thing”

And perhaps they are right after all. Maybe God told them that there is a there there to the liberal nihilist appetite thing.

I hope so. For in that case their repeatedly taking a seat just as the chair is pulled from beneath them, takes on the aspect at least of tragedy, rather than mere farce.

As would the definition of “rich,” which would decrease significantly over time. See also: Alternative Minimum Tax.