Because the following article is by Sowell it is not boilerplate. There are insights in the essay that are valuable. OTOH, there is a sense in which it is pure boilerplate inasmuch as it violates a basic principle of RC analysis, namely: Any political critique is incomplete -or possibly worthless- unless it includes criticism of both L & R
The reason for this ought to be obvious, any political party or persuasion will necessarily NOT include all truth and will necessarily be partly based on fallacy and error. This is structural and is a weakness of partisan politics of any and all kinds. Not writing a balanced critique also guarantees not seeing what is there to be seen. For example, Sowell seems intent, as are many others on the Right, to interpret all of the Left as if it was an extension of Soviet Communism-- ignoring the major fights on the Left over the years in which Socialists battled Communists over all kinds of issues in a civil war that, while much less severe these days with the demise of the Soviet state, was nonetheless, like all civil wars, a bloody mess. Among Socialists per se (while the Commies also used that word, actual Socialists used it in a very different sense) were more-or-less pragmatic and (usually) understood the fact that there were trade-offs and that sometimes the market was a far better way to do things. Few actual Socialists denied that the market should be a major part of any national economy, unlike the USSR, where all markets were regarded as evil. And does Sowell suggest that there is no role for central planning? That kind of view -which I do not for one minute think he favors even if it seems that way in this article- would tell us to junk the Interstate highway system, the incredible work of the Army Corps of Engineers, the US Geological Survey, and so many other valuable things that America would become unrecognizable. Still, all this pointed out, as usual, a thoughtful article. Billy ==================================== NRO July 5, 2013 12:00 AM The Left’s Central Delusion Its devotion to central planning has endured from the French Revolution to Obamacare. By _Thomas Sowell_ (http://www.nationalreview.com/author/thomas-sowell) The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong. A never-ending source of grievances for the Left is the fact that some groups are “over-represented” in desirable occupations, institutions, and income brackets, while other groups are “under-represented.” >From all the indignation and outrage about this expressed on the left, you might think that it was impossible that different groups are simply better at different things. Yet runners from Kenya continue to win a disproportionate share of marathons in the United States, and children whose parents or grandparents came from India have won most of the American spelling bees in the past 15 years. And has anyone failed to notice that the leading professional basketball players have for years been black, in a country where most of the population is white? Most of the leading photographic lenses in the world have — for generations — been designed by people who were either Japanese or German. Most of the leading diamond-cutters in the world have been either India’s Jains or Jews from Israel or elsewhere. Not only people but things have been grossly unequal. More than two-thirds of all the tornadoes in the entire world occur in the middle of the United States. Asia has more than 70 mountain peaks that are higher than 20,000 feet and Africa has none. Is it news that a disproportionate share of all the oil in the world is in the Middle East? Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the political Left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations. All this moral melodrama has served as a background for the political agenda of the Left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor out of poverty, and in general make the world a better place. This claim has been made for centuries and in countries around the world. And it has failed for centuries in countries around the world. Some of the most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the Left occurred in 18th-century France, where the very concept of the Left originated in the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of the National Assembly. The French Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised — “liberty, equality, fraternity” — what they actually produced were food shortages, mob violence, and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions, extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died under the guillotine. In the 20th century, the most sweeping vision of the Left — Communism — spread over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao. Milder versions of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took root in India and in various European democracies. If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly. But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end the noisy claims of the Left. In the United States, those claims and policies have reached new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which Obamacare has been only the most obvious example. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
