Amit Ghate has left a new comment on your post "Protecting Us from Ourselves":

Hi Galileo,

My thoughts on your question run along some of the same lines as your hypotheses; first that education is responsible, though I come at it more from the angle that people in the cities you mention tend to be much more educated than in other places, so they have many more bad ideas than do those with less formal education, not necessarily that some cities have more progressive education than others (though that is probably true too).

Thus, by being productive and successful, the men in the major cities you list could afford to -- and did -- send their kids all the way through graduate school, thinking that this was best for them. But given the ideas they were taught, such an education was actually an attack on all that made it possible, and in this way the producers became promoters of their own undoing.

And not only do their kids have 20+ years of bad ideas thrust on them, in many cases they’ve also been so sheltered that they don’t have any of the real-life experience to untangle the ideas or to see the anti-life consequences of the abominable ideas they’re taught. (This too is similar to a point you make.)

Next, I think that much of regulation is aimed at keeping those in power in power, i.e. of maintaining the status-quo. One of the greatest things about the 19th century is that the expression “shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in 3 generations” was a fact of life. If an heir didn’t measure up, he wasn’t the beneficiary of regulatory power which served to throttle new competitors, while nowadays it’s the reverse (see the Kennedy’s for example). In fact, the original subject of this post illustrates this, i.e. those with sufficient wealth are allowed to invest as they wish (again Ted Kennedy can do what he wants) but those without it are restricted and are thus at a severe disadvantage. This suits the goal of maintaining the status quo and of entrenching social classes -- something which is as anti-American as any policy could be -- yet which is supported by all our intellectuals. A similar case can be made for the income tax; those starting off without any money have to begin by working for income and are heavily taxed, while those that have money and pull can find different ways less subject to taxation and regulation to maintain their wealth. This again has the effect of preserving artificial economic and social strata.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m obviously not advocating that we tax the rich to remedy this(!), rather that we get rid of all or as many of the taxes and regulations that burden our society as well as the welfare programs they allegedly go to support. The solution isn’t to forcibly create a “level playing field” as the leftists want, but simply to allow everyone the freedom to achieve (and to fail if they make the wrong choices and/or take the wrong actions).

On top of these political issues, there are also more fundamental issues to consider, viz. those which go to the nature of man and his functioning on earth (i.e. of philosophical ideas). For instance, Warren Buffett, who is self-made, extremely knowledgeable about business and as smart as they come, is an advocate of the regulatory state. His position rests on a certain view of man and of reality, so his mind will only be changed by arguing against those more basic premises. (And while I think actual experience in a truly capitalist society would help him accept such arguments by giving him more direct evidence from which he could confirm the principles, it would still be necessary to make the arguments.)

So as much as each political step taken to dismantle the regulatory state is positive and tends to engender further “virtuous circle” effects, there is no way to avoid addressing and refuting the basic philosophical ideas upon which the regulatory and/or mixed economy and/or totalitarian state depends.



Posted by Amit Ghate to Thrutch at 5:45 PM