Thursday, April 14, 2011

Intellectually adrift

Of course, I'm talking about the Left.  Once a proudly intellectual movement - unflinching from the world as it is - it's become flabby and lazy, to the point where it no longer knows how to even think.  Where the Left used to recruit rightish intellectuals by the force of its argument (the 1920s to the 1950s), the flow of intellectual talent now goes entirely the other way.

Orphan Wilde lays out where it's gone adrift:
Because it considers taxation as an investment with guaranteed returns, or indeed non-negative returns.

Because it holds employing people digging out holes and filling them in again - or just paying people to stand around doing nothing, or even paying five people to do what one person and a machine could do, or employing people to replace perfectly good infrastructure long before it needs replacing - creates demand and thus expands the economy.

Because it says rich people just get richer through economic osmosis, contributing nothing and spending nothing, just absorbing everything.
There's much, much more, and it's entirely damning.  It's actually a pretty good summary of why I haven't considered myself a leftie since about 1985 or so.

1 comment:

BobG said...

I first got disenchanted by the left during 1969; some run-ins with SDS when I started college. Though I've had a few friends from that side, I never have considered myself one of them. I've been an independent since I was in my late teens. One of my favorite short novels during high school was Anthem by Ayn Rand; it struck a note in me that has never gone away.