The Core Of The Problem...

ShrinkWrapped has a way with words: this phrase struck me (from here):

As Heather McDonald points out, our Social Scientists and Social Engineers (Progressive Politicians) have not yet devised a way for society to address the internal deficits that keep people in poverty when opportunities abound.  Nonetheless, they will probably keep trying and spending a fortune of our money in their doomed efforts.

This is indeed the core of the problem: it is a deadly sin. It is the sin of misallocation of capital, of unwisely spending money. The progressive mindset is, at the core, fundamentally anti-economics, rejecting the idea that their activities are also subject to economic laws and results.

Spending money on something doomed is, literally, throwing it away. If it's my money, then it's my choice: I can spend all my money chasing a pipe dream, such as becoming a world-class classical ballet dancer (I'm 53, uncoordinated and at least a few pounds overweight), even though everything speaks against it.

But spending other people's money in such doomed endeavors is a cardinal sin.

Call me heartless and unfeeling, but if you're not spending your own money on utter waste and foolishness, then you shouldn't be spending it.

Of course, that would affect so many naive and foolish people that that would be, like, totally unfair.


Ye gods of the copybook headings: ignore them, and you have what we now have, a huge cohort of spendthrifts and wastrels, demanding subsidies for their life styles and demanding the repeal of the laws of economics.


I've said it before and I'll say it again: you cannot ignore the laws of economics, just as you cannot ignore the laws of physics. These laws are just as immutable as those of physics, just as permanent and unchanging. Oh, and I know that the laws of physics are changing all the time, but you must realize this: those changes are changes of nuance, not of fundamentals. Gravity still sucks regardless of why it works, and Newtonion physics remains valid for the vast majority of our dealings in the real world. The same is true for the laws of economics: markets in equilibrium move to a new equilibrium when disturbed and/or distorted, and unless you are generating value added in your work, then you are non-productive.

This is the core of the problem: spending billions on things and activities that, at the end of the day, make no difference whatsoever.

We have had a war on poverty for over 45 years now. I wish the progressives would finally realize that poverty won and that their campaigns have done nothing but entrench it further. Of course, if they were to do that, they wouldn't be progressives anymore.