James Brody
January 19th, 2009, 12:05 PM
Steve Moore, Senior Economics Editor at the WSJ, has an essay that lines up with Fred Hayek and Jonah Goldberg while it, for slow readers like me, explains Atlas Shrugged. Worth a look!
JimB
Per Moore: "For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism."
More at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123146363567166677.html
See also Hayek Friedrich A (1944/1994) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press. (Nobel-prize winner, an alarm about socialism in the UK in the '40s and reissued about the USSA. Too elegant for speed reading...) And a straight-on explanation of top-down vs bottom-up not by Darwin but by Thomas Sowell: Sowell, T. (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books.
JimB
Per Moore: "For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism."
More at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123146363567166677.html
See also Hayek Friedrich A (1944/1994) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press. (Nobel-prize winner, an alarm about socialism in the UK in the '40s and reissued about the USSA. Too elegant for speed reading...) And a straight-on explanation of top-down vs bottom-up not by Darwin but by Thomas Sowell: Sowell, T. (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books.