Quote of the day–Lew Daly

We’d like to retire that word [redistribute] from the political vocabulary because you can’t redistribute something that is already highly socialized, and wealth and income in the “era of knowledge-based growth” (whoever ends up “owning” it) is indeed highly socialized. Most importantly (and more to the point), individual productivity is increasingly dependent on what can only be described as a collective good, a common inheritance of knowledge. No one deserves to benefit from this common inheritance more than anyone else, by moral definition, because it’s not created by any individual. So, to the extent that inherited knowledge (“technical progress in the broadest sense,” as Solow termed it) is increasingly driving economic growth, the fruits of knowledge—the wealth being generated by knowledge—should be more equally shared. Wealth that is commonly created should be equally, or at least more equally, shared.

Lew Daly
Via AmericanMercenary in the post What the hell is “Social Justice”?
[This is very scary stuff. Strip away just a little bit of the fluff and it’s, From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Just reading the praise for the book you realize these people not only have zero respect for the right to own property but they don’t believe you even have a right to your own thoughts. This is what inspires thoughts of Atlas Shrugged. In this book the people of the mind went on strike. Those that contributed through the power of their creative minds declared those that demanded the product of their minds through the force of government had received their last handout. You can force someone to work but you can’t force them to think.

After reading of people like Daly I don’t just long for a John Galt but a Ragnar Danneskjöld as well.–Joe]

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8 thoughts on “Quote of the day–Lew Daly

  1. Funny, I just followed a link from Tamara’s blog, clicked a few things, and found the definition of a “Palace economy“, popular in the bronze age:

    A palace economy or redistribution economy is a system of economic organisation in which a substantial share of the wealth flows into the control of a centralized administration, the palace, and out from there to the general population, which may be allowed its own sources of income, but relies heavily on the wealth redistributed by the palace.

    The only thing more “progressive” than the bronze age is the stone age.

    Anyhow. What this Daly character can’t grasp is that all productive work since the paleolithic has depended on transferred knowledge. Acheulean tools weren’t reinvented by every hunter in every generation, any more than farmers in the 18th century had to breed a new species of oxen from aurochses every spring. Nevertheless, those old guys still worked pretty hard.

    But to somebody who’s never done a lick of productive work in his life, no doubt it’s easy to overlook the fact that the tools need a little help from the operator before anything useful comes out.

  2. I think I interpreted this quote differently than how Lew Daly intended:

    Obviously what we add is important and has something to do with the differing economic benefits people enjoy, yet the difference between what the high-tech CEO contributes and what the janitor who cleans out his waste basket contributes is ultimately very small compared to the share of everyone’s gains that comes from inherited knowledge.

    I interpreted this to mean that the gains we’ve already made for people in lower income brackets have brought them so far up out of real poverty that the difference between the janitor’s income and the CEO’s is fairly insignificant.

  3. “Wealth that is commonly created should be equally, or at least more equally, shared.”

    Or else, what?

    “…a substantial share of the wealth flows into the control of a centralized administration.”

    “Flows”, as if by some force of nature? No. It “Flows” or else. Or else, what? That is to say, under what specific threats? And therein lies the morbid truth– that these people intend to replace liberty with brute force. They are martialing their forces as we speak– playing out their nets.

  4. As an anthropologist I’d have to say, “Social Justice” is a convenient fiction to rationalization the redistribution scheme. In human society at the operational level there is no such thing, and there can’t be otherwise “Society” the way Humans have engineered it and as it is – not as some Utopians envision perfection – would cease to exist. It exists only as a model creation at the “aspirational level” in Human religious thought – so, if you hear people talking about it they’re having a religious discussion.

  5. Anytime a paragraph starts with the need to “retire” or eliminate a word for obviously political reasons, the SocLib BS Alert should instantly go off.

  6. Well

    Since they don’t believe in owning things, don’t attribute what they’ve written to them–or better, attribute it to someone else.

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