When you have a society that can’t do things that need to be done because every change threatens somebody’s rice bowl or offers insufficient opportunities for graft, you’ve got a society that is due for a reset, not for incremental change.
The thing is, resets are often kind of ugly.
Glenn Reynolds
March 11, 2016
UNEXPECTEDLY: Walmart’s customers are too broke to shop. Fundamentally transformed!
And this is the predictable end-game of a world-view that views capitol and economics as a zero-sum game, rather than one where we can “grow the pie” to so everyone gets more. If you predicate policy on redistribution, eventually you disincentivize creating things so much there isn’t anything new, and the non-producers face the reality of a shrinking pie for the first time. They get desperate, because they are confused, ignorant, and dependent on people they have been taught to despise.
A society can exist in that declining, sclerotic state for generations, eventually forgetting the meaning of liberty. It can even come to think of liberty as a crazy idea and reject it entirely, such that if and when a reset takes place, it’ll reset to some other authoritarian form. Such is the history of Mankind. The U.S. was an anomaly.
Ultimately, it’s all driven by judgment, jealousy, envy and greed, and by the resentment that comes from them, all rationalizations to the contrary notwithstanding.
The notion of a society that operates according the principles of liberty (the purpose of government being the acknowledgement and protection of individuals’ rights, as opposed to “running things”) is so foreign to some (most?) people that they find it absurd. You’re now more likely to be mocked or threatened in American public discourse for upholding the principles of liberty than for advocating the next step in our Progression toward communism.