Posted on 02/25/2013 10:50:28 AM PST by jazusamo
John Stuart Mill's classic essay "On Liberty" gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people's decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing "that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging."
Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that "people make a lot of mistakes." Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging.
What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.
Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.
Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?
Think about the First World War, from which nations on both sides ended up worse off than before, after an unprecedented carnage that killed substantial fractions of whole younger generations and left millions starving amid the rubble of war.
Think about the Holocaust, and about other government slaughters of even more millions of innocent men, women and children under Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
Thomas Sowell bump.
Sadly, that was prophetic.
Ours is a totalitarian nation in all but name.
“Shepherds may change, but sheep remain sheep.” —Count de Lorca, The Adventures of Don Juan
"I'm from the government ... and I'm here to help."
Marking...
As we expect with Dr. Sowell, he gets right to the heart of why liberalism is so dangerous ... they want to make our decisions for us so we do not make mistakes, but they never consider their decisions to be wrong-headed, even as they mount a pile of their own mistakes in trying to cancel the wisdom of the Constitution. ... in so many words
Democide: Socialism, Tyranny, Guns and Freedom
I co-produced this video, it’s had over 21K views in five days. It starts in the Katyn Forest, and moves to Ayers and Obama and the Bitter Clingers.
Cass Sunstein would enjoy it about as much as the devil would like to shower in Holy Water.
Regards,
It’s sure not meant to be comforting.
“Somehow,” Hollywood has “missed” the socialist democides of the 20th century, (except for the national socialist version under Hitler).
Powerful, well done and most certainly true.
Thanks for linking and hope it goes viral.
Catastrophic problems develop when the reins of the state are placed in the hands of an incompetent, immoral impostor, and the direction he goes is one of his own choosing and not that of the aggregated wisdom of the people; who furthermore will not release those reins when he is found to be wrong and incapable of accepting correction.
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism is a non-fiction book written by the economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek and edited by William Warren Bartley.
The book attempts to conclusively refute all forms of Socialism by demonstrating that socialist theories are not only logically incorrect but that the premises they use to form their arguments are incorrect as well. To Hayek the birth of civilization is due to the start of societal traditions placing importance on private property leading to expansion, trade, and eventually the modern capitalist system, also known as the extended order.[1] Socialists are wrong because they disregard the fact that modern civilization naturally evolved and was not planned. Additionally, since modern civilization and all of its customs and traditions naturally led to the current order and are needed for its continuance, any fundamental change to the system that tries to control it is doomed to fail since it would be impossible or unsustainable in modern civilization. Price signals are the only means of enabling each economic decision maker to communicate tacit knowledge or dispersed knowledge to each other, in order to solve the economic calculation problem.
Try it out for yourself!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fatal-Conceit-Socialism-Collected/dp/0226320669
Dr. Sowell is THE man!! The biggest point he seems to have missed in this discussion (and, it is EXTREMELY rare that he misses anything!) is that individuals eventually learn from their mistakes. Governments, being comprised of arrogant politicians and bureaucrats, never do!!
You’re absolutely right. Government and the people running it keep repeating the same mistakes.
I’m surprised Dr. Sowell didn’t include that because he’s made that exact point countless times.
Glenn Beck has called this guy, Cass Sunstein, one of the most dangerous men in America today. I tend to agree from what I’ve seen about him.
You didn't see the above sentence?
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