I was born in the darkest days of World War II of middle-class parents who had somehow survived the Great Depression and managed to move up from farming and minor railroad executive of their parents into the professional class. They and the whole world were born and raised in scarcity. I was born on the cusp of the New Age in which there would be plenty for Americans; we would be able to indulge "conspicuous consumption" which so enraged philosophically inclined liberals.
It was not a time of such abundance even for Americans that we could be profligate with our resources, personal or national. Life was not as easy as it is now, indeed, I would have died as a young child had it not been for penicillin and it was only by the narrowest of margins that I survived.
My parents operated in the system which allocated goods and services according to a free market, or at least a market much freer than the one we operate under today. They worked a postwar economic miracle and whole demographics moved out of a life of misery and want into a leafy suburban world of relative plenty.
When I got to college in the 1960s as part of an honors program we were assigned The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, a favorite of the left and a favorite of John Kennedy. The thesis of the book was that our society was miss -allocating its resources the evidence of which was ornamental but useless fins and chrome on automobiles in a world of failing schools. This evidence was adduced to support the proposition that people were too stupid to be permitted to allocate resources for themselves, they must be guided by those who could see the greater good.
When one reads this philosopher/author we are struck by the same argument, we are too stupid to allocate our own resources, he and his elite colleagues know far better than we do that our money should be spent on the environment, for example. Elizabeth Warren tells us "we did not build that" and Barack Obama echoes her. Obviously they are smarter than we are and they know better than we do what we should do with our money.
Too bad we are not as smart as my parents who allocated the money according to their own judgments and built the greatest economy, the freest society, and the strongest nation on earth. Every time they spent a dollar they were casting a vote. If they voted to have a Cadillac, which my father upon attaining a certain income level did acquire, the nation somehow survived all that chrome. I remember the children of our neighborhood coming over to see our new car which if you push this lever up the Windows automatically went up and if you push this lever down the Windows magically went down. You would think my parents would have been smart enough not to waste money on electric windows when they could have had the old crank variety.
It is only when society attains a certain level of abundance, sometime after my birth in the time of scarcity, that we can have philosophers spawning everywhere and occupying perches in the eyrie heights of ivory towers, lofty perches from which they can tell us how we should vote with our dollars.
The left is always trying to change the predicate so they can get to their answer. Our system used to work brilliantly but they have had their way to a great degree and the free market has been grossly distorted with baleful results by the left, many of whom are the spiritual grandchildren of John Kenneth Galbreath. The more they distort the free market, the more they intervene to correct the distortions they have created. All the while preaching from their heights about how our resources should be allocated, indeed, denying us the right to allocate them ourselves and sometimes denying us access to our own resources.
There is a definition for a philosopher: God Player.
In fact hubris is the cardinal characteristic of leftists. It is why they are so aggressive in their politics, because political power offers them the broadest scope for of their egos. Give me an ivory tower high enough, and the philosophy convoluted enough and I can transform the world.
