Bad Luck (Part 10^Googol)

Instapundit » Blog Archive » OUCH: Dow Jones plunges 512 points; but don’t worry, President Obama’s birthday parties unaffected….: "OUCH: Dow Jones plunges 512 points; but don’t worry, President Obama’s birthday parties unaffected.

UPDATE: Reader Dave Ivers emails: “Having just had a discussion with a close friend on the Left, I truly believe that Obama and probably all of the Left think that 3.5% GDP growth year on year is some sort of natural phenomenon and that no matter what they do it will happen. They then proceeded to trash the things that make that 3.5% growth happen.”

Once again, the Robert Heinlein quote:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

It can’t be repeated enough.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 10:55 pm"

That's a shorter way of saying Googolplex in the title.

Anyway, the comments from Dave Ivers pretty much nail it. The way it was put by Eric Blair (that's George Orwell to you) in "Pacifism and the War" during WWII was that the "fascifists" lived in a "bourgeois illusion bred of money and security". The full paragraph was:

Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Objectively pro-Fascist? Why I thought Orwell was a much subtler thinker than that! -- the shocked, shocked liberal genius exclaims! (While sniggering up his sleeve with glee that Blair has been stuffed down his own memory hole! Dumb proles!)

Today just substitute "fascifist" with "liberal/progressive" and not much has changed, has it? Money and security are still thought to grow on trees by those who have no skills other than perhaps ordering complicated caffeine at Starbucks. Heaven forfend that they might have to pick the coffee beans themselves -- the horrors!