A wonderful perspective on the some of the key insights of Ludwig von Mises including on socialism, envy and ignorance -- which brought to mind another must read about the envious primitive liberal mind:
Any human emotion can become destructive by degree. Economist Young Back Choi thinks that envy is particularly destructive because it “is man's desire to eliminate others' relative gains even if he would become absolutely worse off in the process.” We see this in the original Ultimatum game. And we see it in the brutal consequences of Stalin and Mao. "Because a certain degree of selfless behavior is essential to the smooth performance of any human group,” writes Natalie Angier in The New York Times, “selflessness run amok can crop up in political contexts. It fosters the exhilarating sensation of righteous indignation, the belief in the purity of your team and your cause and the perfidiousness of all competing teams and causes."
Understood this way, envy, despite its evolutionary rationale, does not seem very sane. Perhaps we should hope that any given person is likely to be a little better off over time, even if some are a lot better off (even if this goes against the emotional grain). Alas, a positive-sum orientation is neither a feature of the egalitarian ethos, nor any politics of envy. And this is just one aspect of the trouble with the Stone Age Trinity as it gets institutionalized. “Envy is appeased only at equality, regardless of the absolute level of consumption,” adds Choi. “’Only those societies that have been able to develop sufficient means to mitigate the destructive forces of envy have been able to build civilizations and prosper. Anthropologists have documented that two of the most distinguishing features of poor societies are the relative free expression of envy and the universal fear of envy on the part of those who come to have above-average gains.”
Envy can creep into both our politics and our personal lives. So also can envy’s sister emotions, guilt and indignation. All three are facets of a brain that was sculpted by millennia in a mostly zero-sum environment. But now we can live in a positive-sum world.
Shortened: http://gg.gg/sanity Contact: bob underscore wtf at comcast dot net
QUOTE OF THE HOLOCENE: "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation" - V.I. Lenin -- You're welcome to point out to me any decision that Hugo Chavez Barack Obama has yet made that Lenin would quarrel with. [ crickets ]
RUNNER-UP QUOTE OF THE HOLOCENE: "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." - P. J. O'Rourke
DUAL QUOTES OF THE 20TH CENTURY: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." and "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it." --H. L. Mencken
LAST YEAR'S QUOTE: Washington, D.C. runs "just like the mob, except it's legal," said Schweizer. "If problems are being solved, if things are going smoothly and things are being fixed, a lot of people are not going to give. The party establishments and the political leaders from both sides are collaborating a lot more than they let on," explained Schweizer."
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